Titan Network
Graveyard => Save Paragon Retirees => Save Paragon City! => Topic started by: Little Green Frog on December 05, 2012, 06:44:22 AM
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Hey, I just wanted to let you all know that there is an article covering the closure of CoH in ReadWrite, which is a well known and influential magazine in startup and tech circles:
http://readwrite.com/2012/12/04/a-eulogy-for-city-of-heroes-how-a-video-game-saved-my-life
What sets this article apart from the others is that the author raises an interesting point about the right for preservation of online communities, such as MMOs. This is something that I've been giving a lot of thought even before NC Soft has decided to pull the plug on us and I am hoping that maybe the outcry sparked with abrupt and unexpected closure of our beloved game will help the concept of player rights get more exposure. Because right now we, as players, are in such a position that we can devote a lot of time and effort into creating communities and bonds, but the continued existence of these depend on a whim of a corporate owner, who may not have our best interest in mind, especially when undertaking such drastic decisions as a closure of a long running title. This is absurd and as pointed out in the past, can't be considered ethical.
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As I get some time, I'd like to explore this issue as well, as it's very important to me too. The fact is that in many cases, people pay thousands of dollars over the course of years and sink thousands of hours into these games, yet we have less access and rights subsequent to a shutdown or other corporate maneuvers than for most sub-$20 bargain bin specials at your local GameStop.
One counterargument I frequently see to the SaveCoH movement goes something like this: "You know that this game was going to shut down at some point, why are you acting all surprised and mad about it?" Or phrased another way, "Do you think you have the right to force a company like NCsoft to keep supporting a product that they no longer want to?"
The simple answer is yes and no. No, I don't necessarily think that NCsoft must keep City of Heroes servers running indefinitely. However, I do believe that companies should plan ahead for when a game is going to be sunset and make arrangements for it to either keep running after the sunset period or transfer it to someone who can do so. I'm imagining a scenario, for example, in which they basically give the game to Steam or gog.com or some service like that (perhaps multiple services, why not?), who can then charge a nominal fee to cover the cost of a VM somewhere run a single server instance so that people can keep playing. No new investments in development, basically no customer service ("My machine won't run the client!" "Noted.") except kicking the server once in a while if it crashes, etc. Just something to ensure that once someone has invested hundreds or thousands of dollars into a game, it won't just *poof!* be lost when they shut the servers off one day.
My stock answer is that after enticing players to spend so much time and money on a game in a genre that's so conducive to that kind of investment, companies like NCsoft have a moral and ethical obligation to not leave players out in the cold like we have been. NCsoft has now done it five times. I wish I had spoken up earlier when they did it to other games, but I don't want to compound my silence then with apathy now. At some point, players have to make a stand and say, "This is not acceptable."
There's another thread around here that someone created regarding a Gamer's Bill of Rights. When I get time, I'll probably circle back and read it again and see if we can't get something moving on the idea. Nobody should have to go through this because some faceless corporation decides, "Yeah, we're done with that."
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We need to be sure to tell her that we are HERE and that she's welcome! ;)
Also, yes, it is an interesting subject that has come up a few times.
Obviously there are financial expenses and resources that need to be covered, but I do believe the nature of online communities garners greater protection than there currently is. How, exactly, I am not at all certain.
In our case, clearly there was a major real community around a profitable business venture.
Honestly, I've thought about some sort of online game maintenance/rescue/insurance company/service of some nature.
A mandate on the publisher to allow the usage of the product through some sort of rescue operation (if the publishers do not wish to do it themselves).
I'm not thinking this through right now and this is all extremely fresh off of my mind and there'd be a ton of legality issues with IP and bureaucratic entanglements...
But there might be something there. Even if it is just to implement a working offline game version. Or enabling/allowing legal private servers of the game.
Once it has been shutdown... there should be some way of that work to still be enjoyed, if there is someone who wants to enjoy it.
*shrugs*
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Superb article, thanks so much for linking it.
I too agree that we as a community, a community who paid-for, cherished, and nurtured CoH for 8 years should indeed be able to have something of the world we shared. Be that, as suggested, basic server access with no forthcoming expansions or customer support, and our hopefully-reduced monthly-fee going directly towards the server, its basic maintenance, and backup.
