Survey: Do you care if someone hacks your hack?

Yeah, like it says in the title, do you get bothered by it? As long as someone doesn't steal something I made I really don't care if someone hacks my hack (by that I mean stuff like scripts, I don't care if someone were to rip public tiles, and stuff like that).

I really don't care about it. Though if I did something I'm proud of and they stole it, well, nasty things could happen >:)

I think its quite disrespectful to openly admit to hacking someone else's work. If you want to tweak a hack to get your favourite pokemon sooner, or investigate secrets areas, you should just keep it to yourself.

This immediately came to mind.

But, I'm not sure how i'd feel about it, to be straight.
Maybe a little upset about it, but, I won't know how I feel till it actually happens.

I find annoyance at someone for hacking your work to be the height of hypocrisy. If you feel that way, then you probably shouldn't be hacking at all. I don't condone theft of another's work; however, seeing how it works is perfectly acceptable. I don't think curiosity should be curbed, especially since it is the foundation of the entire community.

I don't mind, as long as somebody acknowledges that somebody else created it, and they don't post it.

Touched said:

I find annoyance at someone for hacking your work to be the height of hypocrisy. If you feel that way, then you probably shouldn't be hacking at all. I don't condone theft of another's work; however, seeing how it works is perfectly acceptable. I don't think curiosity should be curbed, especially since it is the foundation of the entire community.

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This. We borrow Gamefreak's entire engine every time we make a hack. It's really obnoxious to turn around and complain that someone's doing what you did.

EDIT. That's not to say that adding one small tweak to a big patch and releasing it as "yours" is okay, though. I mainly support borrowing features and ideas, although I personally don't protest rom-basing if the original work is credited.

Touched said:

I find annoyance at someone for hacking your work to be the height of hypocrisy. If you feel that way, then you probably shouldn't be hacking at all. I don't condone theft of another's work; however, seeing how it works is perfectly acceptable. I don't think curiosity should be curbed, especially since it is the foundation of the entire community.

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Except, remember what this even is - ROM hacking. Some people may not explicitly thank or give credit to Game Freak, but there's always the implicit credit simply by virtue of their game being a ROM Hack. Ultimately, it's obvious that not all of the work is entirely their own, and it's easy to tell what mechanics they changed simply by being familiar with the original.

Compare that to taking a ROM Hack and essentially using it as a ROM Base. Maybe there's a hack that adds new Pokemon, items, moves, and the Fairy-type. You take it and build your Hack overtop that without explicitly crediting them. In this situation, it wouldn't be even slightly obvious that those weren't your own work.

Pretty much the only situation that it would be obvious is if you just made a couple of small changes and tried to pass it off as your own.

However, all of that is only if someone doesn't give credit. If they do, I'm perfectly fine with it. If the original hacker explicitly forbids using their hack, or they specifically ask you to stop or take down your hack, I think you probably should, just as a courtesy.

I don't really care that much if say, someone that knows scripting hacks in events to cheat or alters the starters for nuzlocking/Let's Plays/personal reasons. I'm not going to stop you at all, I mean I do the same thing when a hack is majorly hard/badly built so I can't really say anything. I'll try and give you the tools to do so even. :P

Using my hacks as a base for someone else's work though... I tend to discourage that unless I say so. The reason why is that the further along the hack is that you're using as a base the more you're shooting yourself in the foot using it because of all the space used up, permanent changes, etc. You can't really make something how you want it out of anything more than a flat base, unless you're going to add in a generic "hard mode" or "386" hack to it.

As far as hacking a hack goes though, I can't really stop anyone. TBH it would hold up in court about as well as "he stole the cocaine I was going to sell." And well... this is the Internet, and maybe they're better than me at it. If someone did I'd probably tell them "hey dude, at least credit me or link to my project huh?" But can I force them? Not really no.

Magic said:

I think it's quite disrespectful to openly admit to hacking someone else's work. If you want to tweak a hack to get your favourite pokemon sooner, or investigate secrets areas, you should just keep it to yourself.

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So it's disrespectful to use someone else's work to make theirs when GameFreak openly says that they do not want their games to be hacked? Dem be words of hypocrisy. Guarantee you that those at GameFreak worked harder than anyone that is hacking their roms and yet they don't get the respect they deserve with these forums promoting hacking. If anything, you'd think it'd make the owner of the hack feel good since they did a good enough job for someone to want to modify the game to their likings. It only promotes your hack and besides that, this is all free. "Illegal" and free. Getting mad because someone is using your hack that has tiles that you got from others and sprites you got from others and the engine that you got from others with music you got from others and graphics from others is, in my opinion, a factor of the vacuous.

I'd be okay with people using my work as long as they asked first and gave credit, but I definitely wouldn't like it if someone hacked my hack without asking me, and even more so if they don't mention me. I don't think people hacking Gamefreak's work is really related to what Dark Sneasel is asking, it's different. People know Pokémon is made by Gamefreak, no one is claiming it as their own work.

Using another person's hard work without giving proper credit, even if it's work for a hack, is disrespectful.

To an extent I'd say it's a matter of degree.

If someone takes a battle script or move animation I made and uses it in their own hack then that's fine - I'm glad they liked it enough to want to use it themselves. We all benefit from having consistency for moves introduced after Gen III, rather than absurdities like Dark Rising's "Stealth Rock" (Spikes' effect in Rock Tomb's slot).

If they take a completed hack, make a few tweaks, change the title screen and claim it's all their own work then I'm going to take offense because a fair amount of my own effort went into balancing the level curve, writing text and so on.