Before we begin, it’s vitally important
that I make something perfectly clear. Whatever you feel, after this video
concludes… please do not use that energy to spread negativity towards those
in the wrong. It’s not worth it. Instead, spread positive energy towards those who deserve
it the most. Show appreciation and gratitude for the community members who have given this story
a happy ending. With that said, let’s begin. I have an unfortunate story to share with you
today. This is an incredibly complicated story, spanning several years of developments, so this’ll
take some time to get through. One of Minecraft’s biggest and most well known resource packs is the
alleged victim of blatant intellectual property theft. You may have heard of it, as I’m talking
about Faithful 32x. Faithful is a Minecraft resource pack created by Vattic in November
of 2010 that went on to become one of the games most popular resource packs of all time. Its
premise has always been pretty simple. What would Minecraft look like if it’s texture resolution
was double the games default. Simple. Clean. Effective. Beloved. Faithful 32x was continually
maintained by Vattic all the way through Minecraft release version 1.8, or for around 4 years or
so, and his policy for people having permission to use his textures for their own packs was really
quite simple. If you use any of the textures for your own pack, credit Vattics work, and link
back to the original Minecraft Forum thread. A generous policy at the time, and ever since.
As some of you might be aware, I use and host a variation of Faithful called FaithfulVenom, with
permission, that also aims to preserve a few more things that Faithful does not. Namely, the
game’s old sounds that were changed in early 2012, and the game's vibrant color map that was
altered in Minecraft Beta 1.8, which resulted in my original map’s spawn point turning from a
vibrant green into a rather dead looking green. Following the release of Minecraft 1.8, Vattic
unfortunately disappeared from the community, leaving the fate of Faithful
hanging in the balance for Minecraft 1.9 and beyond. It’s at this point in the
story that things begin to turn… sour. The day is March 17th, 2016, at 11:22am. Minecraft
1.9 had released only 17 days prior, and I had not yet updated FaithfulVenom to include 1.9’s
textures, given the disappearance of Vattic at the time. I still wanted to keep FaithfulVenom up to
date, but I am not a texture artist, which means I’ve relied on other peoples work in order to keep
it up to date, which I’ve always been very forward about. This led me to someone who goes by the name
of Kraineff, otherwise known as xMrVizzy, or just, Vizzy. Vizzy is a texture artist that decided to
continue work on Faithful for Minecraft versions 1.9 and beyond. While looking for new textures
to implement, I ultimately found his work on Curseforge, so I inquired with him about using his
textures to update FaithfulVenom, which he said he was fine with, so long as I credited him. This
is the same policy that Vattic had with Faithful during his time working on the pack, so nothing
seemed amiss. And this is how things went for a while. Just, smooth sailing. Throughout all of
2016, 2017, and 2018, Vizzy and his growing team would continue updating the pack for the newest
versions of Minecraft. On August 26th, 2018, a user by the name of Offroaders123 would convert
FaithfulVenom to work on the relatively new Minecraft Bedrock Edition, which I tweeted about
to make sure my audience knew about it. Everything seems great, right? Well, in late February of
2019, this story would take a turn, for the worse. On February 26th, 2019, the Faithful 32x resource
pack would make its appearance on the official Minecraft marketplace. At a glance, it’s not
immediately obvious that anything is wrong, aside from its price being set at $8 USD, which
made it the most expensive resource pack on the marketplace. When asked about this fact on Reddit,
Vizzy claimed that he “didn’t know what the price would be”, which is absolutely a flat out lie.
