two things. do not overdo it with the fetishes. if you put every kink in the game you will not attract everyone, you will deter everyone. of course voting them in by privileged users is a good idea.
you need to remove that step business. patreon does not allow incest in any way. not even between adopted or step-family.
i was not burned by crypto, the earth is, from all the hot air. "crypto" is not the things you advertised. if your project does what you now elaborated, it is not crypto in my opinion.
and no, your system does not need a blockchain. a distributed ledger need not be a blockchain, it is just so prevalent to use that thing for that application. those byzantine generals sure would not have used a blockchain to agree on strategy. smarter people than me phrased it very good: a blockchain is a solution seeking a problem and not the solution for an existing problem.
if new nodes come into the system by installing the app and if worth comes into system by using the app, and worth comes out of the system by a real money exchange, your system will be abused and crippled, once it has enough worth for anyone to care to do so.
if worth only comes into the system by buying in, it goes the way of all the other crypto scams you lament about. it is a pyramid. first buyers make profit, late buyers have worthless bits when the exchange rate drops to nil. or many first buyers also are left with nothing as seen so often.
you need an authority to regulate money. if your authority is decentralized, that costs effort. a lot of it. if it would not cost effort, it could be easily exploited. for example by the so called 51% attack. or just by "mining" a lot of "worth" and cashing out with real money. "mining" in your system consists of agreeing on the transactions or something like that. so what hinders bad agents to just do random transactions they approve in their subset of owned nodes to create "worth" and cash out later? they would just make sure somehow that other nodes would be unreachable, so their running in circles gives them profit and not the other nodes of real people. and how would you battle such exploits? you either cannot do so because it is decentralized or you can fight it, proving the system is actually not dezentralized and making the blockchain a farce.
when it comes to money, the scammers and exploiters know no boundaries and their imagination and creativity will baffle anyone designing a "fool proof" system. money in any form is something you need to have trust in. and there is absolutely no "crypto" currency that has trust. it just is too volatile. your 1 coin might be worth half or double the next day. it is useless for paying. but it is usefull for doing trades on exchanges and making money from investors hoping to increase their money.
then it should not be called "mining". it implies figuratively hard work and in practical terms that is difficult calculations.
if it can be achieved on cheap hardware it begs the question if it really is "crypto". crypto is another word with implied meaning. you do not do crypto on a mobile device. if the thing you do is easy to calculate it ain't crypto. (not talking about actual cryptography here, but the buzz word crypto)
that fba has nothing to do with blockchains nor crypto. it is a means of reaching agreement with a subset of authorities in a scenario where some of those authorities are not reachable or could be lying. you can use it to decentralize authorative decisions: like, has that payment be made or not.
but just because you use some fba algorithm does not create worth. you could try to manage existing worth with it. let us call it a coin for lack of a better word. but who has coins to begin with? who has authority to mint new coins? or authority to "mint" new nodes? in olden and the new days that was and is the ruling goverment. in the crypto world that is done by hard work of extra difficult mining, so you can prove you did it. and not just claim you did it and spam the system with more generals to make your fake coins legit.
the existing crypto "currencies" are parasites. they only have worth because someone bought them with real money and there is a lingering promise that the coins can be traded back for real money. and that promise was broken often enough. buying real goods is usually not really possible. the currency is too volatile and the cost of authorizing a transaction is too costly, even with all that optimisation. you do not pay for a 5 dollar game if paying for that game costs additional 5 dollar in transaction energy costs distributed to a large network of nodes. (or 500 dollars in case of bitcoin).
you need to have a primal mover. an inherent worth. for gold it was the rulers that liked jewelery (and now the computer industry) and the fact that gold is hard to literally mine. for money it is the promise of a government to accept it for paying your taxes.
the primal mover for "crypto currency" was once that decentralized money thing. but this evaporated for lack of real life application. it now is only the pyramid scam promise. and this insanity can go on for decades.
summary: who mints new coins, how could you transfer real money into the system, who creates new nodes. in "crypto", this is done by caluclations that prove you put did hard work. if your system does this by magic and majority agreements, it is not crypto, even if you use a blockchain to store your agreements. you sure you even need the blockchain for your system... ;-)
sustainability
nothing to do with crypto is in any way sustainable in a large scale. and a large scale is needed for a real world application like money.
mining on mobile phones
if it can be done on mobile phones, it is worthless. literally. crypto is essentially telling people with a proof how much energy you wasted. and exactly that. nothing more. you proove that you have calculated something difficult. and that means energy costs. you do not have that power on mobile.
Cryptos have the potential to bring financial liberation to all of humanity
no, it makes us dependent on specific hardware and whoever has the most calculating power. and it does waste a huge lot of energy. not in potential. in the real world. crypto does not scale up and is essentially a huge pyramid scam. the first ones to "mine" have the most out of it, breaking the system down when they leave the system and cash out.
you might want to look up the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley it is a good explanation for many things you will see happening in this topic.
you used the term cognitive dissonance and that is what is happening in the valley of the graph and why it is uncanny. mixed signals. it makes people uneasy. the graph in the explanation is between living people and unliving puppets. but you can draw similar graphs for gender and anything else that can give mixed signals.
so i would see the desire to upgrade "the mask" by using and presenting girly things as trying to overcome the valley of mixed signals and be on the other side. we are not puppets after all and realize that we give off signals.