The concept is a bit of a sticky-wicket, but my mindset is clear: corporations should take moral and ethical responsibilities seriously, and do so above-and-beyond the letter of the law. If a company shows it gives a damn, people will repay it with loyalty. How much better would NCSoft be regarded now if instead of killing the games they have to this point, they simply set them aside, focused R&D on new games, but allowed basic access to those who still wanted to play and were willing to pay?
Sure, eventually those games would die too, but it would be a more natural, more "organic" death that came as a result of attrition: once the subscriptions dropped below the level needed to maintain the servers, then the announcement would come and the game eventually shut down.
That, I feel, is something that many of us would have accepted. Sure, there would have been complaints and regrets, but we'd still be able to PLAY, and that's a hell of a lot better than what we have now.
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I am hoping that sooner or later a debacle comparable with the closure of City of Heroes would inspire an able attorney to make a case for the courts about perseverance of online communities. They could argue that the effort required to run such community is shared between the publisher and the community itself and because of that the publisher would be obligated to forfeit all data necessary to keep those communities operable either by another company or a community effort when the publisher chooses not to support it anymore. Right now the communities have absolutely no say about their future and are not entitled to the content they create.
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As I get some time, I'd like to explore this issue as well, as it's very important to me too. The fact is that in many cases, people pay thousands of dollars over the course of years and sink thousands of hours into these games, yet we have less access and rights subsequent to a shutdown or other corporate maneuvers than for most sub-$20 bargain bin specials at your local GameStop.
One counterargument I frequently see to the SaveCoH movement goes something like this: "You know that this game was going to shut down at some point, why are you acting all surprised and mad about it?" Or phrased another way, "Do you think you have the right to force a company like NCsoft to keep supporting a product that they no longer want to?"
The simple answer is yes and no. No, I don't necessarily think that NCsoft must keep City of Heroes servers running indefinitely. However, I do believe that companies should plan ahead for when a game is going to be sunset and make arrangements for it to either keep running after the sunset period or transfer it to someone who can do so. I'm imagining a scenario, for example, in which they basically give the game to Steam or gog.com or some service like that (perhaps multiple services, why not?), who can then charge a nominal fee to cover the cost of a VM somewhere run a single server instance so that people can keep playing. No new investments in development, basically no customer service ("My machine won't run the client!" "Noted.") except kicking the server once in a while if it crashes, etc. Just something to ensure that once someone has invested hundreds or thousands of dollars into a game, it won't just *poof!* be lost when they shut the servers off one day.
My stock answer is that after enticing players to spend so much time and money on a game in a genre that's so conducive to that kind of investment, companies like NCsoft have a moral and ethical obligation to not leave players out in the cold like we have been. NCsoft has now done it five times. I wish I had spoken up earlier when they did it to other games, but I don't want to compound my silence then with apathy now. At some point, players have to make a stand and say, "This is not acceptable."
There's another thread around here that someone created regarding a Gamer's Bill of Rights. When I get time, I'll probably circle back and read it again and see if we can't get something moving on the idea. Nobody should have to go through this because some faceless corporation decides, "Yeah, we're done with that."
I plan to take a break from these forums and this debate at large because I have very strong feelings about this, and it seems the larger community has theirs but won't come together on the details, which is breaking my heart... That aside, Tony, as always, illustrates my feelings at their core. He has the talent of transcending political correctness where I really have no patience for it and speaheads the point of the matter.
While I appreciate what NCsoft did in continuing CoH after Cryptic, I feel there's an obligation by whomever's the controlling interest to 'finish the story', or in this case 'let it live on for those who appreciate it'. I no longer watch network television (short of one dalliance because of my wife- I watch Castle, but I'll buy Once Upon A Time when the series is successfully completed and watch it then) because I have no faith that I'll actually get to see the end of my story. This is the same thing.
