In the real TS2 world I am known as netseeker2. And as such I would like to post my whole sordid story of what happened to me there at TSR and what goes on there behind the scenes. It is documented with evidence files (which you will have to download from the link given). These are ALL uneditted and untouched files (correspondence, screenshots etc) between Thomas & I, and Atwa & I. There is no slander nor defamation at all in it, because it is actual facts listed and I also have the proof as attachments (that you will need to download off from that link - which incidentally Thomas won't do you any good to try to have removed because since it is proof - that means it could be used in a court of law against you.) - since it doesn't seem I can add attachments in here. I also divulge how TSR operates based on my experiences and things I know that goes on there. So sit back with your favourite beverage and start reading.....
My experiences on TSR started off fine for the most part with me uploading lots that I created. Then because there was so little homecrafter material available and what was available at the time all the creators of such material were territorial about it and didn't want anyone using any of their stuff without permission for such (the TSRAA wasn't in existance yet), so I started creating my own homecrafter material out of sheer desperation for a snow terrain paint that I could use on one of my lots. Which led me to make more homecrafter material that I decided to share by uploading to TSR, figuring it would make other lot builders lives easier if they didn't have to create everything from scratch themselves like I did. Izazu was the first to ask me permission to use my homecrafter material and then CycloneSue, so that encouraged me to make more of it. But I kept getting rejection after rejection on them from Kath because some didn't tile properly (okay fine, maybe some didn't but some did and she still rejected them using that excuse).
Then the TSRAA came into existance and Izazu suggested I join it. So I did. I was there for a little while until one person who is currently a FA on TSR now (Shakeshaft) copied almost precisely some walls I'd made and added a couple little (barely visible) mouldings to them and posted them. There was an argument between us about that and somehow someone dragged that into the TSRAA forum, where Shakeshaft mentioned something about it in there and then I posted my rebuttal to her. Well of course since Shakeshaft was their little darling my rebuttal got removed but her post stayed. So I removed myself from the TSRAA but stipulated on my profile page that anyone could use my material in lots that they posted anywhere.
A week or so later I got wickedly sabotaged and my ratings plummeted - in the space of 20 minutes they went down over 600 places - so I shut my ratings off. In fact at that time Dinad and Sims2LvrGrl also got sabotaged. Then surprise surprise a week after that Shakeshaft was named FA, when all of us (including Shakeshaft) were around the same ratings before our sabotage.That occurred during the summer months of 2005. Then I quit TSR and didn't upload anything again until CycloneSue lured me back, which was several months later in late fall of 2005.
So I went back to continue to make homecrafter material to supply there at CycloneSue's request.
Then came Atwa on the scene as a subscriber. She was downloading a lot of my homecrafter material and used it to build lots with. She showed me pics of some of her work and I said she should post it on TSR (like I told everyone who showed me their work - to encourage them to share it - so we could all get and use it if we liked and wanted it). She then asked me to make some walls with photographs she'd taken herself in Egypt to use on lots she wanted to build and at the time I was misled into thinking she was a nice person and so complied with her wishes and amazingly Kath approved them all even though they didn't tile correctly (which Ravenna was all too anxious to inform me of in a PM the very minute they were posted on the site - none of which were downloaded yet by the time Ravenna informed me of that fact - that they didn't tile correctly).
At Christmas time I was given a bigger hard drive and so could install SimPe and Microsoft Framework along with the game and so started doing recolours. Once I started doing recolours I had all kinds of people soliciting me to work with them. Crystal Clear Sims, Spirited Sims, Simsistic and some others I can't think of at the moment. However, I kept getting rejection after rejection on TSR on account of them - not because they didn't tile correctly but because I didn't know which expansion pack they were from and so listed all the expansions I had installed (while everyone else was allowed to do that and get away with it there). Yet my recolours were fine and even sought after by these other sites.