So if I'm hearing this right, if say a hand is given a masculine reference, then even if you say "her hand" it would be masculine.
i am not sure if i understand. an article is not a pronoun. a pronoun is a word that it used instead of the noun. for the noun. pro noun. you could use the noun instead, like you might hear it in japanese anime, when children or odd characters speak of themselves "in the third person".
the article is part of the bare form of the noun in gendered languages. it is inflected accordingly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflection and stays with the word in many situations and in that bare form, article+noun, you will know the gender of that noun.
in german hand (die hand) is feminine, so i shall use foot (der fuss), which is male. the foot of a woman is always male, but you will only see the gender of the word for a body part by the inflection of the person's pronoun. in other words: you do not say "her the foot" "ihr der fuss". you inflect the pronoun. ihre hand. ihr fuss. her (female) hand, her (male) foot.
so the article of the noun foot/hand is telling the gender of the owner* and the gender of the body part. but sadly not in an unambiguous way.
* the owner being the noun - which can have a different gender than the person it is used to refer to.
regarding chosen pronouns:
i disagree that a person can or should chose pronouns. a person might "switch" genders and assume the role of the other gender and thus use that gender's pronouns.
i regard inventing or appropriating pronouns as on the same level as inventing or using a formal title. like king, lord, count, professor, doctor, sir, lady, queen, supreme ruler of the galaxy, president, village idiot. and i consider it socially unacceptable to use a title that was not given by society.
one should not get "identity" by the usage of pronouns. that is not identity. it is grammar. and grammar is supposed to convey meaning. and meaning in language is needed to be understandable by more than one person. what is the meaning of using the pronoun "it" or "they" or "xe"?
in german, selfusing "it" has no meaning, beside being an insult or telling people you have a big ego and want special treatment. even for babies you use gendered terms, once you know the name/sex of the baby. by using "it" one would not convey the meaning of not belonging to either gender. and there are only two, even in german. the third gender is lack of a gender by being unspecified, by having that gender in the bare form, or by being not applicable - which would sound like "it" would be the perfect choice, but unfortunately this is not so. the dehumanizing insult meaning of using "it" for a person is too strong a hurdle to use it. pity. would have been handy as there exists grammar for "it".
the usage of "they" in english for a single person sounds stupid and very wrong in my non native speaker ears. but the hurdle is lower, because there are some long established cases where it would be correct and of course it is not perceived as an insult. but those cases are scenarios where you typically would not even know the number of persons. it does not convey the meaning of unknown gender, it is conveying the meaning of an unknown person. using they for a known person makes no sense. also, if you use it as such, you can easily have a sentence where the reader will not know if you are talking about several persons or someone that approprated that pronoun.
i get why pronouns are important for people, but so are names and meanings of words and grammar. if it is important to someone to tell their chosen gender, they should just do so. and then use established pronouns that are fitting to their name. pronouns are supposed to be shorthand. if you overload them with gender re-affirmation, that shorthand-ness is gone and the meaning changes from simply being a substitute for a noun to a reminder of that person's chosen gender identity. (i was talking about non standard pronouns here)
i would prefer to not focus on gender/sex all the time in texts that have nothing to do with that topic. this is awful in german as well. there are people forcing the topic by using forced/constructed gender terms that are grammatically wrong and misleading. but this is the wrong way! we need to give gender less importance, not more. and citing it all the time, be it by using chosen pronouns or by using arbitrary constructed gender terms does give it a weight it should not have.
we (western free culture) live in a society where all people can do and like all things/persons. be they girly or manly, regardless of gender/sex. focussing on gender all the time is a step backward, not forward.
if things and activities were not "gendered", why bother using them as gender defining attributes.
there is a social feedback loop i guess.
are you female because you like pink stuff or do you like pink stuff because you are female. and what about females that do not like pink very much.
and is pink stuff for females, because they like it, or do they like it because it is for them.
i wish there were an internal gender sense. but there is none and not even brain scans can distinguish between male and female brains. so hopping on that giant social feedback loop is what we have. gender does not exist if you are alone in a vacuum.
yeah, that game is practially what native speakers of many languages do every day unconsiously and learners of that language curse about when learning it. and it gets worse if your look at other languages or even your own for some words.
french and german. la luna, der mond. (female) the moon, (male) the moon.
oh and there are some languages that use two and some that use three genders for nouns. and it is not about any attributes that will tell the gender. it is just the base form of the noun. it includes the article. like you would call "to talk" as the base form of the verb talking. german "die frau" is base form of (the) woman and the article carries the case of the noun. so you will encounter "der frau" as well. (der is male article, but also a flexed version of die). "die tasche der frau" is the bag of the woman or better that woman's bag.
grammatical gender is just that. grammar. it is a way of delivering the information about the case the noun has. english does not use an infleced case system. in german you need those, since you can order words around in a sentence without changing meaning. you usually cannot do that in english.
and because it is just grammar, you can also have words for persons that have a non grammatical gender and that word will not have the same gender as that person. it is just the grammatical gender of the word
fun fact, while speaking, if you accidentally used the wrong article you sometimes can save it during speech, by switching to a synonym for the word, that has the matching gender.
