My concerns about the plugin community.

[Wincass71]

I want to emphasize on that the "price" for plugins is in place to finance the store and things around it (including adding new features for plugins) rather than for the plugins themselves.

So from a technical standpoint the quality of a plugin doesn't matter and people can use the preview and ratings to get an impression of whether they are willing to acquire it.There is zero obligation to download a plugin which you do not like.

However, it does not mean that there are no players that would install it for their cities...... In the end, the player decides what they download, not a third party. If they like it, they’ll grab it.

Like ---

The absolute quality of the tram cars in the following seems incrementally inferior to that of the tram cars posted above.
Yet it is my favorite tram plugin , and I wouldn't trade it for another :

[FVI]

If you don't like low-quality plugins, you can always do like The26 who created a tutorial on how to improve plugin textures.
I think it's a good thing for everyone isn't it?

PS @The26?thank you for your tutorial

[PenangLion1016]

This is a much more critical post.
The reasoning why bad plugins should be filtered out and removed isn't because there is no obligation for them to download, it's that no matter what people will always download the plugins even if it has the quality of the pitiful depths of Hell. Admit it, Theotown's community's main demographics are kids, they don't care about quality. I experienced this first hand when I started making plugins that were crappy in quality. Subtract the good plugins I made, I can say at least 500-700 thousand downloads I garnered were from the period I spammed inferior plugins, without much changes in ratings, e.g. a rating of 74 percent on average, just 6 percent lower than the "good" creators.
Heck, I can upload a terrible plugin and it'll get at least 6-10k downloads within a month or two. I released a small Cenotaph three years ago and that thing received 20k downloads, despite being a 2x2 plugin with minimal effort spent.

Amazon isn't the Plugin store. One uses real currency and the other doesn't. The existence of real life transactions entices the seller to promote better and higher quality deals to boost their sales. The plugin store isn't - it's passive in nature, and the plugin maker just dumps their graphics and call it a day. The fact that no matter what quality the plugins are, players will always download them doesn't help this issue.
I don't fancy the fact that the top creators out there, Sergio for instance, dominate the lists because the guy spammed 167 plugins in 2 years, while his plugins gets constantly rated as one of the worst in the platform. It didn't change for him, people wanted to download, so he made more crappy plugins. Anhkatori's plugins are great sometimes, though his night lights are very much unrealistic and downright ridiculous sometimes. If we subtract crappy plugins, those that I won't approve, the store would've lost at least 60 percent of the existing listings.
That's why I urge for the creation of "Approved" tags where trusted creators of the finest quality - A dutch guy, Monte, Rockfort, Kevin would be graded in a separate category where their plugins gets different attention. It's to promote creators to boost their quality completely and cleanly without having the notion of spamming everything for the sake of numbers.

[DelTaco24]

(Long quote)

Agree with what you said, Lobby’s idea of adding a “most downloaded” tab and having a warning system for plugins that aren’t getting enough downloads would only put a band aid over the problem instead of actually fixing it. They’re just gonna accept that the majority of the plugins will be bad, because like Lobby said, from the technical side quality doesn’t matter, by having all these crap plugins on the store makes them more money. Favoring money over the community. Just “hiding” the crappy plugins and moderating by downloads doesn’t seem like a good idea at all to me. It could lead to some more problems as downloads have nothing to do with the actual quality of a plugin. Low quality plugins can get lots of downloads, while high quality plugins can get few. And this proposed warning system about plugins “underperforming” could lead to some wrongful disapprovals. Let’s say that it gets implemented like this, all plugins must get at least 1000 downloads in the first week, a high quality plugin only got 800, so therefore it’s “underperforming” and gets taken down. Meanwhile an absolute abomination got 2000 downloads in the first week, making it well preforming, and it gets to stay while the higher quality plugin that got less downloads got disapproved all because it didn’t get enough downloads. Just sounds like an awful idea to me. They should moderate by quality and not downloads. Because like the previous post said, the kids who unfortunately make up a great portion of Theotown’s playerbase don’t care about the actual quality of the plugin. They don’t care if a building has ugly bright colors, wrong shadows, is too big or small, doesn’t fit the style of the game. If they like it despite its ugliness, they’ll happily blow an insane amount gems on it however expensive and overpriced it is.

