Why are hacked towns the only towns people actually praise?

AccfSally said:

But it's apart of the game...
The villagers will call you a time traveler if you do it too much.

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Hehe, I didn't see you had posted that.
Yes, indeed TT'g is a part of the game. ^_^

i understand hacking in the sense of tweaking a few things, but there are some hacked towns that are too much & they don't look nice anymore. i'm sure hacking is actually pretty time consuming & i respect that, but i find a sense of satisfaction in being able to complete the look of your town without using a save editor.
also; a lot of hacked towns (probably just tumblr towns) look so similar that i don't even bother going to them since they all go for the same exact aesthetic :/ it gets boring very quickly that being said, if anyone has a natural town that they're proud of, i'd love to know your da

I saw one that was 90% river.

It wound all the way around the map like a snake.
It was THE most hideous thing (I wouldn't call that garbage a 'town'.) I've ever seen. (in AC.)

Well, it's amazing to see and think about what you can do without all the limits, but after visiting a few, the novelty wore off quickly. I'm still more impressed visiting complete, non-hacked towns.

never hacked before, but always considered it. i guess it's less effort but no one should get mad or look down on others when they decide to hack lol, it can be as frustrating as playing normally

i'm not gonna judge other people for hacking, but some of the aesthetic things people do with hacking seem silly to me. do you really need to move your town tree and bulletin board and fill your river with bamboo, weeds, etc.? it just seems unnecessary and i don't think it looks very nice.

As others have said, I think it's mostly that hacked towns get a lot of attention for being unusual. Someone who doesn't hack is going to be more curious about a town with PWPs on the beach or bamboo in the river than a town that already fits the known format. Seeing something new can be refreshing and exciting, especially if you've been playing for a long time and have visited a lot of non-hacked towns. Hacking also allows players to do things that some non-hackers wish they could do—again, beach PWPs come to mind.

If I may be a little cynical, though, I think it's also because hacking has become pretty trendy on Tumblr. Even though AC was designed as a personal experience, it's become very community-oriented for many people (which is fine), and like any community, the AC community definitely has norms and trends. Certain villagers see huge spikes in popularity, and for a while, if you visit a lot of dream towns, you're seeing the same 25 villagers repeated over and over in almost every town. Certain PWPs are used regularly while others, even ones less bizarrely specific than the drilling rig, are virtually nonexistent. Pastel pink towns, rare Japanese unorderable items scattered throughout the dream town in wrapping paper, that doctor's mask clothing item . . . those are all very specific town choices that I've seen over and over and over again. For a while, I think hacking was also seen as a kind of status symbol, a way of being part of the Cool Club in the AC Tumblr community. Not that anyone was mean or deliberately exclusive, just that if you follow the trend, you gain more followers, get more integrated, etc. There's kind of a Look to some of the most popular towns, if you know what I mean.

Again, I want to stress that I don't think any of these choices are wrong or bad, and I'm definitely not saying that everyone who likes Marshal or has a fairy town is a mindless copycat. Lots of people just happen to enjoy those aesthetics! (And hey, if somebody creates a town just to be Tumblr-popular, that's fine too.) I just doubt that the community as a whole is immune to the influences of trends.

The towns that are often shared on tumblr usually are hacked. I think it's kinda like a trend or aesthetic people go for.. and it's so easily shared on a platform like tumblr so it seems like they are the only towns out there that are "nice". There's a lot of great unhacked towns by users on this forum though, but I guess a lot don't share them on social media. I personally like visiting the non-hacked ones because although hacked towns are inspiring, I wouldn't be able to do the things hackers do. False hope :'D