Numenor's Opinion of pay vs free

[Saraswati]

The problem is, to someone that has never received criticism, anything that's not overwhelmingly positive, is considered a horrible, terrible thing.  It doesn't matter how nice you try to be, they don't want to hear it, and you can burn in hell.  And there's no way you can justify it, because you were lying, essentially, to be as nice as you were in the first place.  I'm not saying go around and undeservedly flame the pants off of people, but I'm saying that it's not really a good thing to keep the kid gloves on all of the time.

Seriously.  Considering the amount of teenage fic writers I've won over with my policy of brutal honesty tempered with the praise for things done right, I think I've found a decent way to go about it.  Of course, fandom hasn't been cultivating a cult of nice wholesale, either.  But hell yes, fuck being gentle, because it makes the praise that much more worth it.  You'll have to deal with tantrums, and that's messy and a pain, but if you hold your own, and explain yourself, you'll generally win people over.  Some people will NEVER be able to cope with honesty, but they wouldn't cope with anything less than excessive ass-kissing in the first place.  

But that's really the stem of this problem with Numenor.  He's not getting his way, and he's throwing a tantrum.  And this is a guy who's gotten tons of praise, adoration, thanks, and donations tossed his way, for a site that doesn't even host anything.  I don't begrudge him any of this, up to the point where his entitlement complex has overgrown his head.

Quincita, sorry for not replying to you earlier hun.. I got preoccupied with other stuff over the weekend. I can see your point here, I have actually seen people go off the deep end because people have given them gentle criticism. And I do often get stared at these days like I'm from Mars because I'll say to noobs on the exchange "It will help your downloads no end if you include screenshots"..  I think we've probably got a different way of explaining the same approach I think. I remember Moira bluntly telling a noob on the exchange that not every peice of work is worth 5* and I thought "good for you".. My feeling is that as long as we stay rational and calm with people, they either leave or grow up eventually.

I think the behaviour issue is partially the fault of the ordinary masses like me early on.. before I learned how to do anything, I used to revere even really crap skinners. So some of the guys that have been around since early on have grown to expect this is their due regardless. Numenor I still have less of an issue with it though, because he has done a lot for us as a community, and I do hope this gets resolved..

Ash, subfoldering is the only way to keep yourself sane if you're making stuff to share from the same folder you play with.. I've usually got at least three going. It's less intimidating than it looks if you create somewhere temporary to put your stuff, then get The Clean Installer to sort your stuff by type, and then wholesale move them into their appropriate folders. All told, it should take about ten minutes.

[Apsalar]

Well actually,Pescado, the recolors don't really effect the loading time that much. Unless you're timing your loading time. Maybe not even then. All the other stuff do though. But maybe you're just anal about your loading time. Heh.  :roll:  *likes to live dangerously*

Yes, but my gameplay involves constantly doing the error/quit/fix/restart loop. If it took 5 minutes just to reload after changing a line of code, it'd be intolerable.

Fair enough.

@ missangelica: welcome back

[Ash Redfern]

Ash, subfoldering is the only way to keep yourself sane if you're making stuff to share from the same folder you play with.. I've usually got at least three going. It's less intimidating than it looks if you create somewhere temporary to put your stuff, then get The Clean Installer to sort your stuff by type, and then wholesale move them into their appropriate folders. All told, it should take about ten minutes.

I don't make items to share but having an organized downloads folder would be nice. I do have some things already in their own neat little folders but most items are kind of free floating. The main reason I have yet to take on the task of organizing the rest of my files is because it seemed like such a  massive chore to tackle. But perhaps I will give it a go sometime soon as you do make it seem less exasperating than I had first imagined.

[Paden]

Lorelei, I raided and got some of your stuff, I liked the look of it and it works fine in my game. Thank you!
Missangelica, I was wondering why in the hell you were so silent! Welcome back and hope all is going well for you.
As for copyrighting their creations, that is hard to do when you're modifying something that is copyrighted by someone else first, ya know?
Numenor, love you to bits but it's a fuggin payfile so it's booty-able. Meh!
Pescado, mine loads fast and I've got plenty of shit in there. Must be all the RAM I've got, I designed the damn thing for games. Spent most of the tax refund on it, too, and its not going on the net until I can find an anti-virus program better than McAfee or Nortons that doesn't cost me my first born child and a pint of blood every ten days.