Lots of crappy plugins will get more downloads than proper high quality plugins, because the kids love big, bright, flashy, futuristic skyscrapers with night frames (like what Katori uploads). I wouldn’t consider Katori the best just because he has the most downloads, many of his plugins look too bright and cartoonish, and even a bit blurry sometimes, maybe because he STOLE it? A lot of Katori’s buildings seem to be mostly copy and paste work, uploading the same pagoda packs with different colors and height variants, some edited Megapolis assets, etc. While he has gotten better over time, and I don’t think his newer plugins are stolen, I would still by no means consider him the best. I’m not saying they’re terrible, but definitely not the best and I think they’re overrated. The kids just love his plugins because they’re big and flashy and have night frames, because apparently that’s the most important feature to them. Will never understand why.

Anyways, another author that the previous post mentioned who also has a lot of downloads and a controversial past that the previous post also mentioned was Sergio, the guy who spams and steals. While most of his plugins individually do not get nearly the amount of Katori’s, most of his plugins have under 20k downloads, the reason he has so many downloads in total is because he has SO many plugins. He has the most published plugins of any user and is beating out the person in second place by over 100 plugins. The reason he can pump them out so fast is that he does the bare minimum to make his buildings look somewhat ok, but many times they feel half baked and often oversized, maybe because he stole them from another game? Like Openttd? I’d say about 1/3 of his plugins I can confirm taken from Openttd. It’s clear Sergio favors quantity and makes plugins with the main goal of earning gems, just judging by how he steals assets from other games, uploads everything individually or in tiny packs (4 or less), and does a minimum in terms of quality. But like you said, as long as people continue to download his mediocre plugins, he will continue to have motivation to keep pumping them out to earn more gems.

So there’s the problem, monetization incentive + overly lenient moderation = lots crappy plugins. This is why I think the plugin store should be exclusive for higher quality plugins only. People who try to submit lower quality plugins to the store should be told in the disapproval message to upload on the forum showcase instead until they improve. That way there is no monetization incentive for newbies and that way people who just want gems won’t have a reason to make plugins, leaving only the talented people who just want to make good plugins like Rock, Yusuf, and Vonark. To be clear I’m not saying that every plugin on the store has to be a 10 out of 10, but the standards should be raised much higher than they currently are. The majority of the plugins on the store should be of decent quality while lower quality plugins can be uploaded on the forums like I said instead. It seems like a pretty simple solution to me. The store be for high quality only, while anything can be accepted on the forums, allowing newbies to still share their plugins if they want, and people who still want to use them despite their low quality can do so. It would also be better for them to upload in the forums as they’d get more meaningful feedback on how to improve. Because of course the comments on the store are absolutely infested with useless spam comments and demanding the uploader to add night frames. However I doubt that will happen because the way things currently are apparently makes the devs more money, and that’s how they’d prefer it. Quantity over quality.

[Canguta666]

I do agree with that, it’s better when people upload smaller items in larger packs. However what that might’ve been referring to when he said “do not spam packs” was more low effort things like flags and planes. Flags and planes are in my opinion the worst offenders when it comes to spammy, low effort, unoriginal, for-profit plugins. People who are bad at making plugins and are just doing it for the gems often end up resorting to planes and flags as their main form of plugins as they take no effort to make. A perfect example of this is one person in particular, Canguta666. His saga with low quality plugins happened 2 years ago and he was one of the first people who frequently uploaded plugins that I personally got annoyed by. He started off by making the typical kind of newbie plugins, basic looking, poorly textured, overly saturated looking buildings. After a few months of doing that with little to no improvement, he just dropped the ball completely and started doing you guessed it, planes and flags instead. That’s when he started to bother me personally. For a good while he’d upload a low quality plane plugin, either in a small pack of 3 or less, or individually, and he would upload one almost every single day, and they’d get the green light every single time. I got so tired of seeing yet another mediocre plane plugin from him, yawn. Plus the fact he uploaded everything individually when it could’ve easily all be made into one large pack made it appear as if he just wanted to earn some gems. Other symptoms of “plugins for profit” he showed was rushing through creation and refusing to improve (or begging other people to renovate his plugins for him). He just stopped trying.