By March 2006 or thereabouts I was getting overwhelmed with the amount of sites I was supplying and the amount of material I had to create in order to supply them and to make matters worse I kept getting rejections for cockamamie reasons on TSR and so I offered to quit (which you will see as an online support issue title in the attached online support issue screenshots). Steve answered that himself and basically said it was my decision but that the idea of TSR was to share and share alike. I had other issues with TSR at the time too and since Per was one of the people to answer it sanely and rationally and fairly, and resolve them I stuck around. But honestly I was going to quit creating altogether for everybody at that point and that's when I got a surprise email from Hexameter with the beautiful horse & carriage he had made for me as a gift, for giving him the impetus he needed to start creating in the first place (it was my Melody Ranch Town lot that was his impetus). That was the first time I corresponded with Hexameter and today I count him as a close friend. It's his gift and what he said in his email that accompanied it, that made me change my mind and continue beating my head against all the brick walls in the community. Basically, I figured it would be selfish of me to quit creating if my humble offerings that I posted could inspire someone to learn meshing and make something that beautiful, that maybe if I quit creating there might be others who wouldn't make something that they'd have otherwise made if I created something. That is why I stuck around.
In the meantime I was chosen to be a beta-tester at TSR and was there in the forum when Blue Soup got thrown out of the beta-tester forum for for allegedly belonging to a pirate board. Thomas tried to ask and accuse me of that later on after the sabotage I was to endure in November. Which he would've loved to have been able to prove, because when the Kudos were implemented I had earned so many so quickly I must've gotten some FAs panties and shorts all in knots because one night TSR "had a crash". The next morning my kudos were in Thomas' words "adjusted" - what he did is he hid 144,000 of them (and they are still not showing in the total that shows on my profile page currently - but show in my kudos page where it itemized what they were earned for and spent on) and gave me a year's sub in exchange for them. If he could've proved it or even a suspicion of me belonging to such a board, he'd have banned me then and I'd have lost the sub (which is basically all I got out of TSR for everything I gave them). As it is I had 43 days left on my sub when they banned me and yanked all of my stuff off of there. Plus I had over 846,000 kudos earned (besides the hidden 144,000 kudos) showing - so how many centuries would those be good for taking my 3 incentive days a month? Just wondering here, because these are something I earned the hard way - if it were money he were paying me like he does the FAs - there wouldn't be a problem because that would be in my bank account and he couldn't just take it back. So he's a rip-off artist like he's accusing everyone else out there in simsland of being.
Then at the end of November 2006 I, Atwa, Sherriesim, Paleoanth, Darqstar & Momoma all got sabotaged again. This time though they hadn't done a number on me like they did before - they only dropped me from 4.33 (which was in the gold category) down to 4.29 (at the top of the silver category), but they basically trampled the others down into the ground. I believe Momoma was the one who got the worst trampling.
Because I had been sabotaged before I was furious that the powers that be hadn't done anything to change things to protect the artists against it, when they had had a year & a half to do so from the last time I got sabotaged. I also knew from previous experience that if we got sabotaged that they were going to name a new FA in very short time and that perhaps we were all contenders for being chosen (because the FAs have a forum where they discuss all of this stuff) - FAs also had a tendency to sabotage people's ratings if their ratings were higher than the FAs were. Sure enough a new FA was chosen, but from offsite - Confide I believe it was. Which infuriated Atwa because she noticed that all the FAs from September until December were all offsite artists being recruited from elsewhere and none were from the SA pool onsite (who she thought had the right to be FAs first before offsite artists). In a way I agreed with her because after all most of the SAs and almost all of the artists in the ranks were there supporting TSR and TSR was making money on all of their stuff, while it was still a strictly paid site. So I posted a rant about it on my profile page. I also posted a rant about the saboteurs as well and quit.
That is when Elmazz who was merely an artist in the ranks too at the time, went around all the forums saying something in them about how I should be the spokesperson for the non-FAs and Thomas went ballistic in the forums at me (NOT at her, but at me) when I wasn't even on the site let alone in the forums. So then he sent me a threatening email and kicked me out of the beta testers forum. But he made Elmazz into an FA. Do you see the justice and fairness there? Because if you do I wish you'd point it out to me.
