And Wesp's egocentric lies continue...Wesp just posted this insane bullshit over on the Steam forums:
Originally Posted by ?GameOver?
I'm still waiting for your explanation why taking someone else's work, changing it against their will and redistributing, against their will, is suddenly OK.
This is what Tessera did with my work! Granted, at some point they started from scratch but it can be proven that they still used my patch as a template to do the fixes. So is stealing a stolen work theft ?
And then, Wesp concludes his post... with the usual self-promotion that ALL of his posts contain:
If you want to have a patch close to the original game just use the basic version of the unofficial patch and if that isn't close enough for you, tell me what you would like to change and we can discuss it.
Ya know, I have refuted this disgusting claim of "theft" by Wesp and his teenaged groupies so many times in the past that it AMAZES me that he still keeps clinging to this idiocy.
But hey... I'm happy to refute it once again, for those who may not have seen any of the other 200 times that we've exposed Wesp's lies:
(1) No part of version 5.04AT of the True patch... not one single iota of it... was copied, lifted, stolen or otherwise based upon ANYBODY else's work. When we started working on version 5.04AT, we began with a clean "plain vanilla" copy of Bloodlines. Then, we patched it with the official 1.2 patch from ActiVision. And then, Acrimonious told me to give him a couple of weeks to put together a "core" for the True Patch. Which is precisely what he did... and a couple of weeks later, he sent me a bunch of preliminary maps and Python scripts that he had repaired all by himself. Nobody helped him with it, and none of his work was based upon any of Wesp's buggy and downright sloppy coding. Unlike Wesp, Acrimonious is a professional Python coder (that is how he earns his living) and he INSISTED upon doing it his own way.
(2) Once we had a preliminary batch of "core" files, we each proceeded to do a separate play-through of the entire game. I played as a Malk, and Acrimonious played as a Nossie. Not only are those our two favorite clans, but we also knew that more than any of the other clans, the Malks and Nossies have the most numerous examples of clan-specific dialogue and other such peculiarities. And all during this first round of bug hunting, we stayed in touch almost every single night via Windows Messenger... sometimes staying up into the wee hours of the morning. This allowed us to correspond in real time, whilst we had the game up and running. It also allowed us to exchange repaired files back and forth on-the-fly, and then test each of them immediately.
(3) During this laborious process, which altogether took us about four weeks or so, we managed to hunt down and repair literally HUNDREDS of bugs in VTMB. Naturally, we already knew where a lot of them were, before we even got started. Not because we had anyone else's prior work to draw from, but because we are both highly experienced VTMB players. We've both played this game so many times in our lives that we can almost literally play it blindfolded. Still, we knew that there was no way that we could find all of the bugs by ourselves... not unless we threw away our personal lives and worked around the clock for six months.
(4) So... we continued to find and repair as many bugs as we could... knowing that during the final phase, we would enlist a number of volunteer beta testers (something that Wesp has *never* done), to help us track down any small bugs that we might have missed. Also, it was during this "middle phase" that we had real-time discussions about which unfinished content warranted being restored. I remember that Acrimonious wanted to restore great globs of crap that he had found buried within the game's files. This is the same "cutting room floor" material that Wesp has unwisely decided to re-insert into the game -- with little or no concern for VTMB's continuity and roleplaying integrity. It was my job during those particular debates to be the "Just Say No Guy," because more often than not, I was forced to say "No... it doesn't look like unfinished material to me. It looks like it was extra junk that Troika deliberately cut out for continuity reasons." And to this day, I am quite sure that I was correct in all of those assessments. In the end, we agreed to restore a brief scene in the early game with Heather, as well as to add the correct firearms to the late game during the Society of Leopold encounters (at their Malibu stronghold). That latter change was not arbitrary, either. We based our decision upon references made in other areas of the game which take place at or around the same time in the storyline. After putting two and two together, we concluded that there was no way that Troika would have left those guys with nothing but .38 pistols... certainly not at that late stage of the story. Not unless they were rushed for time, that is..., which as most of us should know, is exactly what was happening during the final days of the game's original development. So after seeing what types of weapons the hunters were using in other areas, we finally elected to replace most of the .38 pistols with Steyer Aug automatics. The strength and accuracy of those guns was also corrected by Acrimonious, after play testing revealed that they were not functioning in a way that was consistent with their in-game description. So you see... nothing arbitrary about it. All of those decisions were based upon very careful considerations of continuity, as well as the overall integrity of the storyline.