For game play, I'll decide when the story's over for my character. From the generation who played PONG, I want my game 'til I'm done playing it. I could probably play CoH as it was at its closure for years to come before I found myself bored of the combinations of powers or character concepts. When I say years, I mean decades. It wasn't about "what was new", thought it helped. For me, it was about "how was it new to this character concept?!" As an example, I had a TA/Dark Defender I'd solo in my free time. Everything tinted red because he was a Vigilante 'blood mage' that tried to bring justice to the Rogue Isles. After Water Manipuation came out, I moved him to another server (he was in his 30's- and I had plenty of xfers) and remade him as a Water/Pain Dom Corrupter because it fit him better. I would have run him as-was, but the update made him fit my vision even more. I could have happily run that TA/Dark to 50, becaue his story meant something to me. I felt it worth it that he get the best run. Either worked but it, to me, proves that even a version of CoH/V without updates is more desirable/viable than nothing at all.
I can't express what this game has meant to me, and it is trivial compared to some of the stories I've seen presented in support of this game. All I can say is that it meant more to me than I'm able to describe and now it's gone with no recourse.
It's not a matter of fair. I'd give my own resources to keep it running on my own computer if I had to. That option wasn't available. I have a decent computer. I'm sure if I was running a server on it (especially if I bought a new one and dedicated this one to it, which I'm sure I and many would) there'd be space to run an 'unwanted' program...
If this were about what's 'right', then we'd still be playing, that's another story for another time...
It's not about 'nice'... We see where that's gotten us.
and it's not about greed or power, or we'd easily have the emulators by now. We wanted to be 'good' people about this (see above) and I can't blame you.
I'm not a political person, and this has well-passed into this range of combat that I'm ill-equipped to engage in. I'm too honest and straightforward to get involved in that. However the idea that a game is 'art' and its meaning to personal interests is of worth (at least to me, and apparently many others that have found solace in this medium) that once it's created (and the communites that spawn from it) are made, it starts to fall outside the hands of its creators is intriguing to me.
It harkens back to the legislations from way back in the day that you can't copywrite a program's source code, because a source code implied ideas, and that one cannot monopolize upon thoughts. That's where the crazy EULAS about reverse-engineering a program's code came about.
Roadmaps aside, CoH is an art, and it's and idea, and NCsoft is taking it away from us. Is it legal? In today's context who knows.
All I can say for me and mine, it isn't right.
But that and $2.50'll get me a cup of coffee.
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You have all articulated this very well.
If I were to make a real world analogy here...
Imagine if you were to buy a condo in a little resort. It's a quirky place, and happens to, by and large, attract the same sort of people as you. First a few of you come together, then you all start to form community groups, and the next thing you know, you have a city that bumbles along with some clashes, but mostly getting along GREAT.
Then the resort comes to you and says "We're bulldozing. The Hyatt offered us ten times for the land."
You say--"WTF??? I BOUGHT this! I've been paying my condo fees all this time!"
The resort says "Read the fine print. You only bought the rights to live in the condo until we kicked you out. Too bad, so sad, buhbye."
It's not an exact analogy, but it's close. And I seriously think that for an MMORPG we should have the right to find someone with a spare server and run it until the last person leaves.
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I did approach a few gaming companies with my day-job-journalist-hat-on asking about gamers rights.
Everyone apart from Blizzard ignored me (they said they'd get back to me and then didn't.) Then I got distracted with the Wildcard project.
I'll see if I can't start chasing people on this.
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The simple answer is yes and no. No, I don't necessarily think that NCsoft must keep City of Heroes servers running indefinitely. However, I do believe that companies should plan ahead for when a game is going to be sunset and make arrangements for it to either keep running after the sunset period or transfer it to someone who can do so.
The funny thing about this is that it's essentially been tried and proven that it only takes one Paragon employee to keep COH running in maintenance mode. Surely enough COH players would have stuck around and kept paying to cover one guy's salary and at least keep the game alive, albeit without any content updates. Shrug.
I just wanted to edit this and point out that I am, as someone phrased it somewhere on these forums earlier, firmly a "Randian" in that I think businesses have every right to make decisions regarding their intellectual property. This is no exception. I'm also a big believer in free markets and the wallet vote- This is capitalism at its finest, and capitalism is good. There is a definite line between thinking a business practice is unethical and therefore ceasing all your personal transactions with the business in question while encouraging others to do the same, and trying to contrive and distort a scenario wherein you imply or directly state that the business should suffer legal repercussions for doing something they had every legal right to do. Again, this is the beauty of capitalism: People have the right to be jerks, and you have a right to stop doing business with them because of it. If enough people feel the same way as you do, it will have negative consequences on their image and prosperity. In this case, we've already seen examples of such an impact occurring. No need to write your congressman, capitalism is WAI.
