Halle Berrys The Little Mermaid By Lukas Werneck (x)

Halle Berry’s The Little Mermaid by Lukas Werneck (x)

The only ones at fault here are perma paywallers and those who wait forever to release their stuff for free and that's on that. I do think it sucks that reasonable early access creators are caught up in this, but if it weren't for the perma paywallers, EA would've likely continued turning a blind eye and things would've been fine 🤷

nah y'all not gonna like me but early access ppl share the blame too. EA ppl never spoke up or held their own accountable so everyone's bag got fucked up.

they never policed one another when 2 weeks became a month or whenever they remember to unlock it. never opened their mouth over some of these insane tiers. didn't say boo when leo was copybotting all of second life and calling it "her creations". never said shit when people were getting threatened and doxxed over 5 fucking dollars (i can legit think of 4 mm creators in particular who participated in this behavior). y'all had groups of deranged individuals trying to hunt down that poor woman who ran that one site and still trying to take down rebels.

this is what happens when y'all leave the business class to police itself bc it won't bc the only thing the business class cares about is profit at all costs. this is why a lot of creators were a-ok with theft, threatening people, copying, etc. they don't have a moral compass bc rules apply to everyone else but them. there's a reason why government does step in and regulate business bc none of y'all would be going to college or school or have any semblance of a living if it was left up to business class.

another unpops opinion: this needed to happen to dead this fucking game.

patreon unfortunately has extended the life of this shitty game and whether EA ppl or perma ppl want to realize, they are partially (not wholly) responsible for why we essentially have the most unplayable 1500USD game on earth. no other eagame is this fucking borked and no other gaming community would accept this but cc and mods more or less served as some sort of bandaid for this broken ass game.

ea don't fix shit bc you modders will fix it for less than they pay actual developers. it's why they got bold and fired most of qa and most of the people who actually worked on this game. you go to the ea site and see the credits and see that less people are working on each release than before.

i feel if this community put their foot down when patreon shit came up, we'd have a much better game than this. ea would not be this bold to keep releasing broken pack after broken pack. ea would not be bold about firing almost all of the maxis staff and rotating through staff that can't stay there long enough to impact any bit of useful change. they would not be this bold to keep outsourcing the job to overworked and underpaid staff in india, while reaping in record profits. they would not be this bold to keep using gurus who work on the game as customer service and pr on twitter instead of actually hiring proper customer service and a decent social media team. they would not be this bold to use youtubers as independent contractors using their community goodwill and clout doing promo and marketing for a very broken game.

for the creators saying ea "stabbed them in the back" - a lot of you did the work for a multi billion dollar company for pennies on the dollar and ripped each other to shreds fighting over crumbs. this is how you will always be repaid. there's absolutely no winners here.

I've seen a lot of people over the past couple days discussing patreon early access and whether or not it's included under ea's new policy. Most seem to agree that exclusive/perma-paywall models are bad, and a lot of people seem okay with early access. So I thought I'd share just why I don't really approve of the early access model either.

1) Trusting patreon creators (in the sims community) with your private information is a risk. Unfortunately, it's been shown by exclusive and early access creators alike that it simply isn't safe to trust them with your info. Eacc creators (not just exclusive) have communicated with each other about those that have shared their content early, and the info they have can include usernames, email addresses, real names, and possibly even paypal information if you have it linked to your patreon account. Users have been doxxed and harassed over sims cc of all things. I, personally, don't feel I can pledge to anyone safely anymore, whether they're following the old 2-3 week early access model or not.

2) There is no quality control. There is no way to determine what you're going to get before you pay for it, and if it's not good quality, you're most likely not going to get a refund. Patreon doesn't make creators refund you, they have to decide to do it on their own. So you can have mods that don't work, ridiculous high poly meshes, no proper LODs, low quality textures, etc and you're stuck with that.

3) There are no standards. People on here argue a lot about what should be charged for and what shouldn't, because there's no consistent standard for what is acceptable or not. Should sims/tray files be early access? Recolors? Conversions? Only mesh edits? What about tiny mesh edits? Is it the time alone that matters? But if that's the case, how much time should a creator have to spend on something for it to be worth paying for? There's no agreement, and so what people will put behind a paywall gets more and more ridiculous over time.

