Brief disclaimer: This post isn’t targeted toward a certain person or group of people.
It also isn’t entirely made for entertainment purposes, as it addresses an issue on Scratch.
With that out of the way, let’s begin. Loving and favoriting are staples of the Scratch website, and they can be good or bad depending on how you look at it. Now, this isn’t the thing I want to talk about.
The reason I am writing this is that many users are baiting others into giving a project false loves and favorites. Some projects even use detector scripts to trigger rewards. I don’t mean people asking others to love and favorite,
I’m going to explain this system:
- Users are first baited with some sort of reward (such as free coins, level skips, additional levels to play, etc.), or the project locks up until it is loved and favorited.
- If the user does give in and gives the project false loves and favorites, a detector will see this and grant the reward.
- If they don’t, the project will pressure the user into doing so.
Because of this, a project could get front-paged, even if it isn’t all that good, all because of players wanting something that probably wouldn’t last that long. Loving and favoriting is supposed to show that the user likes the project.
Also, many projects keep pushing you to love and favorite. If you have played the Nintendo 3DS game Rusty Slugger’s Real Deal Baseball, you may remember that if choose to pay full price for an item in the shop, the shopkeeper may pressure you to haggle and get a lower price. (If I talk about this in the future, I will call it “Annoyance or Expense”) Many Scratch projects do similar things, such as withholding a valuable or necessary item or displaying annoying messages on-screen.
I can understand project creators wanting fame, but baiting users into giving you it probably just makes a bad digital citizen. Just be nice to people, make good projects, and just be a nice person. If your projects use this system, I ask that you remove it, as this isn’t the way to true fame. And if you see other projects using this system, please don’t report it, rather you should write a comment pointing it out, and if you want, you can link to this article.
See you in the next project,
TGP