Returning to my point against planes and flags, all that’s required to make your average plane or flag plugin is just filling out a template. Just copy and paste a flag or plane from the world texture and recolor it how you want and you’re pretty much done. No effort required at all, and while the texture is technically “high quality” by definition, I would not consider it high quality because they didn’t actually draw the flagpole/plane themselves. All they did was slap their own flag/logo on it. Another thing I’ve noticed about planes and flags is that the few actual good quality ones are uploaded in much larger packs, while the crappy ones are uploaded in tiny packs (3 or less), or just straight up individually, and I can already guess as to why. The people making the crappy ones are just trying to milk the monetization with the least amount of effort possible, and flags/planes are often the answer. Because they can be made in great amounts very quickly and will unfortunately most likely get approved. Even if they weren’t bad quality it would still be quite pointless in many cases as there’s other plugins of pretty much the same thing already existing. That’s another reason I loath flags and planes, their shear repetitiveness and unoriginality.

In conclusion, I personally think the moderators should be much less accepting flags and planes on the store unless they are actually original (by that I mean not copied and pasted), of higher quality and uploaded in much, much larger packs. And tell the authors of the lower quality less original ones to upload on the forums instead. In my opinion flags, planes and sample houses are the worst type of plugin, even a low quality (but original) building is better than that obnoxiously repetitive crap. At least a low quality building has some effort and creativity put into it, unlike a copied and pasted flag or plane.

Yes, I probably could’ve made this shorter…

Indeed, i used to spam those, resulting in the absolute domination of plugins, with 14 in November 2020, and it is a singular one, which is shocking to me that i have dominated it, but there's a catch, it is becoming repetitive, and only has 6k to 10k downloads today, i felt bad about that, but it is horrifying to see the complaint, no wonder someone said "Oh my god, could you PLEASE put these on a category or just group them into one post, because now it feels like spam or flood, it's been nothing but planes for the last 2 weeks in the main page and it feels like it's just overshadowing other plugins that arent this niche, please stop flooding.". And yes i should be careful about my plugins, and making it better detailed, as well as increasing the pack into 6 planes, or merging singular plane plugins into on whole pack of A350s, thank you for telling the truth.

[Oofvonabdullah]

i really tought its just some people obsession with planes. no wonder why my flag got rejected even tho flags doesnt need much time to make :/

i just want to give out my flag so that i can make it official


edit: mine is actually original >:(

[Oofvonabdullah]

(Long quote)

Agree with what you said, Lobby’s idea of adding a “most downloaded” tab and having a warning system for plugins that aren’t getting enough downloads would only put a band aid over the problem instead of actually fixing it. They’re just gonna accept that the majority of the plugins will be bad, because like Lobby said, from the technical side quality doesn’t matter, by having all these crap plugins on the store makes them more money. Favoring money over the community. Just “hiding” the crappy plugins and moderating by downloads doesn’t seem like a good idea at all to me. It could lead to some more problems as downloads have nothing to do with the actual quality of a plugin. Low quality plugins can get lots of downloads, while high quality plugins can get few. And this proposed warning system about plugins “underperforming” could lead to some wrongful disapprovals. Let’s say that it gets implemented like this, all plugins must get at least 1000 downloads in the first week, a high quality plugin only got 800, so therefore it’s “underperforming” and gets taken down. Meanwhile an absolute abomination got 2000 downloads in the first week, making it well preforming, and it gets to stay while the higher quality plugin that got less downloads got disapproved all because it didn’t get enough downloads. Just sounds like an awful idea to me. They should moderate by quality and not downloads. Because like the previous post said, the kids who unfortunately make up a great portion of Theotown’s playerbase don’t care about the actual quality of the plugin. They don’t care if a building has ugly bright colors, wrong shadows, is too big or small, doesn’t fit the style of the game. If they like it despite its ugliness, they’ll happily blow an insane amount gems on it however expensive and overpriced it is.

