It is intellectual theft. You are stealing, block for block, what other people have spent hours in finding, designing, creating. If you take something that is not rightfully yours, you are stealing. This is not even on par with having similar towns because the same path patterns are used and because the original creators have consciously and graciously shared them. But I would even go the lengths saying that if one spends all this time to find a similar map, unlock all the same PWPs, and plot-reset to get all the villagers into the same positions is plagiarizing. The hack is only a tool to speed up the process. At the heart, you are stealing, and that's what's horrific about it.
It's like in universities copying for your thesis; would the original authors of the manuscripts care? Probably not. But are there consequences? You might end up getting kicked out.
i dont see how this counts as stealing tho, like yea i kinda can but lets break it down;
1) stealing refers to taking something someone else owns without consent/permission
2) you don't actually own the game. Nintendo owns it
3) so???
if you actually owned the rights to the game then yea you can scream theft, but you dont. you only physically own the game. Just because someone else "took" your town doesnt mean it's stealing... If you insured your town or sth then yeah maybe, but you ddin't, and the rights still belong to Nintendo. It's non profit so I really dont see how its stealing?
- if you spent hours making an art work for someone and then someone just took it as their own and sold it for $$$ then yea, stealing
- if you spend hours working on ur town and then someone took it, no, that's copying
copying =/= stealing
i've been to peoples towns and been like 'o this is nice' and then copied it and put it in my own town, so what? you should be proud someone liked it enough to want to have their own copy of it. you can scream theft all you want, but since you don't actually own it there's little to nothing you can do, so may as well deal with it and get over it
you may as well say someone "stole" my pokemon because i spent hours IV breeding for a perfect IV pokemon but then someone caught one in the wild, how is that stealing?
i didnt create the english language so every thing i type, word for word, am i stealing from someone?