I replied to his threatening email (which you will find enclosed/attached) explaining where I was coming from and Atwa's anger about him not choosing FAs from onsite but rather recruiting them from off site. I even suggested that he name her, or Sherriesim or another artist Clncy as an FA. This email was dated on December 12th 2006. Atwa was named FA a day or two before Christmas of 2006 (more than 2 weeks after my suggestion to Thomas that she be named FA). You will see what I asked for in exchange for me returning to TSR (and being an SA or FA wasn't one of my demands for myself) - all I asked for was equity and fairness to everyone on there including me and for him to right some wrongs. Period. This text is uneditted and verbatim. I am also attaching his replies - well our entire exchange on the whole matter for public edification because I know there was a lot of speculation and rumours going around the community at the time as to what happened. It is my belief that Thomas named Atwa FA as a means of appeasing not only me but Sherrie and the community at large (the disgruntled portion of it who were sick of seeing offsite artists being recruited to be FAs) and not because she was such a wonderful ew-aw great artist.
Now why did Atwa want to be FA soooooooooooo badly? Because FAs get paid. They get paid based on their popularity and the number of downloads they generate. FAs have always been paid and are still paid. Whilst the SAs and the rank artists got nothing even while TSR was a strictly paid site and selling their content to subscribers. So I never got a cent off of anything that TSR ever managed to sell of mine while they were a strictly paid site - all I got out of the deal was incentive days and for those I had to have in the beginning 5,000 paid subscriber downloads to get one incentive day - then it was upped to 10,000 paid subscriber downloads for each incentive day. Which incidently could've been taken as often as you wanted until they ran out, so if you wanted to use them all one behind each other you could. I had accumulated about 140 incentive days before they were changed into kudos recently. Which meant when my sub expired in 43 days time, I'd have been good for almost another half year before I ran out of incentive days to use. Now with the kudos thing and my 846,000 kudos taking 3 days a month, which millenium would it be by the time I used them all and would TSR even exist then? More importantly would I even exist then? So that's a rip off right there.
On January 8th I got a surprise email from Thomas telling me (not asking me if I wanted to be one, like he asked everyone else) that he'd made me into an SA. It seems that Thomas felt he could always take liberties and do whatever he wished with my account and stuff without first asking or informing me of anything. Whether I'd gotten that email or not, I was preparing to go back to TSR, as my son had returned to school and the Christmas holiday business was over with for us. It's just coincidental that he made me SA when he did which coincided with my return to TSR - as I had promised him in exchange for his making things right I would return but at the time I made that promise it was very close to Christmas and I had still had things to do around here with friends and family and well like anyone else netseeker2 makes her personal life her priority over her sims life. So when I made the promise to Thomas that I would return, I meant it, but I didn't say when that would be, because I wasn't sure myself when that would be, only that it would probably be after the holidays or maybe during them if I could find the time.
So I resumed uploading stuff I'd made and contended with all the cockamamie rejections (including that I didn't link to the meshes that I'd used - even though I've never done a custom mesh recolour in my life and everything I recoloured was from the game). I've had rejections galore with all kinds of excuses attached as the reason for rejecting them, from the picture size to the wallpaper background for the set, to things not being suitable for 13PG rating (yet liquor and bars are supposed to be suitable for 13 year olds - righttt), to not tiling properly, to not listing the precise expansion required for each item in a set (and listing all my expansions I had), to not linking to the meshes etc... You name it, I've had something rejected on account of it. But that was fair for me - yet others got away with not listing what was required (and still do) or listing every expansion they own as being required for that one single item. Yet when I did it, it was rejected. This happened EVEN WHILE I WAS AN SA too.