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In a worst case scenario, I certainly would have.
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You have all articulated this very well.
If I were to make a real world analogy here...
Imagine if you were to buy a condo in a little resort. It's a quirky place, and happens to, by and large, attract the same sort of people as you. First a few of you come together, then you all start to form community groups, and the next thing you know, you have a city that bumbles along with some clashes, but mostly getting along GREAT.
Then the resort comes to you and says "We're bulldozing. The Hyatt offered us ten times for the land."
You say--"WTF??? I BOUGHT this! I've been paying my condo fees all this time!"
The resort says "Read the fine print. You only bought the rights to live in the condo until we kicked you out. Too bad, so sad, buhbye."
It's not an exact analogy, but it's close. And I seriously think that for an MMORPG we should have the right to find someone with a spare server and run it until the last person leaves.
This is a great analogy, but with online communities there is even greater lack of symmetry, because we actively participated in content creation. It's not like we merely lived in that condo. The owner offered us the bulding, but we furnished it, decorated it, planted the trees along the driveway and so on. Now the owner comes and not only kicks us out, but also burns our belongings and cuts those trees. The problem is these things never belonged to them in the first place. In real world the tenants would either have been given time to move away or be paid damages. In our case we are left with nothing.
With the closure of City of Heroes we lost gigabytes worth of data that we have created over the years. For example it only took the flip of a switch for the entire discussion board to disappear with no way to appeal or to save the content. True that it was their platform we created that content on, but we authored it. I can't help but see connection between what happened to City and how digital platforms seem to occasionally work agains their users (and common sense) in the modern world. Remember how Amazon remotely removed all copies of Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell from people Kindles? I feel this is the same thing. Kindle users don't own the platform, so if Amazon decides they can't have access to a book they paid for, they won't. Same thing with MMOs: since you don't own the platform, you may create as much content as you wish, but it is up to a faceless guy in a tie in an office located somewhere on the other side of the globe to make it all disappear with a sudden puff.
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You have all articulated this very well.
If I were to make a real world analogy here...
Imagine if you were to buy a condo in a little resort. It's a quirky place, and happens to, by and large, attract the same sort of people as you. First a few of you come together, then you all start to form community groups, and the next thing you know, you have a city that bumbles along with some clashes, but mostly getting along GREAT.
Then the resort comes to you and says "We're bulldozing. The Hyatt offered us ten times for the land."
You say--"WTF??? I BOUGHT this! I've been paying my condo fees all this time!"
The resort says "Read the fine print. You only bought the rights to live in the condo until we kicked you out. Too bad, so sad, buhbye."
It's not an exact analogy, but it's close. And I seriously think that for an MMORPG we should have the right to find someone with a spare server and run it until the last person leaves.
This is pretty similar to the analogy I made on the official forums about the closing. I likened it to a house that you had spent a long time looking for, where you'd gotten used to (and could live with) all its little quirks, and had decorated it to your tastes and whims (constantly making little improvements here and there).
And then, while you were looking forward to getting a few new pieces of furniture in a month, some land-owning corporation (one that, until that moment, had kept out of your decorating) pull up in a house-moving truck and cart the whole away. You know the house is still out there, somewhere, but you don't know where and you can't get to it, and they won't let you see it.
(There was also a rant directed towards the Official Forum Unicorns who insisted that there were plenty of other places to go: "Look, there's some rat-infested hovels you could move into, or a billion-dollar mansion you can't afford, so don't complain about not having a home! I'm sure they're just as good as the house you loved!")
Also not a perfect analogy. (And I think yours is better) :D
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This is something I've been thinking about in the past week, although from a slightly different angle. I've even started to try to find gaming lawyers to consult to see whether this could work legally.
I think there's more mileage to the concept of a standard commitment which MMO (and pseudo-MMOs like Demon's Souls) providers could sign up to which would guarantee that an up-to-date copy all their code, accounts, resources would be held by a neutral trust and, at the point the original publisher decided to sunset their operation (or were forced out of business etc), the trust would gain a level of ownership that would allow them to allow non-profit hosting of the game either directly or by a third party.
