whatwasicalledagain

Honestly, private characters shouldn't even be a thing. I learned a while back that keeping things to yourself isn't really the way to go, especially with sprites on a screen. When you go ripping sprites, you shouldn't just keep them to yourself, because if you do, someone else is going to beat you to the punch and upload them to a websites, thus gaining popularity you could've had. The same goes for characters; if you make a character and make it private, someone else could be inspired to make the same character and upload it to a website, thus gaining the popularity you could've had. If you didn't want popularity, why would you upload screenshots and videos of the character to shove it in people's faces? It's just not necessary at all. As far as rare characters go, yeah, you can't really trust cloud services or hosting services. They may stay up for an indefinite amount of time, or they may go down the very next day, so it's understandable that rare characters are a thing, especially with occurrences such as the Ecole Faker and the fake SEGA takedowns. But if you intentionally make it rare, then that's just plain silly. What value is there to making a character rare? It's just going to cause outrage if you do, and if it gets into the right(or wrong) hands, then it'll be as common as it would've been if you hadn't have made it rare. As far as WIPs go, creators should maybe have "alpha" builds or "beta" builds available so that their fellow MUGEN players can test the characters themselves and give feedback to them instead of just having a designated crew for that task. There is no harm in letting the entire community see your work, and you should be open to criticism from everyone around you as long as it's actually constructive. You shouldn't just keep it to yourself until it's finished, though I would understand if it's meant to be a surprise or something or you just don't like putting incomplete work out there, but don't go linking screenshots of it and never finish it. At least give people a taste of what they could've had if you lose interest in the character instead of just scrapping it all together. At least then it would be preserved for maybe another creator to finish for you.