Vivitaru wrote:Can you please set the record straight and tell us what is true and what isn't? I really would like to know since i'm totally in the dark with what's going on with those blacklisting issues...
Sure. This is how things work..
1. The donations for FFEvo have nothing to do with just Ashita. Nor does it have ANYTHING to do with private servers, DSP or anything on that line. Donations go towards keeping FFEvo's servers online. Donations do NOT go through me, nor do I see any of that money. RZN gets all of the donations and manages it entirely himself. Feel free to go ask him that as well if you want validation to that.
2. Donations for FFEvo do not give anyone special privileges for DSP or any private server. FFEvo and DSP have nothing in common, nothing. Not a single thing on FFEvo is maintained, owned, or handled by DSP. Nothing. Not a single word in the donation panel mentions you gaining any special access to private servers, gaining any special privilege to DSP related content, or anything in that matter. So no, there is no ties to people being blocked after paying for something, because THERE IS NOTHING TO PAY FOR. It is called a donation for a reason. Let alone it entirely states on the donation page that it is for server costs, nothing else.
3. Ashita has currently, 3 servers blacklisted. (Sinister Skies, Shinra, and Era). To go into some detail of each:
- - Sinister Skies : This server was blacklisted after internal discussion of the DSP team and how Twiz handled donations. His entire server was hosted at his house, costing him nothing extra per-month. His donations were entirely for profit to get money from our project. Our hard work and efforts are not for others to profit on and ultimately his server was blacklisted from Ashita as I do not want my free and hard work being profited on by some kid.
- Shinra : This server started out as the new place for Sinister Skies people to go for a "better" environment. Soon after, the server turned into the same thing that Sinister Skies was, having a pay-to-win model allowing people to donate (insane amounts by the way) for gear effectively making the server the same thing as SinisterSkies with different management. Again, after some discussions with others, it was decided to blacklist Shinra as well as they were clearly using the donations for self-profit as well. (Again, their server was hosted at someones host, costing nothing extra to keep the server online.) Along with this, at the start of their server they boosted having features that were not implemented into DSP and were not at all contributing back to the project. This hinders the development of DSP and ultimately is one of the main things we very much hate seeing. (This was the same with Sinister Skies.)
- Era : While this server used to be the main grounds for DSP developers to test things on, as well as the better of the servers giving us decent feedback, bug reports, and content submissions, it was brought out that the staff had started to go against the wishes, that were explained multiple times to them, of DSP and our views on donations. Recently Era had a brief stint of going pay to win buy offered various pieces of gear for donations. It has also been discussed and felt that donations were not at all being used properly and some going into the pockets of staff members instead of just server costs. Due to this, Era was blacklisted.
We enjoy seeing people hosting servers with our software. However, we do not enjoy seeing people profiting off our work for self-gain. We also very much so hate seeing servers gloat about having features that are not implemented into DSP and are not sharing said features. DSP is not here to promote server feuds, fighting to be the best of the best. Our project is far from complete, and with the lack of developers, the main outlook and future of the project relies on third-party contributions. Without them, things tend to slow down and not get far.
As for the other junk GraveNET wants to spew about FFEvo (such as people getting banned [which never happened]) for posting anything / bug reports, none of that junk is true. It was posted on FFEvo that if you do not keep up to date with Ashita (as in being on a private server that is using older Ashita files) you will not get any support as we do not maintain multiple copies of the Ashita files. No one was ever banned for it.
It is stated on FFEvo in multiple places that Ashita is designed for retail and is kept up to date with the current retail version of the game. However, Ashita does work for DSP and is typically the go-to as Windower offers 0 direct support for private servers. (Not saying it doesn't work, they just don't give any support for it.) If the private server is up to date with the client and the person reporting any bugs is using the latest Ashita, there is nothing wrong with the report.
The only mention of people getting banned for posting about private server stuff was if they contentiously kept reporting things on old files and didn't follow the rules. All of which you can read here:
http://www.ffevo.net/topic/3491-importa ... ease-read/
As the post says, we do not mind people using the tools on private servers, as long as they keep up to date with the tools. This post was made after we had a giant flux of bogus bug reports from Shinra users because they do not keep their server up to date like other private servers. It was explained to them that they need to keep things up to date, but their users continued to keep posting things that were not broken.
It got to the point where they were making assumptions that Ashita was broken because they failed to look at the news posts, search the forums, or follow any proper forum guidelines before making any posts.
