Coincidence, or Attempt to Silence?
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All Discord roles were removed with no communication or warning.
Is this retaliation for aiding the call for transparency by raising awareness of the Pokémon Clover incident on Retro Achievements? You decide.
Would you like such treatment after contributing nearly three thousand achievements across over forty games?
PSA: Your developed achievements are no longer your own but belong to the site, according to their Developer Code of Conduct here.
Achievement Ownership
When you publish your work you are giving it over to the community to be reviewed and reworked over time….
Is even Roblox less predatory in comparison, despite the abysmal 24.5% cut for Roblox developers? Retro Achievements pays nothing, yet you also keep none of your work. On a typical romhacking website, your work stays your own.
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Double Standards: Bending the Knee to Big Studios Like Nintendo While Giving the Middle Finger to Hack Authors
The following section is not directly addressed to Wes, tele, or suspect15, as each of them have been kind in taking the effort to discuss potential solutions to the issue raised in this section. Neither is the following section directly addressed to any singular individual on Retro Achievements but to the organization as a whole.
Retro Achievements goes to great lengths to prevent the illegal act of game roms being shared on any of their platforms.
Where can I find ROMs?
Not here. It is illegal to host or distribute copyrighted ROMs.
At the same time, Retro Achievements has no qualms about engaging in the allegedly illegal act of mass copying and hosting romhack patches without obtaining hack author permission or awareness.
If true as alleged, this not only violates the IP rights of hack authors but robs the hack author of download counts, forum members, user reviews, user engagement, and Discord members, just to name a few examples.
In doing so, Retro Achievements also positions itself to benefit from increased membership and user engagement by making itself the one-stop shop for playing your favorite romhacks and getting achievements for doing so.
In this way, Retro Achievements does not hesitate to throw fellow modders in the retro gaming community under the bus, as long as RA stands to benefit.
Depicted: example patch downloads for the Andaron Saga mod of Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones (GBA) by Mangs and Team. As of this writing, this mod is only available from an potentially adjacent Discord server to Andaron Saga. This means RA users, unlike other players, won’t need to join that Andaron Saga Discord. Does RA have permission to host this patch?
And as if the blanket “fire now, ask questions later” approach wasn’t bad enough, Retro Achievements has not provided an off-ramp for hack authors to take down these cloned patches, despite requests for them to do so.
Romhacking sites typically honor a hack author’s request to take down a romhack patch.
Ironically, even rom-sharing websites, which won’t be named here as they are illegal, honor such requests albeit to take down pre-patched roms rather than romhack patches.
So Retro Achievements, why the double standards?
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