This subject was covered in detail by ibxtoycat on March 3rd, just 5 days following Faithful’s
introduction to the Minecraft marketplace. The very next day, Offroaders123 took FaithfulVenom
Bedrock offline for fear of an incoming DMCA claim by Vizzy, according to an email I received
from him that day. Okay, time out, hold up. Did Vizzy have the commercial rights to even put
Faithful onto the Minecraft Marketplace? Would Vizzy have even had the authority to submit a DMCA
takedown claim against re-uploads of Faithful? On March 14th, 10 days after FaithfulVenom
Bedrock was taken offline, I inquired about this problem with Vizzy, and he told me that
new textures were protected under copyright, and that “most of the textures do not relate to
the time of Vattic”. Unfortunately, I completely believed Vizzy’s explanation, which is why I
didn’t push the subject any further. Vizzy may be right about textures he created being protected on
their own, but the marketplace version of Faithful have used textures created by Vattic ever since
it hit the marketplace, and it still does use some of them today. I’m not gonna run down the entire
library of textures to compare in this video, but if we compare Vizzy’s present-day creeper texture
with Vattic’s original, it doesn’t take a detailed forensics analysis to conclude that they are one
in the same. In fact, most of the textures Vizzy was using at the time were the same as Vattics,
and many are still the same today. So then, the question remains. Did Vizzy have the rights
to use the Faithful name and Vattic’s hard work in a product he was selling for profit? This is
all contingent on the assumption that Vattic gave Vizzy ownership rights to Faithful, and allowed
for him to sell this pack on the Marketplace. It’s not entirely out of the question that the two
of them may have come to some sort of an agreement about it. However… dear viewer… I’m sorry to
report that no such agreement was ever made. Vattic never provided Vizzy with any kind of
permission to continue Faithful’s namesake, let alone publish it on the marketplace. How do I know
this? Well, that’s because, Vattic has returned. One year ago today, communication with Vattic was
restored. Up until this point, I’ve only been able to tell you the story that I have been directly
involved with. However, the only reason I’m even able to tell you my story today is because of
why Vattic has returned. Strap yourselves in, because this, is chapter two. I mentioned earlier
in the video that the team working on Faithful had been growing from 2016 and onwards. For reasons I
am about to get into, they are the heroes of this story. These truly Faithful team members are the
reason why I have all of this information to share with you today. By the time October of 2020 had
rolled around, Vattic had not made an appearance for multiple years, and Vizzy is even on the
record as stating that he was allegedly told that Vattic had fallen on hard times, which meant he
wasn’t around to do work on Faithful any longer. We’ll get to that later on as well. This part
of the story begins with two users who go by the name of Ninventoo and Sei. Ninventoo was second in
command of the Faithful project, as well as being a moderator of Faithful’s Discord server. Then
there’s Sei, who was also a Discord moderator, had write access to Faithful’s website, and who was
able to make changes to Faithful’s GitHub as well, meaning he was one of the few who could update the
pack aside from Vizzy himself. That fact is key to what happened next. For a period of time prior
to November of 2020, Vizzy’s activity on Discord had become infrequent, leaving the team to update
Faithful themselves during this period of time. The way in which the administrative team updated
Faithful's textures was through a clever voting system where new textures could be submitted
and voted upon, and the textures with the best ratio of upvotes to downvotes were the ones that
were supposed to be added into the pack. With Vizzy being absent at the time, and with people
asking where the next version of the pack was, Sei asked Ninventoo to compile the most recently
voted textures into the pack so he could publish an updated version of the pack. But, on November
5th, 2020, Vizzy returned, and was outraged. Having others able to control a project that
he thought was solely his to control didn’t sit very well with him. As you can see here, he
felt he had the right to ban any member that he wanted who didn’t “just make texture”. What a guy.
This was when he began to systematically remove every contributor's Discord role, removed all
moderators aside from Ninventoo from the server, and went as far as to ban absolutely
anyone who disagreed with his decision, effectively wiping the slate clean
so others couldn’t make decisions without his approval again. I’m starting to
sense a pattern here. As you might imagine, these team members weren’t exactly happy about
this choice, but their response, was a noble one. Stepping away from the Faithful project now,
several of its former contributors and moderation team created their own Discord server, and
as well, their own resource pack project, which would take on the name “Compliance”. The
names of these contributors deserve to be known. Compliance’s founding members consisted of Sei,
who I mentioned before, and then there's Pomi, Juknum, Harag0n, Robert, JogurciQ, and PeJohn,
with FHLX, Evorp, and even Ninventoo joining the team later on. I’ll talk more about Compliance
in a few moments. For now, let’s fast forward to December 18th, 2020. Not long before this, it was
noticed that Vattic’s original Minecraft account had a recent skin change. Was he hacked? Was this
real? There might be signs of life here. One year ago today, after having been out-casted from the
Faithful project, four of Compliances members decided enough was enough. Out of options
and desperate for some sort of resolution, they knew what they had to do. They had to embark
on a quest to find Vattic, in search of answers. On that day, cituation, Karthy, TRG, and FHLX
decided to reach out to Vattic in such a manner where they felt they stood the best chance of
regaining contact. They chose to submit an urgent bug report on Vattic’s original GitHub page that
was directly associated with the original Faithful project in the past. I mean, what did they have
to lose right? Worse case scenario, they get no response. Best case scenario… well… the best
case scenario… hahaha… the best case scenario… is exactly what happened next. Vattic responded. And
his response… was legitimately shocking. “Hello, I never gave anyone permission to keep the pack
going. My disappearance is complicated, and I’ll not go into it here. I am open to talk about what
is going on. Might be best to move things onto a private channel.” Wow. Things just got a lot more
interesting. Vattic, welcome back. We missed you. To get this out of the way, Vattic’s identity was
verified seven ways to sunday. The GitHub page wherein he replied was the original. He applied
a txt element to the original Faithful32x32.com domain upon request by Minecraft Forum staff in
order to re-activate his Minecraft Forum account, which it now is. He also provided proof that
he has some of his original texture PSD files that were used in the creation of those textures
in the first place. This is Vattic. They found him. They actually did it. After verifying his
identity, Vattic was shown the screenshot that Vizzy allegedly used as proof of ownership
for the Faithful name and its assets. Vizzy: I made a big job. Can I get all rights for
Faithful? Vattic: Okay. Now this package is yours! Vizzy: Thanks. Now, viewer, it also doesn’t take a
forensics analysis to see that this screenshot is so bad it’s actually comical. Vizzy is a Russian
individual, and Vattic is British. Vattic’s wording in this screenshot doesn't even look like
what someone who speaks English would even say. It looks like a non-English speakers interpretation
of what someone who speaks English would say, fed through Google Translate or something. Now, I’m
not flaming Vizzy for not speaking proper English… but even without Vattic’s confirmation, it’s
pretty easy to tell that something wasn’t kosher about this response. As you might imagine, Vattic
confirmed this supposed “proof” was fake, stating that “the profile picture is correct, but I never
had that conversation, I would never say ‘Okay, this package is yours!’”. This single-handedly
causes Vizzy’s entire argument to fall apart. Vizzy. I have a message for you. You are not the
owner of Faithful, and I hope that the community will no longer support your work. I look forward
to any potential legal action that might be coming your way, courtesy of the Faithful’s real owner,
Vattic. Now, viewer. I told you at the beginning of the video. Do not seek retribution. It’s
not worth it, and any potential legal action is being handled at the discretion of Vattic, in
private. So I ask that you respect his privacy. Instead, support the future of Faithful.
