Just some things about f95zone, and the Moderators/Staff in this site in particular for those of you wondering why my relationship with them has gone from "co-operative" to "Hostile - DMCA Everything", f95zone have in the last couple of months:
Deleted long, in-depth, well-explained and multi-paragraph positive reviews with absolutely nothing wrong them for no good reason and that had been there for months, just trying to tank the star rating and limit the games exposure because individual moderators dislike me.
They've removed or never added my SubscribeStar link, which I can't add and I've had people ask if the game is available anywhere other than Patreon.
They've removed my "We do not condone sharing Patreon links but choose to engage" blah banner. Believe it or not, some people don't realise Devs that are active here do not support sharing their early access releases, and that banner helps and I had it there for years, but they've deleted it.
They've reuploaded my personally supplied Mega.nz links for the public version when it updated with their own, meaning anybody that signs up or purchases a plan to download a 4gb file (earns me about £200 a year from my own links) they get the referral cash for. Despite me creating the game and supplying them with a fully functioning link and the only work required was for them to click "edit, paste", apparently they deserve the referrals instead. My own Mega links for the version were not password protected, and have been up 100% of the time since I uploaded them, and I don't remove public links until there is a new public version.
They've removed my message about saves from prior to v.0.9.1 not working, which has since got me bug reports, thanks! I look forward to hearing the well thought out and intelligent reasoning behind that.
They've deleted comments telling people who wanted to get the release earlier than June 18th they could get it cheaper directly from me than from Patreon. Just why?
All in all whilst f95zone was a good, supportive place in the past and I'm fully aware they share pirate links of early access content, that's not even on the list of complaints as I know it is a pirate site, since the turn of the year into 2022 it is now a dumpster fire with some (not all) reddit level "aktually" moderators on enormous power trips determined to try and help float or sink games depending on whether or not they like the Dev. You'll notice most of those things listed above aren't "oh well just ask them", it is a moderator intentionally doing something that negatively impacts the game and has absolutely no benefit whatsoever. I shouldn't need to go "Hey guys you know that warning I asked you to add about saves from a certain version not working well you seem to have removed it, can you please re-add it?", there's just no reason to remove it.
You can say "oh they're too busy, they're understaffed" except this is over-moderation, and it is selective because I've seen Developers using racial slurs and hurling racial abuse at other Developers in the Dev Forum with moderators talking at the same time in the exact same thread, which should get their posts deleted, but because they like that Dev it's calm and they take no action, but then a message saying "you can get it here for £5", no we need to delete that!
So if you want to know why I've gone from tolerant and accepting of f95zone to completely hostile, there's your answer. I'm fully aware I can't stop piracy, it is very hard to stop piracy on a game I release for free, but I can make it as disruptive as possible during the early access period if pirate sites want to try and limit my exposure (exposure being the one reason why Devs tolerate them at all) and cause me problems.
Clearly if you're in this thread then you want the game to be developed, so maybe ask "why is this pirate site trying to make life as difficult as possible for this Dev who, prior to v.0.13 and all of this from f95zone took place prior to v.0.13, had never DMCAed anything or caused any problems at all for them" rather than "why Dev DMCA links on pirate site".
If you have bugs, suggestions, whatever feel free to come and join my Discord (surprised the link for that is still there), but I'm going to be seriously scaling back engagement and reading of comments/replying here in the future, as I've listed above, f95zone is not the supportive and helpful environment it was for Devs from 2018-2021, thanks to the new generation of moderators and staff, not the users, RIP.
Edit: Monroe has been very helpful and supportive and fixed many of the issues, whilst I'm still not going to engage much here during the early access period, I will be back and check things, reply etc as I regularly did after that time.