This is the reason why Sherriesim quit TSR and went on her own, because of the cockamamie rejections she was getting and for the "help" (read hinderance and hard time) she was getting from Atwa (who was supposed to be the "Artist Manager" at the time and intercede for us) over it. I tried mediating that dispute between the two of them - which occurred on February 20ieth of this year. I wasn't very successful at it obviously. But basically in hindsight (even though Sherrie didn't have any screenshots - but Atwa "did" - though hers could've been manufactured and in hindsight I think they probably were) I believe Sherrie's version of what happened in that chat session between her and Atwa whereby it degenerated into a huge fight and Atwa had Sherrie's SAship revoked on TSR because of it. It's so nice to have power when you're a backstabber, busy stabbing all the people in the back that got you to the point where you are eh Atwa??? I have all the supporting evidence to prove what I'm saying.
Then shortly after that, they started allowing the SAs to set the publishing dates for their submissions without having to be approved. So great no more cockamamie rejections to contend with. Ahhhhhh but now we have a new SA Forum that we all have to attend and participate in and my one and only participation in that (other than to post a few chitchat pieces and some links in the resource area) wound up as follows:
On Friday September 14, 2007 or thereabouts I got banned from TSR and all my stuff got yanked off of there. Now apparently if you try to go to my page, it's a profile page with my About Me on it, and a couple of pics but it says I haven't created anything. I don't know how long that will stay there either and quite frankly I don't care at this point.
The sin I committed for that to have happened? ....
A couple of days before July 17th 2007 (which is when my last submission was posted there) Thomas was asking in the SA forum for ideas on improving the site and the image of the site in the community. Since I've always been there as a creator and not merely as a subscriber or downloader, I could only offer suggestions based on my experience as a creator and so I reiterated all the things that've been done to me over the years by Kath, him, Per and Steve and said not to do those to anyone else. I mean I thought we were seriously talking about the real existing TSR and not some fantasy site with hypothetical problems that required hypothetical solutions. So Thomas got furious in the forum and basically told me to stop bringing up past hurts and that they don't do that (oh and yeah one of the things I said not to do also in my post in there, was delete one person's message in the threads in forums while leaving everyone else's replies to them) and he deleted my message that he was replying to, while saying they don't do that. So basically he called me a liar and berated me publicly for giving them honest to goodness suggestions that might've helped them improve their image based on things that really do happen there. So when I saw his reply I asked him what he was replying to if they don't delete messages to show me the actual message he's replying to, and got mad and said I was out of there. And I never went back into the SA Forums after that. And Atwa sent me a scathing email about what I said in the forum. To which I replied.
On August 17th 2007 (one month to the day my last submission was posted) he apparently changed the rules for the SAs - now instead of 3 months of inactivity before you lost your status and mini-site it was down to 2 months. Plus on top of that he had changed the requirements - now you have to produce one set of 10 objects per week, one lot every 2 weeks or a mesh set every month. Sounds alright except that the 10 objects aren't 10 objects if you use the same texture on any of those pieces more than once. What constitutes an object now is the texture - so for a 10 piece set you need 10 different textures on them. Sorry.... But to coin a phrase from Sherriesim, I don't do paint factory explosions. My son who will be graduating from his Interior Design studies in December agrees with Sherrie's assessment on that one - he says you NEVER use more than 3 maximum 4 main colours for an entire room - unless you want it to look busy or like a paint factory explosion. So I can only imagine who was behind that new requirement that Thomas posted and why - perhaps so hers wouldn't be the only paint factory explosion stuff on the site and thereby stand out like a sore thumb.
Then on Friday September 14 2007, I got an email from Atwa asking me if I was going back to TSR as an SA because the rules were changed and I'd better go back before my SAship lapsed. To which I replied that I had no intention of going back before I got a public apology in the SA Forum from Thomas (which I knew I wouldn't get from the arrogant ignoramus) and a private apology from her in email. There was no response to that message.
The next morning I went to log into TSR and I couldn't get in. So used another name to get in to find that all of my stuff was gone from the site. Then another SA went to look at my page and told me what she found and Sherrie then verified it for me.
