The artwork Ryannic posted was by Adele Lorienne S. and can be viewed here here

Wow I like her style too. I think I'm gonna practice sketching like that. I suck at coloring. >.<

...

But Guay didn't do either of those. The rangers are Daren Bader, and Fog has (over the years) been Jesper Myrfors, Harold McNeill, John Avon, and Arnie Swekel. No Guay.

Guay had fog. http://www.geocities.com/RebeccaGuayFan/im...tg_fogpatch.jpg
Fog Patch!

Guay had Treetop thingie http://www.geocities.com/RebeccaGuayFan/im...woodelves02.jpg
Wood elves!



Hokay, we're starting to sound like MTG nerds.

It is pretty mind-boggling that this keeps happening even after all these highly publicized shrubbings. Setting aside scruples and artistic integrity (since those are apparently already being set aside), why are people trying, month after month? Is it because they get away with it some of the time, so the risk is worth it? Because if they're really all (or almost all) getting caught, I can't think why anyone would actually take the risk.

In the back of my mind I always new Ryannic was cheating, I just couldn't prove it. The artwork was always very vague; and the first pic he submitted of "battleships at war in sea" was just a dead giveaway to me. I am really happy someone found him out, it confirms all my suspicions. Justice is served!

On another note, why do people do it? I don't get it.

How odd. This is about the only IRE mud I've heard of this many issues with this sort of thing. Makes me wonder why they seem to flock here.

Could the admins look through entries that lost as well as entries that won, and shrub the people who submitted plagerzied works even if they lost?

Ryannic didn't care about getting shrubbed, because (if I remember correctly) his Lusternia character was only here to trade credits for his Achaean character (unless I'm getting his name mixed up in those credit trade posts)

I hope he's been shrubbed there as well, but given the circumstances, it might be odd to do.

Edit: And apparently we're one of the few(or half) IRE games that still does monthly artisanals or something. I'm guessing others felt this was good oppurtunity to get their characters in other games credits, too. They didn't have much invested here in the first place.

(apologies in advance if the piece I'm thinking of wasn't "drawn" by Ryannic, but I've looked through the archives and I can't find it, so I think it was "his")

I don't remember what it was called, but one piece he submitted reminded me a lot of that Orbstar guy from Indefensible Positions. I remember thinking that, as much as I love the comic, the art isn't something most people would want to copy, so it must have been his own.

Again, a million apologies if the piece was by one of you non-cheater types.

It's nice to know that we have a base that really cares about this kind of thing. Heh, maybe Estarra could get us Lusternians to help look for plagurizers!

This is absolutely sickening. I know of only one incident in Achaea, which is a cesspool of corruption in many forms, where someone was shrubbed for plagiarism in Artisanals, and that guy was a moron anyway. This has been happening in Lusternia nearly every month now and it's really disheartening. I plan on participating in Artisanals at some point (when I can afford a new scanner) and seeing this happen month after month makes me think that maybe the Artisanals will end up being removed at some point...

What really makes me angry is that so many of the plagiarized works end up being winners, which screws over everyone else. (Well, everyone that actually tries, anyway)

When a winning piece is discovered to have been plagiarized, do they remove it and leave the other original pieces in, and hold the contest again for that month?

No, unfortunately. They leave all the other winners as is. I agree with Kromsh, those that actually do the work themselves end up not getting a chance because some a-hole plagiarized someone else's work and one first place.

Yeah, when a winner is a plagiarist, they should shove the best of the runners-up up to winner. It's not fair at all to make those who would have won were it not for the plagiarising bastards lose out on credits and Vesteran Points.

Fortunately, this month's winner wasn't plagiarized (to my knowledge).

True, Ryannic was only a runner-up. I doubt someone with as much time and effort put into his character as Exarius would go and plagiarize the artisanals.

If that is indeed the reason, and it makes a gut-wrenching amount of sense, I hope that IRE sets up some kind of mutual extradition treaty so people who do this can be shrubbed across borders. I have no problem with people trading credits cross-game (I did it myself), that's not the problem. But if cross-game credit trades cause people to come spam our artisanals and bardics to use them as a credits farm, with no intention of participating here, that's pretty bad. If they plagiarize to do it, that's unconscionable.

Transcribing the sheet music in my bardic submission into ASCII was torturous and I was never happy with the results, so here's the sheet music in a more readable form.

I also have a MIDI file, though the instrumentation it uses makes some of the phrases sound a bit off.