Lots of crappy plugins will get more downloads than proper high quality plugins, because the kids love big, bright, flashy, futuristic skyscrapers with night frames (like what Katori uploads). I wouldn’t consider Katori the best just because he has the most downloads, many of his plugins look too bright and cartoonish, and even a bit blurry sometimes, maybe because he STOLE it? A lot of Katori’s buildings seem to be mostly copy and paste work, uploading the same pagoda packs with different colors and height variants, some edited Megapolis assets, etc. While he has gotten better over time, and I don’t think his newer plugins are stolen, I would still by no means consider him the best. I’m not saying they’re terrible, but definitely not the best and I think they’re overrated. The kids just love his plugins because they’re big and flashy and have night frames, because apparently that’s the most important feature to them. Will never understand why.

Anyways, another author that the previous post mentioned who also has a lot of downloads and a controversial past that the previous post also mentioned was Sergio, the guy who spams and steals. While most of his plugins individually do not get nearly the amount of Katori’s, most of his plugins have under 20k downloads, the reason he has so many downloads in total is because he has SO many plugins. He has the most published plugins of any user and is beating out the person in second place by over 100 plugins. The reason he can pump them out so fast is that he does the bare minimum to make his buildings look somewhat ok, but many times they feel half baked and often oversized, maybe because he stole them from another game? Like Openttd? I’d say about 1/3 of his plugins I can confirm taken from Openttd. It’s clear Sergio favors quantity and makes plugins with the main goal of earning gems, just judging by how he steals assets from other games, uploads everything individually or in tiny packs (4 or less), and does a minimum in terms of quality. But like you said, as long as people continue to download his mediocre plugins, he will continue to have motivation to keep pumping them out to earn more gems.

So there’s the problem, monetization incentive + overly lenient moderation = lots crappy plugins. This is why I think the plugin store should be exclusive for higher quality plugins only. People who try to submit lower quality plugins to the store should be told in the disapproval message to upload on the forum showcase instead until they improve. That way there is no monetization incentive for newbies and that way people who just want gems won’t have a reason to make plugins, leaving only the talented people who just want to make good plugins like Rock, Yusuf, and Vonark. To be clear I’m not saying that every plugin on the store has to be a 10 out of 10, but the standards should be raised much higher than they currently are. The majority of the plugins on the store should be of decent quality while lower quality plugins can be uploaded on the forums like I said instead. It seems like a pretty simple solution to me. The store be for high quality only, while anything can be accepted on the forums, allowing newbies to still share their plugins if they want, and people who still want to use them despite their low quality can do so. It would also be better for them to upload in the forums as they’d get more meaningful feedback on how to improve. Because of course the comments on the store are absolutely infested with useless spam comments and demanding the uploader to add night frames. However I doubt that will happen because the way things currently are apparently makes the devs more money, and that’s how they’d prefer it. Quantity over quality.

tbh, whats withtheir obsession with gems anyway? to complete all packs?

[IlikeBurgerHam]

i really tought its just some people obsession with planes. no wonder why my flag got rejected even tho flags doesnt need much time to make :/

i just want to give out my flag so that i can make it official


edit: mine is actually original >:(

It's been over a year since all of this and all I wanna say is, it really is just because they had to increase the standards to make sure that certain low-effort plugins don't make it to the plugin store. You can still share that flag to others through here, the forums.

Just to clear any future confusion, when I mean low-effort I mean those that are ripped/stolen, overpriced, or are of poor quality.

[Oofvonabdullah]

i really tought its just some people obsession with planes. no wonder why my flag got rejected even tho flags doesnt need much time to make :/

i just want to give out my flag so that i can make it official


edit: mine is actually original >:(

It's been over a year since all of this and all I wanna say is, it really is just because they had to increase the standards to make sure that certain low-effort plugins don't make it to the plugin store. You can still share that flag to others through here, the forums.

Just to clear any future confusion, when I mean low-effort I mean those that are ripped/stolen, overpriced, or are of poor quality.

i see... well i will upload the flag here, i will

[Canguta666]

After 18 months, this 700 diamond plugin is still there?!

[KazutoGekko]

Currently the moderators don't help at all, I asked them for help for a plugin and not even with 3 did they put together a single one to give me a good answer like ComanderABAB did, so, the poor quality of approved plugins is due to the lack of desire of the current moderators to answer questions and also thoroughly review the plugins sent for approval