You will find screenshots of the various online support issues I've had there over time - two screenfuls of just titles alone, attached. So for Thomas to say I never had problems there was a blatant lie - he was the one doing the lying in that forum but had the audacity to call me the liar. Hence the reason I didn't give-in for my request for a public apology. If I had've thought to get screenshots of the innumberable rejections I've had over the years, I'd need to rar them all and attach a CD's sized rar to this email of just those alone. But I think the online support issues verifies what I'm saying here. The only two liars I know of on TSR are Thomas and Atwa, but they're the ones that have the audacity to say and infer that everyone else are liars. So far as I know everyone else is genuine, including me.
----------------------------------- Enough About Me - Now About TSR Itself --------------------
Up until September or October of 2006 TSR was a strictly paid site with weekly freebies rotations. Meaning that if anyone wanted to download anything that wasn't in the freebies rotations they had to have a paid subscription to get it.
All during that time (nearly from it's inception - though it was free for the first little while - maybe a year at most) all the artists who uploaded material to it, except for the FAs got nothing at all out of the deal. In fact it was a sims 1 artist (I wish I could remember her name but alas I can't) who made a lot of unique deco pieces and stuff for The Sims 1 game, that caused a ruckus publicly because she had lost all of her creations that she'd made and wanted to get them again but the only place they were was on TSR's servers and even though she made them and uploaded them there, she couldn't download them without having a paid subscription to get them. So I guess because she caused a ruckus publicly and most people sided with her thinking that it was only fair (and I agree) they decided to allow the uploaders free access to their own stuff - but ONLY their own stuff. Anything else the uploaders got free had to be in the freebies rotations like anyone else going to the site whether they created anything and posted it there or not. But TSR didn't mind selling this stuff that the creators made and not giving them even a cent on it. The FAs on the other hand like I said always got paid and still do.
Then along comes incentive days for creators. Fine okay, well now they can get get access to some of the things they might want that isn't in freebies rotations, but you have to wait until you have 5,000 paid subscriber downloads on your stuff before you can get that one free day. It's a step in the right direction I suppose, but not much of a step. But then they upped that amount to needing 10,000 paid subscriber downloads to get one incentive day.
Now we have something new added to the deal here - Kudos. Kudos were meant to be used to buy things but what they have to buy is a paltry few things for the non-artists in the community and for the artists it's nothing really but a lot of hot air - like having the little picture in the "feature" spot for artists which rotates, or your name in the newsletter or to "buy" background colours and counters for your page and if you really want to splurge a mini-site (which will probably get taken away from you after 3 months of inactivity even if you bought it with kudos). I know my friend's mini-site got taken away from her for inactivity after 3 months. So they shouldn't be saying you can "buy" a mini-site, to me the correct term would be "rent with conditions attached". But you still had your incentive days that you earned that you could take anytime, until recently. Now there are no more incentive days separate from the kudos - they're all under the kudos and as such you can only take 3 of those a month. Now I'd like to know the last time anyone had an employer who told them how to spend and how often they could spend their earnings? Seems to me, that if you earn something, it's yours to use how you want. At least here in the civilized part of the world it is. Obviously it isn't in Thomas'Slave Regime though. Given that some people can barely get the 10,000 downloads needed for a single incentive day, it doesn't seem fair to me that TSR should dictate when and how often they can use them.
Yeah I know it was done only recently and that now you only need incentive days to get only the FAs stuff, as that's still paid. But still for some people getting 10,000 downloads for a single day's worth of free access to the site will take them a very long time. By the time they get their day they may've forgotten what they wanted it for in the first place.
Oh and did I mention that a new "perk" (read a new angle to generate yet more subscriptions) for SAs is that they have free access to the entire site now? No they're not being paid like the FAs who also have free access to the entire site (and always did - that's how they managed to download enough material to sabotage people even when the site was strictly paid) but they do have free access to all the material including the FAs stuff. That's supposed to be a "perk". Yeah right - it's more like it's a new idea of Thomas' to try to generate new subs by allowing the SAs the right to get the meshes, so that they can then recolour them and post their recolours of them. That way the people who come for the freebies will see all of these nice recolours (well if the SAs don't abide by that new paint factory explosion rule they ought to be nice that is) and will want to pay to get the meshes required for them.
