Mellow Complains About Something or whatever-

You know, there’s a good chance that someone has taken this pack and tried to distribute it through discord servers without my knowledge. Or, they tried to make a “giveaway” on YT, taking some mouths and compiling them with others or something, and adding a few other figures to go along with it. I don’t like the idea of people trying to capitalise on my own successes when they haven’t put in any work at all. I suspect the same thing could’ve happened to my last pack too.

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Is it really worth calling it a success though? I guess 4,000 is a lot, but it’s nothing compared to the numbers people got before. 2,000 or something was average back then, and now people barely pass 500. You know what I think the problem is?
Exclusivity. You no longer need to come to this site and get whatever figures or effects you desire, when you can just search on YT for a crappy little giveaway or join a discord server and check out #figdownloads or whatever they decide to call the channel, if they even have it. If they don’t, you can simply join another one.
Now, you might be saying “Mellow, that doesn’t sound like exclusivity. In fact, it just sounds more like an increase in options.” And you’d be right, there are more places to take figures from.
But, do you really have more options if you have to go out of your way to join a server just to get some QUALITY (keyword: quality) stickfigures, since all the good figuremakers have long since migrated from this site and would much rather give out their stuff elsewhere. Do you really have more options when THIS is the quality of the stuff you receive these days?

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In an ironic twist, it’s easier (arguably, better) for you to join servers and search for figures there or look, rather than relying on the figure page.
But it’s not so much about the quality. It’s the fact that people just don’t go there anymore, and I don’t understand why. If they aren’t getting stickfigures from there, then where are they getting them from? That’s what confuses me. Even though I just said what I think the reason is, I highly doubt that’s everything to do with it. Are people improving as a whole? Do they no longer feel like they’re forced to rely on someone else’s figures? Where do these video giveaways even get the figures from anyway, because they obviously ALL can’t be their own or else they’d all be low effort figures.
I made a movieclip of the mouths for easy access and gave it to the person who requested the pack, and I allowed them to distribute it on the basis that it would be made clear that I was the one who created the pack. This was “secured” through me adding my emblem to the pack, but considering that I’m only a little popular on the site, this was a mistake. The more that pack gets passed on, the more dilluted it’ll be and the more chance there is of people just taking it for themselves. Whatever problem there is, I definitely added to it.
This depreciation of the figure page feels… inevitable, in retrospect. I don’t think there’s much that can be done, or if you can even consider calling it a true problem. This is slightly off-topic, but when SN PC eventually comes out, I feel that it’ll be a proper reignition of the community in many ways, especially the figure page.
Now that SN would be open to a whole new group of people, the community would be able to properly sustain itself with an influx of amateurs almost constantly coming in. To me at least, it feels this way. We’d have to accommodate for the sudden growth though, especially with the activity page. We’re now so used to seeing the same similar faces every few hours that a bunch of new folks coming along would take some getting used to. At least Gigan would get some new people to bully or whatever it is that he does.
Maybe the figure page will be good again by then.