Let me start off by saying two things:
1 – this comment is from me personally and doesn’t necessarily reflect the thoughts, opinions or feelings of any other member of WT:Silver
2 – I would normally send this kind of thing as a PM, but since the discussion has been initiated and continued here in the thread, this is where I will reply.
Okay
@Wyrdo , you’ve been asking for communication, so here you have some. In this comment I will attempt to explain to you why I personally have chosen not to interact with you up to this point.
1 – Your contributions are of limited quality and use.
By your own admission, you have not produced anything original. So far it’s all been edits to existing art. That’s fine in principle, a lot of cool things can be made with good editing of already existing assets. Original work is however of far more interest since almost everyone on the team can do fairly high quality edits.
The next issue is that your edits are quite frankly of rather low quality. Many of the chibis are shrunk in pixel-format, making them jagged as well as decreasing the quality of the lineart. The cuts and pastes are also fairly obvious and stick out. The style of the assets you use, and even their image quality, is not always the same, making for a less clean look. As far as I can tell, you also acknowledge this in your posts, repeatedly saying things along the lines of “those are just quick edits”, “can be made better” or “it’s only for inspiration”. But that is not something I am content with putting into the game. We put in a lot of work to make the game look as good as possible, and I don’t want that to be undermined by placeholders and “quick fixes”.
Most damning of all however is that you’ve used assets from elsewhere (like random google searches) and even a screen of Hogwarts castle that you didn’t even know wasn’t from WT. This is a major no-no for anyone dealing in art online.
So, my personal interest in you as a contributor of art is therefore severely limited.
2 – Your overall approach is suspicious
First off, you came in here and presented a bunch of stuff that we hadn’t asked for, and that you hadn’t discussed with us beforehand. That in itself isn’t bad of course (it’s how a lot of us came into the project), but it isn’t always good either. In some rare cases you get socially awkward people that are desperate to attach themselves to something and just drain you mentally in the process. Many of those people mean well, but just end up being toxic regardless. I’ve been forced to deal with a lot of people like that, so I’ve become very wary of how I interact with people that come to me (or the group I am a part of, as in this case). Perhaps overly so.
I continue to be wary when you repeatedly say that you are presenting your stuff for us to do whatever we want with. But then you seem to get annoyed or disappointed when we do just that. It really puts us in an awkward spot, I feel, where you seem to place some sort of expectation on us that we haven’t accepted or willingly shouldered.
Furthermore, you seem to keep wanting some sort of contact with us, but like we’ve told you, we run our stuff on discord, and you’ve been invited to it. Now, if you do not have the ability to join it, well, I’m sorry to say but that just tough. That is where we operate. F95, /STG, twitter etc. are just extensions where we reach out when we have a new patch, or occasionally reply to bugreports and stuff like that. It’s simply not reasonable that you request for us to make our development process more complicated by coming to you. To the best of my knowledge, you haven’t tried to reach out personally to any of us either, even after being invited to do so. You’ve been explicitly asked by Loafy to give us some suggestion as to how we can discuss things with you outside of F95, but again, no apparent response from you.
There’s also a comment you made about Sad crab essentially telling you to eff off when you wanted to help them. Naturally, it’s entirely possible that Sad crab could be jerks that would say that for no good reason. But it does make me consider the possibility that they may have had a reason for taking that attitude with you and that your description of events is just one side of the real story.
This possibility is made more likely in my opinion after your latest comments. Replying publically in a thread to a PM and quoting the PM is extremely poor form. Basic etiquette is to reply in the way you were contacted. Now, if you can’t reply to PM for some reason (which seems very dubious to me, but might be possible, I don’t know) then writing publically here explaining that and asking for an e-mail address to reply to would be the better move.
Finally, you keep taking about all the stuff you will do, all the original art that you’re about to create, and how you’re going to add so much stuff. So far: nothing except for words and promises. With the possible exception of Mo, I’m the one on the team that been involved with WT-modding the longest and I’ve seen this time and time again, especially on /STG. In my experience, nothing is the most you’ll ever get from people that talk grand like that. My advice is to stop talking, start doing, and then let your work do the talking.
3 – You make false claims. Repeatedly.
You’ve posted here saying that we were working on chibis after you presented yours. At no point did we say that.
You’ve stated that we should release updates as smaller patches that will not break saves and that this should work because most updates are “more tweaks than anything”. Anyone involved with the work can tell you this is nonsense; saves will continue to break for the foreseeable future due to the significant upgrades we make to the code.
You’ve said multiple times that you’re being ignored, or that we aren’t responding. We’ve replied to you six times here in the thread, and one PM. I daresay that is the most we’ve replied to any single individual here. Like I said before, we operate on discord and only occasionally check in on F95.
You claim we are removing Astoria, which as Johnny stated is simply false. She is getting a much needed remodeling like Cho did before her.
4 – You’re antagonistic.
Pretty much all the other points also feed into this point. You’re coming across (to me anyway) as quite passive aggressive in quite a lot of your posts over not using other projects art, or not implementing your art, or not communicating. The way you replied to Merlin was quite prickly as well, certainly not civil.
You’re also accusing us of removing Astoria (which as I said is false) so we can keep “patreon begging”. You complaining about that is extra fun since one of the first things you said in this thread is that you find the fact that someone included Astoria into the game to be sickening, and that you wanted nothing to do with such depravity. Aside from that, calling us shills is a poor idea if you want to associate with us in any way. I personally haven’t taken a dime for anything I’ve made, and your point about “suspicious timing” or whatever is simply non-existent. We’ve been on patreon for ages at this point and have only now gotten around to Astoria, meaning there is no timing to speak of. We’ve been busy doing other stuff before, that’s all.
5 – On our side
I have limited time and energy, and stopping what I do to keep a discussion going with you outside the discord will disrupt my work too much.
We devs aren’t all of one mind, and we live in different timezones. So when you (or anyone else for that matter) write here, I hesitate to reply since I don’t know what the rest of the team thinks and feels. Checking the matter with them properly will take time, and is frankly a bother and a distraction from what otherwise needs to be discussed and get done.
Final words
I don’t know you, and I have zero idea about who you are as a person. All I have to go on is how you’ve presented yourself here, and I hope I’ve explained well enough why I feel that you haven’t made a very good impression, to put it mildly. I don’t know about the rest of the team, but I personally have no desire to cooperate or collaborate with you currently.
I’ve taken over a day out of my time to write this up. I have no intention of dedicating even more time to this matter that could be better spent making art (and I also don’t want to clog the thread with this discussion). If you feel I’ve erred in my assessment of you and want to let me know so, feel free to show me wrong instead of replying to this post. I certainly have neither the intention nor the desire to tell you to stop modding WT. Please keep going if it makes you happy. But until you impress me with your contributions and the way you approach communicating with us, I will keep my distance.
I wish you a good day, and good luck in your future endeavors.