The advantage to the publisher is that they could declare themselves compliant, and thus their subscribers would know their time/money investment was less at risk of being "wasted".
Thoughts?
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Just to elaborate, I think we're a very long way off reaching the point where MMO providers agree that we have some kind of "rights" to have virtual worlds kept alive and accessible. I think a combination of a standard charter they could sign up to plus lots of pressure from players to do so would achieve this much more quickly.
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I just wanted to edit this and point out that I am, as someone phrased it somewhere on these forums earlier, firmly a "Randian" in that I think businesses have every right to make decisions regarding their intellectual property.
Yes, of course, I agree they can do with their IP as they please. But MMOs are a slightly different beast than most, because they are effectively a combined effort between the publisher, the developer and the community. No MMO can live without the community. But when it comes to legal matters, community is not allowed to have a say. Why? I suppose it is only because contrary to companies, players are a loose bunch that lacks legal representation which would ask for appropriate rights on their behalf.
Don't get me wrong. No publisher should be forced to maintain a game if they do not wish to do so. However, given that - and I can't stress this enough - running an MMO is a shared effort between publishers, developers and the community, situations like the one City finds itself in, that is with a company like NC Soft unwilling to make any effort whatsoever to let the community live on, should not be allowed.
edit: I said they are unwilling to make an effort to let the community live but I should really say that they seem to be actively blocking such efforts thus far.
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Yes, of course, I agree they can do with their IP as they please. But MMOs are a slightly different beast than most, because they are effectively a combined effort between the publisher, the developer and the community. No MMO can live without the community. But when it comes to legal matters, community is not allowed to have a say. Why? I suppose it is only because contrary to companies, players are a loose bunch that lacks legal representation which would ask for appropriate rights on their behalf.
Don't get me wrong. No publisher should be forced to maintain a game if they do not wish to do so. However, given that - and I can't stress this enough - running an MMO is a shared effort between publishers, developers and the community, situations like the one City finds itself in, that is with a company like NC Soft unwilling to make any effort whatsoever to let the community live on, should not be allowed.
I'm trying to make sure I don't come off too 'robotic' during this conversation, because I care about COH too. But I just can't agree with you. This situation is a case of voluntary exchange- When people say that players accept the risk of MMO's closing at any time when they sign up and click "I agree" on the EULA, they're right. If you don't agree to the terms that are laid before you before you can play a game, the logical conclusion is that you should not be playing that game. This is just the cold hard truth.
Now, back to my initial point, because I think it's more constructive. First, it's important not to get out of hand like some people seem to be suggesting, including you. There is no legal recourse, nor is there any conceivable grounds for legal recourse. This is a good thing, because once again it's how capitalism works. Now, as a fan of COH and someone who would love to see the game sold and resurrected, there is a reasonable view to take that doesn't involve throwing voluntary exchange out the window and crying for government regulation in virtual worlds. That's the last thing I want to see.
The reasonable approach is simple: Don't give them any more money. Markets self regulate and this is no exception. If enough people are upset by a company's actions on ethical grounds, those people will no longer financially support or enable that company. The company will have to either accept those losses or change their ways. If the loss is financially sustainable, it just means that obviously they didn't upset a significant amount of their customer base. In the case of NCSoft it already looks like their reputation is going to hell and they're hurting financially.
Voting with your wallet and encouraging others to do the same is reasonable, and it's your prerogative as a consumer. Crying for government oversight and regulation because you agreed to terms of service that in hindsight you probably didn't actually agree to is not reasonable. Accusing someone of a crime or saying someone's actions which were well within the law should be punishable just because you made an error in judgment when agreeing to the terms of use on a product they provided is not reasonable. There is a difference between what someone "shouldn't" do and what they "can't" do. The former is subjective, the latter is objective. Laws don't exist to enforce whims and prejudices. Consumer actions, however, can be used to voice said opinions and ultimately lead to a much more constructive resolution.
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Much as it irritates me, I have to agree with Septipheran on this. Not that Septipheran irritates me LOL, I just hate that he is right about this and that this IS what we agreed to.
Gamers, and MMO gamers for the most part, actually allowed this to happen....by agreeing to pay for this online only system to begin with.
