Actually, I had some time and was in the process of replying after all.You clearly missed the point and you were the only one looking at this as a win / loose discussion.
Because this kinda issue has been around for years and years, with others finding pretty conclusive proof (steam payment stubs or something) about Inceton being the dev of... something Island game (forgot the title). Captain Kitty is another one from the past. There is obviously some consensus among the admins that the site is not responsible for policing this specific behavior. And I'd rather not open tickets and waste people's time if Lerd0 could ask informally.Why ask Lerd0? You know how the report function works in game OP's and you know how to use the ticket system. You also believe strongly enough that the guy is trying to mislead people that you made a thread.
Report him yourself and see what happens...
Lerd0 answered already.
?No, but do carry on...
You can feel free to look inside the code. It uses the same code base in a lot of those. But I guess you will highlight some words and act obtuse by saying they are not EXACTLY the same.
In the Starcraft scene way back when, people would look at replay files and analyze the APM, hotkey patterns people use for certain things, etc etc. And they could determine if the player that was playing was really him.We have some rpgm games that use stock assets, use engine tools (eventing - conditional branches etc.) and use yanfly's plugins.
Based on the combination of this set of circumstantial evidence, are you saying that the chance that all these games are from the same person is not overwhelming, beyond any reasonable doubt?
I'm sure you know about browser fingerprinting where your digital profile can be tracked based on things like limited browser and hardware data, screen resolution, installed fonts, even typing patterns, etc etc.
So the idea of combining seemingly low quality data to form a pretty conclusive profile is not some radical idea.
There is a certain threshold of data you need, of course. You could come up with better examples where the combined data points would probably lead to a conclusion of "beyond a reasonable doubt." But since your intent was to try and frame my argument in a silly light, you used a combination of data points that was obviously below the threshold for any reasonable person.
I don't know how many subs they have. They hide it on the alt patreons. Anyways, failing to profit from a grift is still a scummy grift.What subscribers? which subscribers? The average dev barely makes any money to start with, let alone enough to quit their day jobs. Here you are claiming this guy is pulling in enough subscribers that they not only support a game of his but that there are so many that some even unknowingly support 2 or more of his games.
But if you want some numbers, four years ago, I looked at Captain Kitty and his alts. They each were making around 600~800 bucks at that time if memory serves. When a game consistently self promotes the other games from the alts like they were doing, we could reasonably conclude that some people might have signed up for more than one without understanding the grift.
The strange thing is, while this might at least present a less nefarious reason for doing it this way, it doesn't change the outcome of personal benefit (flow of income) at the expense of subscribers by lying.The strange thing is patreons rules clearly state they look outside of patreon at a dev's activity so if a dev was worried about loosing his accounts it would make perfect sense not to admit to owning all those accounts and it would not be malicious in the slightest.
The strange thing is, that if he were to be reported for his content and he had admitted to owning all those accounts the person reporting him could include that statement when they report him to steam or itch or patreon or subscribestar etc. and having linked him to all them they could shut them all down.
Why do I keep saying strange thing? Because no one seems to want to do anything except expect the worse and believe that all intent is malicious.
Having multiple accounts, self-promoting those accounts in a feedback loop, and not admitting to it is scummy in itself, yes.As I've pointed out above, it isn't the only way it is not scummy. You are just taking a very narrow, jaded view of the situation.
Outside of supposedly having multiple accounts and not admitting to it, this dev has done NOTHING to deserve not being given the benefit of the doubt. He hasn't mass abandoned his works, he updates them, they haven't been reported to contain anything malicious, they don't have bugs and they work and play as advertised.
Did YOU do this? Tell me how many you found. I'm curious. On the first page, I found none. And the naming scheme isn't just an animal. It's the noun(sometimes adjective)-animal-noun. Like MilkPandaAirport.Do me a favor, go to the latest updates page, include the netorare tag and hover your mouse over the games on the first 5 pages. Now excluding the guy AND his supposed alt, see how many game devs have animals in their names and then ask me the question again.
And again, there is no point looking at a single datapoint. The naming scheme is one part of the whole set that, when combined, gives a very conclusive picture.
You have a thing you do. Something you enjoy. You look for any thread that brings up a concern, complaint, or a negative opinion on anything, and you argue in favor of the status quo. It's true, most people bring up some stupid things like WHY NTR HATE? AI BAD! WHY MODS MEAN? But regardless of what the topic is or how much validity there may be in it, you will crack your knuckles and argue for the sake of arguing, often assuming a very condescending tone as your base debating tone.If I wanted to debate just to debate I'd be in the general politics thread. I replied here for the same reasons I replied to the first thread.