(5) When we restored Heather's "ghouling scene," it was my job to write the missing dialogue options for that encounter. For one thing, there was no special dialogue for the Malkavians. Also, there were no choices for what actions to take, when you need to decide whether or not to feed Heather your blood. Now in Wesp's mods, he had added the lines "Feed her your blood" and "Do nothing" in parentheses. When it came to be my turn to write those same dialogue options, I decided that I would have worded it in exactly the same logical way... even if I had never seen Wesp's version. So that is exactly what I did: I worded it the same way, because that was the most logical wording to use for that scene. Naturally, Wesp has taken this to be some sort of "proof" that we copied large portions of his mod. Well, nothing could be further from the truth. The fact is that I saw no reason to re-invent the wheel... and when it came time for me to type in the dialogue for that situation, I decided to use the same wording and for the same reasons that Wesp had used it: because it made the most sense, from a gameplay standpoint. That's not stealing, folks... any more than it is "stealing" when you say "Hello" to someone you meet. Are you stealing from everyone else who ever said "Hello..?" Of course not, because "Hello" happens to be the most common word to use. The same principle holds true for the "Feed her your blood" and "Do nothing" action choices in our patch. Sure, I could have written some other words that meant the same thing... but then I would ONLY be doing it that way just so we could be "different from Wesp." Well I'm sorry, but Wesp doesn't own the English language. Hell... English isn't even Wesp's first language. The guy is German, fer chrissakes.
(6) Aside from that single instance, there is absolutely NOTHING in the True Patch which is similar to anything in Wesp's mods. At the same time, it is important to remember that there are only so many different ways that Python code can be written. If we were repairing the same bug that Wesp may have repaired in his mods, then the coding for each respective repair is bound to be similar... since the scripts MUST be written in very specific language if you expect them to function as intended. We're talking about program code here, folks... and you can't just scribble whatever you want to and expect it to work.
There are some interesting differences between our patch and Wesp's mods, however: the True Patch is far less buggy overall than ANY version of Wesp's mods. You can chalk that up to the fact that Wesp is merely a hobbyist who dabbles in Python scripting... where as Acrimonious is a bona-fide professional programmer, who almost NEVER produced a sloppy line of code in his friggin' life. The proof of the pudding can be easily determined, even by a layman. Just look through the official thread for the True Patch, and then compare it to *any* of the threads on *any* other boards devoted to Wesp's mods. In our thread, you might find a grand total of maybe a half-dozen post-release bug reports from users of the True Patch. But in contrast, almost
every single thread devoted to one of Wesp's mods is LITTERED with complaints about bugs from the users of his largely UNTESTED TRASH (Wesp himself has admitted that he rarely tests his own work before releasing it). A couple of years ago, I counted the number of NEW bugs that Wesp had introduced into Bloodlines, as the result of his inappropriately named "unofficial patches." As I recall, the grand total back then was 37 new bugs that had not existed before Wesp had put them into the game.
And lord knows how many new bugs he has introduced by now. It seems that each of Wesp's new releases is primarily focused upon fixing the NEW bugs that he vomited forth in his previous version. You remember his previous version, right..? Well you should... because he releases a new version of his craptastic kiddie mod every second Tuesday.
(7) There is one exception to the above statement about similarities between the True Patch and Wesp's mods. The exception has to do with a clear example of *Wesp* stealing from Acrimonious. Specifically, it has to do with the solution that Acrimonious and myself came up with, for the rare but game-breaking "Beckett bug." The solution that we ultimately arrived at was completely unique and actually rather clever, if I say so myself. Well, a short time after the True Patch version 5.04AT was released, the exact same fix showed up in one of Wesp's maps, according to reports given to me by a couple of tech-savvy users of Wesp's mods. Well gee, Wesp... I though you were against the practice of stealing from other people's work..? Not in this case, I guess... since stealing from us happened to serve your purpose at the time.