I have always refused to pay for online only games for this very reason...that if the company went under or simply stopped the game...I would be out a lot of money with nothing to show for it. I kept that refusal going until I broke down and played a trial for COH (about a year or so before Freedom). Sigh....I broke down and began paying for it.
I am glad I did...if I had not, I would not have met all the great people I did and would have missed out on the best Superhero MMO STILL TO DATE!!!!. But that does not change the fact that now, I am out money...with nothing to show for it except some screen shots and some memories (great memories, but still only memories) (but I paid something like $20 and got the Original Unreal Tournament and still get a lot of enjoyment out of that...or games Like Call of Duty (1 and 2...never went beyond the WW2 versions).
Players gave these companies this power over them when they agreed to pay for this kind of system.
Trying to take legal action against these companies or bring in government regulations is not the way to go. We ARE going about this the right way....by putting pressure on the company in question....damaging its PR image and most probably affecting its stock value to some degree. (stock holders, by and large, hate negative PR)
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Okay, I admit that there is a very small, irrationally radical part of me that wishes we could threaten the ROK with the removal of all our troops from the DMZ if they don't force NCSoft to sell COH lock, stock, and barrel to Titan. But that is the small radical part, not the rational part which is, thankfully, dominant. :)
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I'm trying to make sure I don't come off too 'robotic' during this conversation, because I care about COH too. But I just can't agree with you. This situation is a case of voluntary exchange- When people say that players accept the risk of MMO's closing at any time when they sign up and click "I agree" on the EULA, they're right. If you don't agree to the terms that are laid before you before you can play a game, the logical conclusion is that you should not be playing that game. This is just the cold hard truth.
I think you may be missing my point, because I am far from - as you put it - crying for government regulation of virtual worlds. I do not think such regulations would be helpful. I am, however, concerned with perseverance of community created data. Who owns it and has the final say about what happens to it? It appears that at the moment the answer is the platform owner and that their power over it is absolute. But this status quo may only survive because it was never challenged and I believe it should be.
As for the capitalism at work: some ISPs would like to prioritize certain types of data while throttling others. This way they could earn additional money by selling higher priorities to content distributors. And given how often the end user has little to no choice in what ISP they use, the invisible hand of the market would be helpless here if not for regulations that prohibit ISPs from this behavior. But this is beside the point and doesn't apply to NC Soft. Just pointing out that voting with the wallet is not always the be all and end all tool for punishing companies that work against the interests of their customers.
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You have all articulated this very well.
If I were to make a real world analogy here...
Imagine if you were to buy a condo in a little resort. It's a quirky place, and happens to, by and large, attract the same sort of people as you. First a few of you come together, then you all start to form community groups, and the next thing you know, you have a city that bumbles along with some clashes, but mostly getting along GREAT.
Then the resort comes to you and says "We're bulldozing. The Hyatt offered us ten times for the land."
You say--"WTF??? I BOUGHT this! I've been paying my condo fees all this time!"
The resort says "Read the fine print. You only bought the rights to live in the condo until we kicked you out. Too bad, so sad, buhbye."
It's not an exact analogy, but it's close. And I seriously think that for an MMORPG we should have the right to find someone with a spare server and run it until the last person leaves.
I hate to be "that guy," but I feel that I have to, here. The condo analogy is nearly perfectly apt, but not for the reasons VV mentions it. Condos are a weird legal entity that I don't understand well enough to comment on; but a more appropriate term would be "apartment complex."
Just as VV's example says, we bought an apartment. Its management ran it with a strong community emphasis, attracting a lot of the same kind of people and putting together tight-knit groups who were always eager to welcome others in. People move in and out, but there's just this something that its long-term tenants can't find anywhere else. They gladly pay their monthly rent, and shop at the on-site gift-and-convenience store that carried complex-specific products, and put their lives into it.
But in the end, they don't own it. They own the furniture they bought, the own the products bought from the store that are only useful with some of the features that the apartment building provides, and they've invested tens of thousands of dollars in living here...but it's not theirs. The building, the space, is owned by a distant corporation that has, for whatever reason, decided to close the complex down, fire its beloved superintendent and management, and evict everybody. They stay until the end of their current lease.