[mando]

its not going on the net until I can find an anti-virus program better than McAfee or Nortons that doesn't cost me my first born child and a pint of blood every ten days.

Try AVG, Paden. That's the anti-virus program that I'm using, as I was having the same problem that you are (well, okay, in my case it was just me being totally cheap). It works beautifully and the best part is that it is totally, completely, 100% free.

[Saraswati]

Ash, subfoldering is the only way to keep yourself sane if you're making stuff to share from the same folder you play with.. I've usually got at least three going. It's less intimidating than it looks if you create somewhere temporary to put your stuff, then get The Clean Installer to sort your stuff by type, and then wholesale move them into their appropriate folders. All told, it should take about ten minutes.

I don't make items to share but having an organized downloads folder would be nice. I do have some things already in their own neat little folders but most items are kind of free floating. The main reason I have yet to take on the task of organizing the rest of my files is because it seemed like such a  massive chore to tackle. But perhaps I will give it a go sometime soon as you do make it seem less exasperating than I had first imagined.

Hey Ash

This is how you do it fairly easily if you ever decide to give it a go... Create yourself a "custom content" folder outside of your downloads folder. Create hacks/recolours folders within it, however many you want. Open up Clean Installer.. you will see a dropdown box up the top called "chose directory".. Pick your downloads folder

Click where it says "type" on the bar up the top.. this sorts your stuff into different types of items like walls, floors, hacks.. from memory the only thing you can't subfolder is bodyshop files (you guys can correct me if I'm wrong here)

Then you move 'em.. how you do this quickly is you click on the top file of it's type.. then shift click on the bottom file of it's type, right click on them while they're highlighted and go "Move To".. "Browse" and find the folder you've created for them.. Rinse and repeat until you're done, then move your folders back.. Takes about ten or fifteen minutes, like I said.

Angha

[Ash Redfern]

Hey Ash

This is how you do it fairly easily if you ever decide to give it a go... Create yourself a "custom content" folder outside of your downloads folder. Create hacks/recolours folders within it, however many you want. Open up Clean Installer.. you will see a dropdown box up the top called "chose directory".. Pick your downloads folder

Click where it says "type" on the bar up the top.. this sorts your stuff into different types of items like walls, floors, hacks.. from memory the only thing you can't subfolder is bodyshop files (you guys can correct me if I'm wrong here)

Then you move 'em.. how you do this quickly is you click on the top file of it's type.. then shift click on the bottom file of it's type, right click on them while they're highlighted and go "Move To".. "Browse" and find the folder you've created for them.. Rinse and repeat until you're done, then move your folders back.. Takes about ten or fifteen minutes, like I said.

Angha

Thank you very much for all the tips. I might just try to finally organize all my files when I next have the free time.

[HawkGirl]

its not going on the net until I can find an anti-virus program better than McAfee or Nortons that doesn't cost me my first born child and a pint of blood every ten days.

Try AVG, Paden. That's the anti-virus program that I'm using, as I was having the same problem that you are (well, okay, in my case it was just me being totally cheap). It works beautifully and the best part is that it is totally, completely, 100% free.

That's all I use too and since they gave it to me for years for free, I finally broke down about three years ago and bought the AVG Internet protection. Went to McAfee for a bit, and even tried Norton cause I thought surely they would be better than a free firewall(which by the way I also used from AVG)...I'll stick with AVG. Spybot and Adaware. I've donated to both of those as well and CCleaner. First things that all went on my new PC when I got it.

[Silvercoin]

Short version of happenings: Week break from PMBD. Two computers borked to the point of paper weights. Move to another city. Cut from internet for weeks. Tears. Forced to go back to ancient OS. More Tears. Internet. Back to PMBD. Rejoice!

:lol: Interesting story. What would make it a terrifying story worthy of much pity would be if the OS was... Windows ME! *horror*
But yeah, welcome back. See, look how we noticed, don't you feel all popular now.

