Gallery misconduct

Dear friends!

Here comes my gift to you! Now I have experience of ploting marketing strategies and communication in general so yours truly could say that she really knows what she is talking about. And it is totaly up to you to either take it or leave it 😉 I shall still love you all ^^

So. EA/Maxis does not seem acknowledge the problem/loop holes in the gallery system. Contacting EA/Maxis was frutles. What has not been done yet is what has been prooved effectfull in the past. Now think empires. Roman empire they have their peak and then they die. So we could say that the "good gallery empire" is dead and we have this "bad empire". Now what used to happen whas that some groups created chaos in order to destroy the "regime" and simply start fresh.

To make a long story short my suggestion is: 

Create chaos in order to make the gallery system collaps. because most ppl want followers and we CAN use that thurst for greed. 

this is what WE can do:

1. create a message with CLEAR instructions containing all the steps in cheating 

2. spam the message to as many NEW players as possible (remember if we ALL do it it will be a piece of cake)

3. what I think will happen is: EVERYONE will give it a try

4. the result the cheating system will be destroying itself

5. I guess the chaos will continue about 3 months and the everything will get back to the 0-point

6. at this point it is time to re-create the culture of the gallery

Hugs and kisses and so on ^^

FruUtter ------ In The Name of Otter ^^

LOL I have to laugh--you are so clever! I wonder what others think of this! It is historically accurate.

All I can tell you is that the frustration in some of the community is real and growing.  Spoke with 2 other powerful creators this week about the direction of the gallery.  One was very discouraged about the ease of the cheating and will be taking a long break.  The other is beyond disgusted that Maxis doesn't seem to do anything to protect the creators that have 1000's of followers.  It will be interesting to see how this all plays out.

SWSRogueLeader yes, the gallery is at this point. We just can't let the criminals to win this part. I say it because steal, cheat, and plagiarize are crimes, and must be punished. I hope so much that we will have a good surprise from EA.

We miss Charantea very much. She is not the only simmer to alert EA to cheating and be "thanked" by getting a warning instead. As I have said before, somewhere down the line the fact that we are customers, have paid for the product(s), and deserve good service is being overlooked. Instead we are treated like naughty schoolchildren--or ignored.

Support! Always support! It's so saddening when so many of us spend hours on our sims to get little to no recognition on them, but others can cheat to get it. I hope this problem gets solved soon.

Sorry, so I'm a bit out of the loop here but I happened to stumble upon a forum thread a few days ago and further investigation on the gallery eventually led me to here.  I would have said something on the forums but sadly that thread is closed before I got the chance to.

So first things first. I agree with what's been said here.  In theory anyway,

However I must say that I am a bit apprehensive about campaigning to report gallery items that have a download count perceived to be too high or if the ratio of DL's / Fav's is below some certain threshold (going by the forum thread and what's been said here).  I just feel like this is going to eventually turn in a massive witch hunt where any gallery item with a DL count > X will get mass reported.  I know this is frustrating to everyone, but I think cooler heads need to prevail here.

Sure when the player base is big enough there are bound to be exploiters.  But how can you tell which is which and where do you draw the line?  Starter homes will generally have a worse DL/Fav ratio compared to artistic / niche lots, while some of the more "general purpose" residential lots will have a ratio somewhere in between.  Creators with more followers will also have better DL/Fav ratios than unknown creators, and some people who are simply shy about commenting on others' work might also have fewer favs.  So how can we distinguish between these cases (which I honestly think is the majority) and those who are genuinely cheating?  Also, what if someone uses the gallery as cloud storage and wants to add the same house to multiple save files (I'm assuming this is in the ballpark of what the loophole refers to, yes?), are they now also "cheaters"?

Also, I know several creators on the gallery who are very talented and consistently make great content.  So naturally their buildings will rank relatively highly in the popular now tab.  So are they now cheaters because they have a lot of downloads?  Sometimes the beautifully decorated mansion is popular because it is a genuinely high quality piece of work.

I'm glad this has been brought to Maxis's attention and I'd love to see a solution, but not one that involves vigilantism for reporting any creation perceived as possibly cheated.  Maybe now I'm suspicious to a lot of people here for saying this, but just wanted to give my 2 cents regardless. I'm not trying to defend the "criminals" here or condone anything, just genuinely curious and admittedly I have a bad habit of playing devil's advocate.

Unless if there's part of the story that I'm missing, and if so, I'd certainly like to know about it.  Thanks!

--TDS