Which leads me to the meshes..... And the FAs.... In a lot of those cases FA should stand for Fraud Artist, since a lot of them use already made meshes freely available on the 3d mesh sites out there (many of which forbid selling or reselling their meshes in their terms of use) that they merely import into the game and retexture. One of them was caught out and had to lose his FAship and is merely an SA now. But I'm sure if you want to comb through all the 3d mesh sites and see which meshes you recognize amongst them (because most of them are not modified - only resized to suit the games proportions and for SimPe to be able see and import them - because most of them have polygons etc too high for SimPe to be able to handle - so those have to be lowered usually), I'm sure you'll be surprised at all the ones you recognize and which artists used them. So this is what you're being sold in a lot of cases - illegal goods that were ripped off and being sold against the terms of use by the original creators of them.
So that's what TSR is and how it operates and treats it's creators. And if you want to use me as a classic example whereby they used and abused and made money on me and then when I asked for a simple public apology from the owner, got banned and all my stuff yanked off there, then that's probably the best example you'll find of how they treat their artists and people who've helped pay their rent and put food on their table (it's the artists who contributed to them, that are the people who pay Thomas' rent and puts food on his table and gas in his tank and pays for the servers that TSR runs on) while giving diddly-squat back besides a pretty pink page with a silver badge over the top of my avatar's head back. Like I can do a lot with that. It's not even tangible enough to use to as toilet paper - which is basically all it'd be good for anyhow.
And all I have to say to any of the subscribers or would-be subscribers to TSR is that your continued support and payments to them only encourages this kind of behaviour and makes it continue unabated. If you really do care about the artists and what they go through to get those pretty little must haves to you for your games, you'll boycott TSR until it collapses into the ground and help fund a site/server that creators can upload to for free to take some of the strain off of MTS2.
And all I have to say to all the TSR artists out there is - my case could be your case very easily - just look at Thomas the wrong way and it will be, or if any of you ladies out there are getting all cosy cosy with Atwa, watch out for the lying backstabbing two-faced bitch because once she's finished using you for whatever purpose she's using you she'll have you thrown out of TSR too.
There are other places out there on the net to post your stuff if you really must post your items. And other than the FAs who are being paid to put up with all of that abuse (and they must be being paid well enough to endure it this long too) I don't see why any other artists who aren't getting anything out of the deal feel compelled to help feed and clothe that tyrant named Thomas. He's not doing anything for you - all he's doing is using you. And I really don't see why you would want to upload your material there without being paid if the FAs are getting paid. It should be fair for all the artists - who dictates that your stuff is any better or any worse than anyone else's? The download numbers? Hardly - especially if you aren't getting the frontpage exposure the FAs are getting, or make niche material. Just because Thomas like's it better than something else? Gag puke barf - if Thomas likes it then it must be crap - perfect example he likes Atwa and her stuff. Okay? Enough said. So you should be entitled to be paid like the FAs for your material. If you're not, why are you uploading there? To get kudos for incentive days where the rules on those change every half hour or at Thomas' whim or can be taken away without warning? Why bother, you'll find better stuff elsewhere than what's in the FA's material - they don't make anything so innovative or ew-aw great & must have (most of it is just another room set or deco but nothing innovative like Echo's carousel or Katie's items she posted on her board) - not compared to a lot of the good artists on MTS2 and the now closed PC-Sims board. So I wouldn't waste any time there at all as a creator, downloader or subscriber after having read this and being enlightened as to what it is and what goes on there. End of story.
For substantiated evidence see all the the files here:
http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/netseeker2s_creations/ . Read them thoroughly and you'll have a much better and clearer idea of all the workings behind the scenes with evidence and substantiations to what I'm saying.
netseeker2
PMBD
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