And extra note, I don't use it anymore but AVG is a very nice program. I recently tried AntiVir and it drove me nuts. If I had to choose a free anti-virus program, I'd definitely choose AVG. Comodo Firewall is another free program I like if you're still looking for that firewall. Kinda drove me nuts, too, when I first started out with it, what with all the IP address confirmation popups but I like it better than ZoneAlarm now. Which was a good firewall itself, it just pissed me off how it would keep phoning home. LOL PARANOIA

[blumchen]

I just had a virus where I lost all my game files, and personal pictures, and norton found nothing. My old un-updated Ad-aware caught the thing, so i decided to buy ad-aware 2007. . It's free too, and works like a charm. I just hate norton anymore!

[RedLove]

NoaNikko is using his poll to their advantage, I think. On their donation page it says "Numenor's say on Donation items, a must read."

[HawkGirl]

I just had a virus where I lost all my game files, and personal pictures, and norton found nothing. My old un-updated Ad-aware caught the thing, so i decided to buy ad-aware 2007. . It's free too, and works like a charm. I just hate norton anymore!

I love Ad-aware because it seems to catch everything. I like spybot because it has the immunization, so it blocks all the pages known to have adware, trojans. Plus you can choose how you want to block them. Only thing I don't like in the new update is it keeps reseting my web settings to block sites, so I go to download something and it says to lower my settings. Or at least I think it's Spybot doing it, could be one of the others. Have you come across that yet? Or anyone using Lavasoft, AVG, or Spybot?

ETA: Oh you know McAfee did do something right, I had a trojan once, nothing horrible, just kept redirecting me to some porn site, and every email I sent had a link to the porn site. So people thought I had lost my mind. lol But only thing that caught it and cleaned it up with no problems was Stinger, it's a little free proggie by McAfee, like their site advisor.

[silver]

Another great free anti-virus program if you're using the computer for non-commercial use only is AVAST! (The name seems rather appropriate for this forum, now that I think about it.) I have that one on one of my computers. (I use AVG for the other one.)

http://www.avast.com/eng/avast_4_home.html

Many people I know either really like AVG or this one, and both programs have some very avid users. The only problem I see with AVAST! is that sometimes, you get false positives, but then again, I sometimes get false positives with AVG, too.

In addition to my AVG or AVAST!, AdAware and Spybot, I also like this program:

http://www.javacoolsoftware.com/spywareblaster.html

After that, though, I wouldn't go TOO crazy with the anti-spyware programs, though. I've read that too many of them are not very helpful in the long run.

[Requip]

I've read his rant 3 times now (very carefully) and for some reason, it sorta ends up sounding like the rants of others. (think of any creator who ranted about file-sharing) They all end up sounding alike to me.  :roll:

Therefore, until Maxis dosn't complain about this, I will claim the copyright over all the parts of my stuff that I've created myself.

Ermmm.....okay. Then "until Maxis complains about file-sharing, I will claim my right to share files that I purchase with whomever I choose." Everyone keeps threatening that creators will leave. I say BU'BUH as I wouldn't miss a single one of those who create things for any reason beyond sharing or thanks. And if this is his reaction, fine........I'll have no problem pulling CEP or any of his shit outta my game. I don't mind playing vanilla.   Course I'm probably in the minority. I am as disgusted with him as with all those other creators who pitch little fits.  :?

[calalily]

Everyone keeps threatening that creators will leave. I say BU'BUH as I wouldn't miss a single one of those who create things for any reason beyond sharing or thanks. And if this is his reaction, fine........I'll have no problem pulling CEP or any of his shit outta my game. I don't mind playing vanilla.   Course I'm probably in the minority.

Well if it's a minority - I'm part of that.  I can live without objects - and don't currently have any in my game (except Paladin's hacked fish and fruit storers thingy).  An object has to be totally spectacular for me to download (one of which was that bedroom set of Sherry's <3 ) and store.  I can't live without bodyshop - and I don't need anyone but me for that if push comes to shove.

I have to agree about the threats about creators leaving - I don't mind.  I mean, I *might* have made the most spectacular hair mesh ever seen - but I don't share it, so it's not missed.  There might be the most fantabulous creators who have never connected to the internet - and I don't miss their stuff either.  So if a creator leaves - for a silly reason or a really good reason - you never know what you've never had.

*Please don't badger me for a hair mesh - example only. I cannot mesh and thinking about the time required to devote to it makes me want to cry.