I have a sim who had reached 600+ downloads and I posted about it on several Facebook groups, because it was so unexpected to me that he would have gotten that many downloads. But I uploaded him years ago and he's been steadily downloaded ever since. Of course posting his picture generates more downloads and I do post about him from time to time on my groups. Last I looked he was at around 620 downloads, but the gallery went down a day or so after I'd posted about it. When it came back up again, his download count was at 592 (but his Favorites count was higher). I most certainly DID NOT download him that many extra times myself. If I re-use a sim or build I've uploaded to the gallery, I place them from my library, never the gallery. I can’t even reach the gallery while playing many times because I play offline so much. It's frankly insulting to imply we're fluffing our numbers by downloading them ourselves. I have no doubt a few people have done that. I don't for one second believe the vast majority of us have.
Here's what I believe. I believe EA messed up the gallery transfer to new servers and had to recreate it using an older backup, rather than the current files. Am I wrong? Could be. But yeah. I think that's what really happened here.
One of my builds has dropped by 60,000 downloads and there is no way I downloaded it 60,000 times myself. It is the older builds that seem to have been affected by this issue.
I would guess since items that were created start having copies and discontinue showing all creations in the catalogs, perhaps people are just not getting the opportunity to see all your creations to download them. I know many of my builds, sims and items aren't viewable but you can do a search in the catalog to find them. What a mess the last supposed fix was.