The fact is that the entire True VTMB Patch... every single bit of it... was painstakingly constructed from scratch and without any outside help whatsoever (aside from the final beta testing phase). Keep in mind that our entire reason for scrapping the first iteration of the True Patch and starting over again with 5.04AT was because we were
sick to death of the accusations of theft coming from Wesp's camp. Does anybody think that we would be stupid enough to give those nitwits any more ammunition for their silly "patch war..?" Of course not, because *we* are not nitwits. We made sure that every single aspect of our patch was
our work...
and our work alone.I do need to mention that the final phase of the True VTMB Patch version 5.04AT also represents something that Wesp has never done, during his entire history of creating mods for this game. What we did over here was to enlist the aid of a half-dozen volunteers from amongst the tessmage.com VTMB community. We asked those volunteers to commit themselves to doing a complete play-through with the beta version of our patch, using a clan that we would assign to each tester. This was to make sure that all of the clans in the game would be individually tested, by expert players who were highly familiar with Bloodlines. That entire beta testing phase was handled via these Forums and
all of those old beta testing posts are still right here... archived in an area which is no longer being used. If anyone still wishes to challenge the originality and integrity of the True Patch, or if anyone wishes to challenge the authenticity of ANY of the statements being made in this post, then by all means... make my day. I'll move the old 5.04AT beta testing threads back over to the visible areas of this board and then, you can read through that entire chronicle for yourselves. Nowhere will you find *any* indications that *anything* was being copied from, or inspired by, anyone else's work. What you will find, however, are plenty of instances where the beta testers said things like "I'm sure glad that you guys aren't doing this the way Wesp did it. His version is a mess and it makes no sense." Yah... no shit, and that's why we were very careful to do everything PROPERLY and to the very best of our ability.
Wesp claims that he can "easily prove" that we used one of his mods as the "template" for our True VTMB Patch. My response to Wesp is: if it can be so easily proven, then by all means... PROVE IT, you silly self-appointed demagogue. You and your witless goons have been making that same accusation for nearly three years now... but not once, not one single time, have you ever produced any actual evidence.
And we both know why you haven't shown us any proof, don't we Wesp..?Because Wesp, we both know that you are absolutely, totally full of pure horse manure. I'm calling you out on this one, Wesp. Prove it or shut the fuck up and go back to turning VTMB into a dumbed-down, console-style game for the kiddies. Over here, we do things RIGHT. And that includes making sure that we NEVER do ANYTHING your way... because your way absolutely sucks. Just face it, Wesp: you have done far more to *sabotage* Troika's final masterpiece than you have ever done to help it. You may have started out with noble intentions, way back in 2005. But you quickly became so caught up with the PV pee-wees, and the way that they were all sucking your lonely little cock, that you couldn't resist granting each and every silly, inane and downright childish request that they were making. That is a goddamned fact... and I know that you hate me so much for pointing out that fact, that you will continue lie about our patch and slander me personally for as long as anyone will listen to you.In the meantime, the True VTMB Patch continues to be the most stable, reliable and
least invasive patch ever created for Bloodlines. No amount of Wesp's raving, nor the lies spread by his groupies, will ever change that undeniable fact. Naturally, we're all very proud of that singular distinction... and I for one will continue to do everything that I can to ensure that the best interests of Bloodlines players will
always be my number one priority. Bloodlines is an adult-oriented roleplaying game about vampires, Wesp... not an ez-mode, console-style shooter for little kids who wanna be "Rambo with fangs." So you go right ahead and keep giving the kiddies ez-mode rewards, overpowered weapons, dumbed-down quests and various changes which directly violate WoD canon. And on our end, we'll just stick with the script, okay..? Because I for one would rather play Troika's game... not Wesp's half-assed rape of a classic.
So much for accusations.
And so much for Wesp.Lastly, I am going to mention that with the most recent update to the True Patch (hotfix #6), the users of our patch will be happy to know that this latest update enables Bloodlines to be fully compatible with all versions of Vista and Windows 7. That includes 64-bit operating systems, as well as all systems which have more than 2GB of system RAM installed. Also, I have tossed in the popular "VTMB Res Patcher" utility created by another modder (whose name escapes me atm) as an added courtesy, so that the game will display properly on newer widescreen (including HD) monitors. So if any of you thought that you needed one of Wesp's craptastic kiddie mods in order to play Bloodlines on Vista, well... not anymore. I fixed (hex edited) the engine files myself and they are now an "optional" addition to the True Patch. Once again, you all have a clear choice.
And having choices is always a good thing.
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