4) New (and some old) accounts making patreons without interacting with the community in any other way besides making money off them. There's no standard for who should make an account and when, so a lot started out just with the sole intention of making money. Also, there are older creators that tapered off their interactions with the community to purely focus on patreon. Early access took over the community so completely because it was easy and anyone could do it, and so they did. This only furthered the problems with quality and standards of cc.

5) Early access creators becoming exclusive over time after they built a following. Also, other shady methods to make more money I've discussed in other posts, such as: making super tiny edits look more enticing by lumping them together in "add-on packs", linking their "free" content through link shorteners/simsfinds/tsr, steadily raising tier prices in order to access all of their content, releasing a piece of cc for early access then coverting the same piece of cc to another frame and putting it under early access again, increasing the early access time period or "forgetting" to unlock things on time, and more. All of this just shows me that many early access creators aren't much better than the exclusive creators. They're toeing the line to stay in the public favor, and perhaps avoid legal consequences, and nothing more.

6) Shifting the focus in the community from creativity to monetary gain. Modding communities (such as those for the Sims, TES, Fallout, Dragon Age, Stardew Valley, and many many more) are built upon learning from one another and working together to enhance the gaming experience. In other words, to have fun! Modders have done amazing things without having the goal of making money off of it, and while it's nice to have that as an option, the sims community shows that it winds up hurting more than it helps when it consumes to this extent. I've talked about this before so I won't go into it too much, but creators are burned out and tired, and other simmers are frustrated and bored. It changed the community as a whole and it shows.

As a concept, early access is fine, but in practice... when everyone is doing it, in so many different ways, with no sense of standards... it becomes a problem.

Template to send to EA regarding Paywallers.

Hey y'all! I had an anon ask about this, so I wrote this up real quick for anyone who doesn't have the time or ability to pen a long thing to send to EA about the paywallers. Feel free to change it up as much as you'd like, add even more paywallers (highly recommend this), do whatever you want, let's REPORT REPORT REPORT 💖

How to report:

To report Mods, give us the details right here on EA Help:

Click Contact Us from any page on EA Help.

We recommend logging in to your EA Account.

Select The Sims 4. If needed, use the search bar to find the game.

Select your Platform.

For Topic, select Report concerns or harassment.

For Issue, choose Report website.

From here, you’ll open a webform to let us know more about what happened. Please provide a link to the Mods you think break the rules, and as much detail as you can about why. Your report will be reviewed by our team.

Then you just enter your name/email (which isn't shared with anyone but EA)

Here's my lil template! THIS HAS BEEN CENSORED. In my actual report I listed their full names, and patreon/tumblr pages! If you want a full uncensored version please privately message me and I'll happily send it. Give EA as MUCH info as you can on this. The more of us that report the better off we'll be. Also i borrowed a little bit of wording from @myshunosun (the distribution and installation part) sorry but it sounded nice and I couldn't think of how else to phrase it.

My Template:

I made the subject "Custom Content in the Sims community- perma paywallers"

"Hello there, my name is ______, and I have been an avid sims fan and consumer for MANY years. It has recently come to my attention that EA has released an official article on the distribution and installation of mods and custom content. In this article, it states to reach out if we find any mods that go against the guidelines clearly stated in this article. As a community, we know of MANY people who permanently lock their custom content behind what we call 'paywalls', which means simmers have NO access to them unless they pay. This is clearly against EA's policies and I would now like to report them to you in the hopes that you will not let this continue any longer. As someone who has already spent hundreds on this game and franchise, I believe it is wrong in so many ways to lock content using EA's intellectual property/program/meshes behind paywalls when it is clearly against your policy. Following is a list of some of the most famous and notorious paywallers in the community.

S*xamcc currently makes OVER 10 THOUSAND dollars a month from perma paywalling his custom content. The last time they had their patrons publicly listed they had over 2000 a month. They have removed thier public patron amount due to the backlash they have received. This is unacceptable when EA CLEARLY states that mods are NOT to be sold. This creator has no shame and will continue to lock all of their content behind paywalls until someone stops them.

Other perma paywallers:

antos*ms, bergd*rf, cowbu*ld, P*xel V*bes

Thank you so much for reading my report and taking what we as a community have been against for so long seriously. I greatly hope that you look at these reports and do something about these creators."

Coco’s Place

Welcome to Coco’s apartment! Another build that will likely never show up in the story, but built just for fun!

kinda been going a little crazy with the townie makeovers lately lmao. btw i still don’t know my sim-style?? it seems to be “just do things until you get a decent result" 🥴.