Announcement - I'm going down with this ship. (Patreon)

TLDR : Mods mad, hoarders go hoard while you can.
https://hub.virtamate.com/resources/authors/mczippy.34346/

Keep Calm and Carry On.

This is pretty sudden and I'm still digesting the news. This popping up while I was in the middle of preparing tonight's release didn't help. Generally I'm pretty bad at making these types of announcements so I'll try to be as thorough as I can.

Essentially as you can see from the screenshot above, my Hub account will soon be scrubbed. I encourage everyone to grab what you want from my account before its too late.

Normally releasing a DM like this is a faux pas, but I'm getting banned anyways so meh. Also I feel like I'm going to get gas-lit to hell so I might as well make things as crystal clear as possible. I think you guys are owed this.

What does this mean for me going forward :

Nothing will change. I make it painfully obvious to everyone that I like porting. I like doing this and I'm not relying on this to survive. That said a lot of time does go into this, and the admin work is a bit of a drag, so I appreciate every bit of support from everyone and it definitely encourages me to keep things going.

So meanwhile I'll just keep porting. Commissions, polls and weekend releases won't be effected. To be honest if anything typing this out is more of an inconvenience since I can be porting this very exact moment.

I'm going to view this as a positive since throwing me out of the Hub will allow me to pursue wider avenues. Frankly to be honest this ban makes no business sense for them since its is an overall detriment to VaMHub in terms of content and it encourages the meme of the Hub being more of a low effort pay-walled hellhole than it currently is.

In my opinion this could be handled a lot better with actual warnings with an actual stated redline with repercussions instead flying off the handle like this. I only ever got in trouble with one look, and the whole thing with Riju is a reading comprehension fail on their part.

That said I'm sure there will be some people in the VaM creator community who will be very happy now that there is now a vacancy for my niche on the Hub.

What does this mean for you going forward :

Again nothing will change. For now I'll just upload them here on Patreon and Discord as usual and I don't expect this to change going forward.

However one important thing that I will have to do is to make a catalogue of past looks somewhere since that will be gone soon from the Hub. I'll make an announcement when that happens because I have to deal with 130+ looks.

FYI my Discord link is here, we have a pretty nice community with 400+ people and there's about 100 members on at any one time. This is also where poll models are generally submitted : https://discord.gg/9G4Nj8Q6KS

Rant :

This is a bit sad since I am quite passionate about my ports. As an amatuer, my work was not always the best, but I do put in the effort where I could and improved upon my processes where I can find them. In a way this is like how speed-running games appeal to some people, and this is where I found a lot of enjoyment. During this time I learned a lot and tried to pay it forward as much as I could.

For example I was really annoyed at how static CUA hair looked in VAM for anime looks and I was the first creator who used rigged CUA hair on a wide scale for these type of looks.

The previous method was a tedious sub-optimal process that caused physics explosions in VaM. I remembered using this rudimentary rigging for Darkness's look before figuring out ez-rigging for CUA hair which is now the current standard for creators in VaM. When Oni, Wunder and other creators needed help with this I happily shared this information with them.

I do enjoy the technical discussions about porting, so in the future I might make a guide on how I port my characters. Maybe someone here can can be my successor in VaMHub, you never know haha.

In conclusion (thanks for reading this far) :

I feel like the main impact from this would be the decrease in exposure which is not as much of a deal as some might think.

Anime looks are a niche corner of the Hub, with the Hub mainly serving a western audience. Its good as an archive and for the dependency logistics but that's about it. Moving away from the hub will allow me to properly target my real audience.

Its not really about the money, but its for something more personal. I really, really like sharing looks that I have completed. Even though I suck at taking screenshots, I still feel like each completed look is a personal triumph for me.

So far I'm thinking about maybe promoting my work on sites like Pixiv and F95. If anyone have any suggestions they can comment or send me a DM.

Again, thank you to all my Patreons, and thank you to everyone who has given me support, well wishes and words of encouragement. You guys are all special to me so I'll keep this going for as long as I can <3