Support the efforts that come next. If you’ve stuck around this long, I ask that
you don’t leave the video until I’ve concluded all of what I have to say. If you wish
to support the future of Faithful, there are a few things that you can do. First,
follow Vattic on Twitter, as he has control of that again as well. If the original vision of the
Faithful project brought you any positive feelings throughout the years, I’m sure he’d love to have
your support again. The rumors about him having fallen on hard times weren't exactly untrue,
so if you wish to support Vattic more directly, I'll have a link for that below. Second.
Check out the alternatives to Faithful, all of which have gotten Vattic’s stamp of approval.
There’s Compliance, which aims to loosely follow Minecraft’s newer texture methodology, with a
more realistic approach. Throughout the video, the icon on the bottom left of the screen has
been indicative of which pack I've been using, so you've been able to see the differences for
yourself.. And then there’s Emulated Vattic, which aims to take on a more simplistic art style
that matches the original Faithful look more closely. Before I get into the last one however,
definitely be sure to check out these packs after the video is over, because those who made these
packs possible were absolutely vital in gathering and compiling the information that I’ve shared
with you here today. Their plan moving forward is to try and get the Faithful name itself back, and
eventually combine compliance and Emulated Vattic into Faithful itself. So, at last, there’s…
FaithfulVenom. FaithfulVenom also aims to forever preserve the look and feel of Vattic’s original
Faithful, as well as retaining the changes that I mentioned at the beginning of the video involving
old sounds, the color palette, the hotbar along with a few other things here and there. Because
FaithfulVenom was always a random hodgepodge of textures that I typically just grabbed from
Faithful, FaithfulVenom had to be entirely rebuilt from the ground up. It was briefly considered
to rename FaithfulVenom to CompliANT, because that would be an hilarious pun, but I refuse to
let go of the FaithfulVenom name. Just because someone else decided to stomp all over Faithful,
doesn’t mean I’m giving up the name. Instead, I’m choosing to re-define what Faithful means,
because Vizzy doesn’t deserve to be known for it any longer. For those of you using FaithfulVenom
for 1.18, you are already on the version that is rebuilt from the ground up, whether or not
you ever realized it or not. At this point, I have one more name to thank today, and his
name is mullak99. Mullak is a name that I should have shouted from the rooftops a long, long time
ago. When both Minecraft 1.16, and 1.17 came out, Mullak made it clear to me that he would be
willing to update FaithfulVenom using textures that would match the vision that I had for it,
but I always wound up barely missing his messages until right after I would haphazardly update the
pack myself. However, once this whole situation was brought to my attention back in June of this
year, mullak single-handedly went to work swapping every single texture that wasn’t the work of
Vattic himself, and he also created a credits file within the resource pack zip file for almost every
single texture in the pack. Many are from Emulated Vattic, which also credits the source of their
textures, some are from Vattic’s original pack, all of which were either made by him, or
came from other community contributions, wherein clear credit was also given, a few are
from Compliance, who also credits their work, and a few are made by Mullak himself, along with
a sprinkling of other textures made by a handful of individuals. Not only did Mullak prepare
a rebuilt FaithfulVenom for Minecraft 1.18, but he did it for every release from 1.12 and
onwards. The dude is insane. The goal from this point on is simple. If a texture is the work of
another individual or project, credit it. Plain and simple. I may have always had permission
to use the textures that I’ve used throughout the years, but none of this would have ever been
possible without the absolute blood, sweat, tears, and dedication of other community members just
looking to do the right thing. More detailed credits for absolutely everyone who helped
make this announcement possible will be given in the description down below. That just about
does it for me for now. Thanks for watching.
Can't wait for this to get taken down because of Vizzy getting exposed
Haha! Nailed It!!
ib4 he loses the legal dispute