It's sad that all those people are losing their homes, and that they can't find another complex with the same community aspect, but it's the way it is. They can keep all their stuff, but a lot of it doesn't do them much good in other complexes.
(We're talking in big generalities, here. The way NCSoft handled it is the equivalent of kicking all those people out and leaving the building an empty, unused hulk when it had been turning a profit when it was running. This is just plain stupid business. In a more general sense, though, we can hope that most companies that own these metaphorical apartment complexes are in it to make money and are smart enough not to make inexplicable decisions on this scale.)
To force a company that determines running the apartment complex is no longer in their best interests to continue to maintain it is slavery. To force them to give it away against their will is theft. What if they determined that the apartment complex (i.e. the resources that they devote to the game) would serve better as an office building (i.e. are better spent devoted to other products)? If it really will make them more money, then that office building generates more good for more people than the apartment did...or there are perverse governmental incentives. But I edge dangerously close to politics, here.
The long and the short of it is, we knew we were paying rent on a virtual space.
This is not to say anything Save CoH did was wrong. Far from it! I would fully expect that community living in that beloved apartment complex to do all they could to persuade the owners to change their minds. To sell it, to keep running it, anything but evicting them and shutting it down. And this is perfectly right and laudible, especially when they go about it by showing that they'll spend more if they have to to keep it, that their community is a cultural artifact worth preserving in and of itself, that they are going to do good for others to draw attention to their own plight.
But in the end, should those efforts fail, it is wrong to say, "okay, we're going to now accuse you of being immoral and unethical because you made a decision for your own life that negatively impacts ours." We knew it was their property. The correct response is to try to come up with a way to make preservation of the use of those things we DO own possible. We learned this is not happening here and now, and it hurts. But we've got the "Plan Z" ideas as a very valid (if ambitious) plan to build our own, newer apartment complex. And we can discuss ways we'd like to see other companies preserve what is preservable...but we cannot demand that they do on moral/ethical grounds. We can on business grounds: "Find a way to guarantee us this, and we'll do business with you over others." But that's it. Anything else is attempting to claim that the Baker's Union was immoral for refusing to work for less than they wanted and putting Hostess out of business. (Personally, I think they were foolish, but they weren't being unethical or immoral. Just foolish.) To demand they take whatever Hostess offered and continue to work for them would have been slavery.
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I always wondered what kind of entertainment CoH resembled. I believe it--like any MMO--best resembles a casino.
A casino is beautiful. It attracts all the senses. It gives you a place to meet people from all over the world. It dazzles you with fancy costumes, grand spectacles, scrumptious food and a licesnse to explore your desires. "What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas," and "What happens in CoH stays in CoH."
But all of these experiences in the casino are engineered to divorce a person from his or her money. When the money runs out, Vegas has no more use for you and shows you the door in the coldest way, leaving the former patron with nothing.
The casino is a wealth-separating machine, and it is very good at what it does. CoH was, regrettably, also a wealth-separating machine. This became all too apparent when they introduced the Paragon Store. We abstract our spending, buying casino chips--*ahem*--"Paragon Points." We take a spin on the wheel of fortune--*ahem*--the "super packs." They give some the "High Roller's Suite," the VIP players, and let the rest stumble around the casino floor.
From our perspective, CoH was something really profound. From their perspective, it was about as profound as the Sands, or the Flamingo, or the Luxor or the Bellagio. When the getting is good, the casinos remain open...until you conceive of an even bigger, better and more effective wealth-separating machine and require space. Then the casino just becomes something you tear down.
Nobody ever questioned--least of all the owners--the need to bring the Sands down. Forget about how Oceans 11 was filmed there, or Sammy Davis, Jr. played there. All those stories, all those good times that happened on the floor and in the Copa, were--in the end--inconsequential. There is too much money to be made to get sentimental about things, I suppose.
But the tragic thing about CoH--or any MMO--is that they really don't need to be demolished to make space. As if the usual wealth-separating techniques weren't enough, the MMO business lays an even more insidious threat at our feet: extortion. They sell us things we enjoy and want to keep, but to keep these things, we have to make sure that everyone else spends money and attracts new money to keep the publisher in the black and highly profitable. They never tell us how much money they want. They never tell us how popular this game ought to be for it to survive. All we know is that the publisher needs his cut or he'll put us down like an ill dog or a lame horse.
