I fail to see how the legal definition of theft enters into the equation. Neither the PMBR nor this very website have a legal legitimacy, and SSBB Hacking in general is most certainly not following the law.
Whether money is made or not, all the stuff that needs to be done to simply make hacks and install them goes against a whole lot of legislation related to reverse-engineering and bypassing contructor protection. Following your logic, a thief stealing from a thief isn't stealing anything. What about the whole "honor among thieves", especially when the theft is very minor?
tl;dr
we all as modders cannot truly steal content from another modder
Nobody should arrive to that conclusion unless their desire is to bully creators into relinquishing their work for their own selfish motives.
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As for the credits list and it being adressed in the next release... and about respecting those you collaborate you. I wish to believe you. I really do.
Unfortunately, I have it known from a longtime PMBR member that the PMBR doesn't care about crediting as long as no individual complaint is made. And even if there was, it's not even certain that action would be taken.
Considering nothing has evolved in the past month since I first asked, and all the answers I received focused on "who complained to you about the credits?" I'm inclined to believe that no, nothing is going to be done.
You say Thany showed interest in being credited for the model and animations... and yet she wasn't credited for the model. Either I've been looking at the wrong place this entire time, or even when someone asks to be credited, nothing is done.
And apparently, there isn't even anything related to PSAers in that list.
All this is especially ironic, considering Shanus was affirming with a lot of confidence last year or so that all assets were
very thoroughly reviewed and examined before being added. I guess only the content matters and the author isn't very important after all.
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For content produced by Project M Dev Team members, if they do not request a direct mention. Crediting the team will do to credit them, they are part of the team after all. It is an inside agreement and we should have talked about before.
What. What even is the reasoning behind that? Do content creators even know about their name being hidden from the credits, or was that made up just a few moments ago? Because I've
never heard of such an agreement.
And even then, it's only just displacing the issue. If "people on the team" aren't credited, then why are
some still credited? Because they thought about asking, but others didn't?
That sounds like an incredibly loopholey way to do some favoritism.
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As for the topic of being busy, yes, I can definitely sympathize. I can't count the number of times I've had to ruin my sleep schedule too because of solving issues on this forum. And when ds22 and Dant's littly club decides to launch a vendetta against our users, it's surprisingly difficult to sleep in a relaxed state of mind.
I'm sure there more than just the two of us who are very busy bees without needing monetary compensation, though.
Even then, my point still stands. If promotion and organizing tournaments counts as a much higher priority than the most basic of authorial aknowledgement, then there's kind of a big problem in the mentality of the PMBR. If this was a sold product, it would be the equivalent of putting
"more sales" over actually
paying your employees. The question of crediting does not even seem to have been raised until I went and asked.
If the team screws up so early in development and you don't have time later to fix it, then find someone who can make time for it. Don't give us a vague "yeah, we're sorry we'll be working on it at some point perhaps"
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Even if (s)he was credited on say, the main website for specifically creating Roy, people all over the internet wouldn't say "OMG good job Thany, I love Roy in P:M."
They'd obviously still be saying "(The) Project M (Team) did a great job with Roy, I love him."
That is, only if you assume people who never look at credits. People who don't care about who did what are not my concern here.
Heck, even if nobody ever looked at credits. Like, ever. Does that make it right to credit the wrong people? No.
But as things stand, just take someone who wants to mod the P:M assets and wishes to be respectful to whoever made the original asset. They cannot do that properly. So that one Roy recolor on the Vault will be credited to/collabed with... "Pik, StarWaffle, Nanobuds, Spex 130, jiang."
Or worse "the PMBR."