I had no idea about a girl being a neutral gender in German
it sometimes is called neutral or neuter, but also it can be called literally "used for things" or "thing-like". it is not male,female, neutral. it is male-ish, female-ish, thing-ish.
so you cannot simply use "it" for nonbinary people in german. it would be an insult.
there are some neutral nouns for persons which just shows that grammar gender is just grammar. das genie for example. the genius. and of course das kind. the child. or das mädchen. the girl. das baby. the baby.
so if you refer to a person by a noun that has neuter gender, it is not an insult, if you use the "it" pronoun. which gets complicated, if there are several nouns with different genders you can use and did use in a longer text. trival example is a kid and it's name. (which would be a kid and his name in formal english. there are remnants of grammar gender in english after all). so if you talk about a kid named angela (a female name), but also refer to her as a kid you would refer to her as "it", till you introduce her name in the text.
and if you are not confused enough, some words have more than one correct gender. it depens on dialect or meaning. butter is encountered as female and male. ketchup as neuter and male.
https://itch.io/docs/creators/quality-guidelines#avoid-uploading-excessive-amoun...
If your project involves automatic or AI generation, make sure it’s clearly stated in your project description
プロジェクトに自動生成や AI 生成が含まれる場合は、プロジェクトの説明に明記されていることを確認してください
you should not upload your game version by version. it is discouraged and you might lose privileges
https://itch.io/docs/creators/quality-guidelines#do-not-re-create-your-page-with...
that is what a scammer would say, is it not.
in my opinion, the best thing you can do, to look trustworthy, is to link back to itch from your patreon.
i saw malware here, that did not get flagged at all on virustotal. the counter of malware detections says little. it is annoying that so many game engines do get flagged.
i have seen malware that did not trigger anything on virus total. some game engines unfortunately do trigger rather often. renpy, godot, even rpg maker and many others. it is very bad, because malware can easily be hidden in such games, if people get used to ignore warnings.
since itch does not verify developers, i think it is best to try verify an unknown developer yourself. like finding crosslinked social media.
you link to patreon, but the patreon does not link back... ;-)
itch has no public reviews. only that 5 star counter. you should not screenshot users and make public what they told in private. it is unprofessional. also you should not call your users idiots, as you did in your devlog.
if you suspect terms of service violation, you should report it. otherwise, as far as i know anyone can review anything and just like "unfair" 1 star reviews are not removed, "unfair" 5 star reviews are not removed either.
if this is review "bombing" (3 reviews over 5 days at the time you called those users idiots in your devlog is hardly a bombing), you can relish in the fuzzy warm feeling that the bombs actually help your game. a game with 10 reviews and a 4.9 looks not as good as game with 20 reviews and 4.0.
and as soon as there is any topic in a game that is even slightly controversial, like ai, a too good 5 star counter actually looks fishy. at least that is my opinion about the matter.
itch was contacted almost a week ago. they sit on those reports or they ignore them or they do not believe them. maybe they listen to you. or others reporting the fake.
to tell the truth i did not even know the original was on itch too. but games hosted on dlsite do not appear here on itch as a free full game, just like that. when itch did not remove it from index after several work days, i wondered why the impostor did not use the correct spelling...
so i hope this is not some plot twist, and there are two impostors, since you do not link to dlsite, but the fake project does. ;-)
in case this thread does not get removed, as a caution to all reading this:
you cannot trust scanners. least of all the ones itch is using. no positive scanning result proves nothing.
please use some sort of sandbox mode to execute games from untrusted sources. being hosted on itch is not a trusted source. not even when the game links to socials of the original developer. those other socials need to link back and also need to be genuine.
so to anwer your question about proof, it is by deduction.
there are two curse of dare projects. one uses a misspelled username. one uses a repacked file. one is paid. one is free.
so there are a few possibilities what this could be.
simple piracy. but why impersonate.
scamming for donation money. retrieving the money takes time and is risky.
distributing malware.
the original developer released the game twice with different accounts.
something else.
what would you pick?
itch is not acting against https://delusriaa.itch.io/curseofdares and having that malware impostor crap still indexed even. i suggest you tell itch in no uncertain terms what you think of their service. and maybe leave a report on that game as well. maybe their automated system will take it down if enough reports come in, since they are amateurish enough to not work on weekend, when their users are hacked the most. and yes that crapp was reported several days ago, when there was no weekend.
shame on you, itch, shame on you!
(NOTE this here is the original. the link above is the impostor. just look here https://itch.io/search?q=Curse+of+Dares it STILL shows two of them)
unfortunately a patreon link is not proof that a game is genuine, they often do fake this exactly because of concerns like your's. on rare occasion the scammers even reply in comment.
and since the game is quarantined, some people thought the same and reported it. very good. not for this game, but that people are reporting suspicous things.
