There is no game here. This is an abandoned project and no evidence of continued work has been presented, at all:
https://f95zone.to/threads/dual-family-v0-98-ce-gumdrop-games.1870/post-2398851 . This is impossible to explain if you assume that he is just a "milker"/slow as opposed to a scammer that is doing no work and leeching off an abandoned project.
No point in doing that here. You can argue about keywords and tags, but ultimately, f95 is simply not an official channel for GD.
After countless excuses that collapsed on their own it's clear that the scam is becoming harder to defend, hence the influx of shills lately (at least 1 of them from his discord). That's where people like you come in: you pretend to be a skeptic while promoting the idea that work is being done ("this time for real guys"), that the garbage the scammer writes has, by itself, any value. In reality, there is still no evidence and you can't get over that fundamental problem. That's why your efforts won't work. Go back to his discord if rational people tire you.
I'm not a shill (and yeah, I'm perfectly aware that's what a shill would say), and I'm going to argue otherwise. Just a sec.
I woulld like to ask again: will mods consider an [Inactive] tag for cases like these with no development for more than 1 year? the [Onhold] tag is regularly used on games with honest devs, who admit they won't be doing anything for a while. Putting obvious scams like these under the same label is unfair to honest devs. Some differentiation is needed. It would be a nice addition to the forums considering that situations like these will likely become more common in the future.
While they're at it, why not add [Inactive], [Retired], [Semi-active], [Abandoned], [Deprecated], etc.? In my opinion, a single "Onhold" tag (plus another "Completed" tag) captures all instances of changes well and does not impose any judgment.
This is the reason why these shills are so suspicious. Why would they care about people being "too tough" on someone they themselves claim not to trust? not a very natural position to have. Something tells me that they are afraid to be honest about themselves (like the discord shill caught before).
It's perfectly natural. An analogy would be that you don't own a gun yourself, but you're against gun control laws. Or that you don't have a driver's licence and you dislike cars, but you don't call for banning personal car ownership.
Sure, it would be great to see all his supporters withdraw their support, but it's not going to happen. Sure, Patreon could step in and disable his account, but on what basis? I mean, what would be the exact reason for it that's in their terms of use?
There's literally NOTHING that compels anyone posting on patreon to do anything for patrons or to treat higher tiers better than lower tiers. There are many creators who don't offer anything extra on patreon and still have patrons because they want to support the creator. Would you ban that? There are creators who have different support tiers but still don't offer anything extra above what they give out for free.
Your proposal would ban the possibility for actual patronage.
From our perspective, number of patrons and amount pledged per month is meaningless. Some creators require instant payments, some don't. You can (or at least could) subscribe to the latter with an invalid (expired, etc.) card and pledge a million dollars. That million will show up on the creator's page, but it will obviously never be transferred. However, the amount pledged will remain shown on the page until it's withdrawn.
If your card expires, your pledge still shows up on the creator's page even if you haven't made actual payments for months or years.
Same goes for supporter count -- lapsed memberships that are stored with an expired card still show up.
For all we know, GDG could hopefully have maybe 10 paying patrons.
