Feedback for Scarfoxes, but specifically for Darci.
post related (bold isn’t me, im in the parenthesis this time. this is a user submitted post)
The Scarfox server imploded on itself tonight because, once again, Darci makes stupid fucking decisions and then can’t handle the backlash. I no longer fear getting banned, in fact, I WANT to get banned so that my Scarfoxes get voided for free, so I’m going to submit this in a place where I know at least a few people will see it because I’ve been given a seven day timeout in the server.
Keep in mind that some of this is based on my own personal experiences, but is a few years old at this point, so I no longer have the correspondence. Additionally, in the cases of livestreams, they were not recorded so take what I’m about to say with a grain of salt because I cannot prove things.
Darci, this is to you specifically.
I’m going to be frank, I’ve never liked you. As an artist, you are horribly unprofessional. I’ve had to cancel commissions I’ve ordered from you because you left me waiting almost six months without even starting my stuff, you changed the negotiated payment with one particular commission, and you shit talk your clientele despite taking their money. Even before you became the owner of Scarfoxes, I didn’t trust you as a moderator. You posted your Twitch channel in the Scarfox discord, and spent the stream shitting on people who bought and redesigned your Scarfoxes. Any of those people could have been in that stream at any given time to hear you talking trash about them, and those of us who were present were very disappointed by your conduct. Furthermore, you did the same thing on a commission stream. I get that you had personal beef with the commissioner, but that didn’t stop you from taking their money, did it? An artist should NEVER speak poorly of their clients in front of other potential clients. It’s a good way to lose yourself business and damage your reputation, not that your reputation isn’t already being harmed by the fact that you simply take forever to work on owed art.
Moving on from your personal conduct as an artist, I want to address your status as the owner of Scarfoxes. I said it multiple times in the Discord tonight, but I do not feel that you are fit to own or run the species. I didn’t even feel you were fit as a moderator, though at the time I kept quiet and vented my frustrations to close private parties. Kawiku was not a perfect owner either. Anyone who was present from 2017 onwards knows that I was vocal when Kawiku did things that were shady too. But, I will say that Kawiku never caused as much community outrage as you do. Ever since you took over it’s been nothing but constant problems and community backlash, and it seems to several of us that you never learn from your mistakes. And, just like tonight, when things don’t go your way you try to silence people. Hide the backlash. “There is no war in ba sing se.”
You announce changes that affect your entire community without asking for their input. A community which YOU treat like your personal ATM machine. I’ve known since you took over as owner that this is what it was going to come to, but tonight other people’s eyes were finally opened to that reality as well. You drop a new adopt because you need medicine. Or you have rent to pay. Or you need to pay your site coder. But here’s the thing about that. It’s not our responsibility, as your community, to pay for your bills and expenses. Closed species are a hobby, and should be treated as such. You are NEVER going to make a living wage just on Scarfoxes alone, especially not when every decision you make is met with backlash and the admins and moderators under you having to back pedal and create polls AFTER the community cries out against your decisions.
On September 28th, you came out of a two month hiatus that you COULD have used to hire and train new moderators to take the burden off of your current staff. Instead, what did you do? Try to shill out adopts for USD, create a new potion and exclusive traits to sell for USD, and give us new banner art for two biomes that have already existed for a year or more. Then, on September 29th, you drop the bomb that there’s now a $70 voiding fee PER SCARFOX, and you can’t even get the reasoning behind the void fee straight.
First, it was because the MYO mods are too few and have too much responsibility. Well, who’s fault is that, I wonder? There are many people who have been with Scarfoxes longer than you have who would be more than willing to help your mod team out, they might even not need extensive training given how long they’ve been with the species. Then, you backpedaled and tried to claim it was so that people could use their Scarfoxes commercially. But there’s an issue with that, too. You don’t get the jurisdiction over that. If you aren’t the artist of that particular Scarfox, you can’t say “pay me $70 to use that Scarfox commercially.“ And, as was brought up in the Discord following that explanation, no legal contracts are signed when an adopt is purchased, so legally you cannot stop people from doing this already with the characters they buy. There is no justified reason to impose a void fee to start with, let alone one that’s $70. I thought the Edeia voiding fee was bad at $35, congratulations on being even worse.
Your reasoning for the void fee being a deterrent to try and make people sell or trade their designs was also uncomfortably close to what Auspice recently stated when they were questioned about the void fee too, so I have very little doubt that’s where you got the idea from. And trust me, Auspice is the last person you want to be taking CS management advice from. People should not be discouraged from taking their designs out of the species if it’s a character they love and connect with deeply. You should let people walk out for free.
Time after time again, you pull stunts like this and when the backlash comes, you hide like a coward and let your mods take the community’s anger and clean up your mess. You are the species owner, and if you plan to stay in that position, then you need to smarten up and start taking responsibility and acting like you’re running an ARPG instead of a glorified furry pixel shop. However, I doubt that’s going to happen because this behavior keeps repeating itself. Despite your claims to change going forward, you never do. Your community has given you enough chances, and people are starting to realize the truth.
Do you realize that your mods are practically running your species for you at this point? You never do jack shit for the community other than push out adopts, and those have been decreasing in quality for a while now yet you’re still charging just as high of a price for them as ever. What are your mods getting in exchange for their time and efforts, I wonder? Probably nothing, let’s be honest. You can’t even afford to pay your own shit IRL without trying to milk us dry, I highly doubt you can pay your mods. Pathetic.
There’s no more playing around, Darci. You’ve angered too many people tonight and people are starting to wake up and realize how terrible of a person you really are. You’re going to have to work hard to restore yourself and the species, if it’s even possible and I don’t think it is, at this point. Take the advice of your members and either pull the plug on Scarfoxes entirely, turn them into an open species, or step down as owner and pass the mantle onto someone who’s actually capable of running a species.
Locking the channels, timing out or banning members, removing the ability to use external emojis to stop people from complaining, and deleting messages to hide your shit isn’t acceptable behavior. If you can’t handle criticism and negativity resulting from YOUR own stupid actions, you have no right owning and running a closed species.
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