I can certainly see all sides here, I mean - let's face it, since I'm God.
Mcorp has some points, but he/she forwards it in a very immature and badly explained fashion - thus painting him/herself into a corner.
Sure, alot of paid content isnt worth any money at all, and surely lowers the quality-bar in VAM, actually hurting MeshedVR and the community. The better alternative would be some sort of "trial time", if a paid asset does'nt generate X amount of downloads via the HUB>patreon (measuring clicks) then it is removed as it would be fair to say it's not of a quality-level that gains popularity.
This is a problem on many services, like portals where people sell used stuff, like phones with beoken screens for insane amounts with no buyers for the unrealistic amount they want, simply because the world is full of humanoids whom believe their mediocre object/work is worth a lot more than it actually is. It only serves to drown the really good paid stuff in a endless sea of crap.
That be said, no ond forces anyone to buy anything, and thus such is the world, and enforcing some sort of "utopia" so sort crap from gold will most likely result in unforseen and unfortunate consequences.
I myself have an unhealthy self-destructive view on always providing my work free, and some day when I release some serious work, I too might ask for payment, that is - if I KNOW it is good at a level not seen before in whatever enviroment I cross, be it VAM or some other arena, time will tell.
As for free stuff, I like to have my free stuff completely free with no limitations, iv'e even spent months redoing semi-free ideas from scratch to top it's quality and make it truly free. VAM has a challenge due to dependencies, but MeshedVR has stretched very far to solve that problem with auto-credit like he mentioned, and the whole HUB-system for content is imo insabely good, it's almost like an own VAM-application in itself, and my experience is that the free section far outweights the paid content. Why? Because for many, acknowledgement and confirmation of their existence as hard working creators is a stronger motivation than money, and for them, getting credit makes their day.
I could write a book about this. The only licenced free content that actually doesn't deserve credit nor would ever fly in a court with their licence is hair and the hundreds of purely duped morphs with dupe-names with maybe just added range from 0-1000 to -1000>1000 etc, where the "author" puts a license on the dupe to claim credit, that's called "thief" where I come from, and it spams VAM with dupe morphs creating so much trouble it actually ruins the functionality of variablesliders in VAM due to targeting names, making VAM sometimes attatch the wrong morph to a triggerslider thus ending up with the target character getting doubled morph-values, all thanks to a couple hubdred pure duping-thieves abusing licenses in a wat that would actuallt cost them big if some original author were to challenge them in a lawsuit.
The abuse of morph-licensing is so vast that it's almost impossible to know what is a dupe from inbuilt morphs and what is an actual morph made manually by a original creator in a 3D-application outside of VAM unless you do extensive file-binary detective work and/or internet history tracking throughout numerous 3D-content portals.
How low is the bar for licensing? If you change a couple of hair-strands on a haircut, in theory that is now "your" creation, but then licensing it due too those few hair-strands is abuse of licensing in my book.
VAM has a lot of creators who indeed are VAM creators due to real life hardships, that's just statistical logic, if they all had a hot dripping Playboy/Instababe girlfriend/wife, a rich social life filled with blazing activities, well - then thwy wouldn't have time nor motivation to spend so much time creating in VAM, because creating takes time, even crappy stuff often takes time. I myself are in a pretty shitty life-situation, and that comes from a guy who's had more bombshell girlfriends and a xwife to kill for, and now I don't - if I did I would most likely not be spending -alot- of time creating in VAM.
Giving someone credit can one day change their life, lift their mentality, while ignoring the can do the opposite.
In the end it doesn't matter what Mcorp, me or anyone else thinks though, it's like humans trying to debate with mother Earth, nature itself because we somehow thinks nature gives a shit about our opinions when it's simply a thermodynamic process following energy-effiency, it's pointless, just as it is pointless to challenge the system the HUB has in place.
It's really simple: rules are rules, if someone wants credit, give them credit, those are the rules of licencing, those who don't want nor need credit, then don't. I have sometimes licenced work with explicit terms of the license being NOT giving me credit, again: my licence, my rules, that reaches far beyond VAM, so no reason to criticise VAM, the HUB og MeshedVR for it, licensing is global and has nothing to do with VAM, and MeshedVR aldo have to follow licensing-rules to actually be able to provide the HUB-service.
As for MeshedVR and his action on banning, lets do some math: This is a guy with over 13.000 patreons, the lowest amount monthly is about 3USD, highest being 10USD, so lets say the norm is 4USD, 4 x 13.000, thats 52.000 USD income a month from only patreon alone, 13.000 users and forums both here and on Trello. He could - in theory - hire an army to do all his work with that amount of income and then simply live a rich fastlane high society life with a pornstar-goddess wife/husband and completaly not give a fuck about the community - at all - and still gain sucess as VAM is a unique platform and product like none other bringing the learning-curve threshold of creating quality 3D-content to a historic low far beyond it's original genre.
Yet - this guy answers like butler in record time, is vastly engaged in the community and has a clear presence here on thw forums and the HUB even though he doesn't need to, my wild guess is that he too feels good when he gets acknowledgement and actually cares about not only his paying patreons, but also the thousands who don't pay anything. He is the same kind of guy as the creator of Five Nights of Freddy, engaged in his audience far beyond whats expected or required of him.
I myself spam him quite often with in reality the same question just worded differently, yet he answers every time without the frustration I would probarbly get if the coin was flipped the other way.
Mcorp - even though you think the world is unfair and unperfect, you should know MeshedVR tried to treat you fairly and took time to try and solve the situation on his own time and gave you oportunity to correct it, if you would lower your way too agressive defence and follow the rules of lisencing even though you disagree, i'm quite sure MeshedVR will give you two more minutes of his valuable time.