I am constantly struck by the kind of vitriol and desperation we see in places where MMO players discuss these games. We shamelessly promote our game in a desperate attempt to gain more interest in it. We shamelessly tear down other MMOs that compete with us. We do, because our continued enjoyment of these things depends upon convincing our pimp--*ahem*--publisher that we ought not be kicked to the curb, and the only way to do that is to deliver more bodies and wallets to them.
And when the inevitable does happen, when we finally get the axe, we are constantly mocked and ridiculed by the peanut gallery as a has-been, washed up community in a game for has-beens and the washed up. The good things we enjoyed and tried to maintain as best as we could are disparaged as unpopular, unprofitable or unfashionable. We become "yesterday's news" and "yesterday's people," unfit for much other than to become a new body and a new wallet in another exploitive fantasy land.
I'm ashamed at what this industry did to us; I'm ashamed at what we've become because of this industry.
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What has happened with NCSoft and CoH has reminded me that Richard Stallman was right: If you don't have the source, you don't own it.
I hope I remember this in future before I invest (time, energy, passion) into something. Make sure I own it before investing.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/shouldbefree.html
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With all due respect, I dislike the tawdry portrayal of MMOs in Sajaana's post. Can they be that? Yes. Any entertainment CAN be that. Your local pub or gaming store can be that.
Casinos are problematic because they appeal to a false sense of "coming out ahead." If you go into a casino with the mindset that you are spending money on entertainment, you can find like-minded fellows and make friends with the dealers, bartenders, and serving girls, and have a sense of community, provided the owners of the casino don't discourage that sort of thing. (And, if they're good at what they do, they won't; they WANT you to view it as a pleasant place to spend your money and time.)
Casinos get the bad rep they have because they encourage greed. Greed on the part of the customer who goes in thinking they will come out even or with more than they went in. Greed on the part of the owners who see them as money-making machines and view their customers as shills.
In truth, any entertainment business is going to show you the door when you can't pay for more entertainment. It's just business.
What kind of community develops around that business is up to the owners (to foster and/or get out of the way) and the customers (us).
Can an MMO's micro-transactions take a gambling bent? Heck yeah. Trading cards and CCGs have gone that route for years to one degree or another. "Buy this pack and see what rares you get!"
But in the end, it's entertainment and you know what you're buying.
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This really isn't that far from what's being discussed right now (OK, maybe not right no) by the International Telecommunications Union at a large conference in Dubai that relates to the international and national responsibilities/rights where internet freedom is concerned. Bet this topic isn't even on the radar, let alone the table.
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This really isn't that far from what's being discussed right now (OK, maybe not right no) by the International Telecommunications Union at a large conference in Dubai that relates to the international and national responsibilities/rights where internet freedom is concerned. Bet this topic isn't even on the radar, let alone the table.
Quite the opposite; the UN talks' purpose is to find newer and better ways to give international bureaucrats and autocrats the power to regulate the internet and its content and accessibility in nations they don't already control.
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That's no longer the de facto goal, thanks to some western (read: western business) influence. The major totalitarian players, like Russia, China, many of the Middle Eastern countries, are pushing for tighter control, and that will likely result in a lot of corporations just not doing business there. The changes China was able to inflict on Google were more than a little frightening to a lot of players.
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But in the end, it's entertainment and you know what you're buying.
I think the MMO publishers know what they are selling. I have no doubt about that. Do people know what they are buying? Well, in the case of CoH, if they didn't before, they know now.
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I think the MMO publishers know what they are selling. I have no doubt about that. Do people know what they are buying? Well, ithe case of CoH, if they didn't before, they know now.
Oh, we knew what we were buying. We just had hoped that a profitable and beloved entertainment locale wherein we were still spending money would be kept open.
I am not justifying NCSoft's actions, here. I'm just saying that trying to paint the whole industry with a broad brush - to tarnish the game we purport to be wishing we could save with this tawdry metaphor - is a bad idea. NCSoft behaved poorly. Within their legal rights, but outside the bounds of common decency and sense. This left us - who did know what we were buying - shocked and dismayed that the business partner with whom we were working turned out to be an utter fool deliberately screwing up the calculations that enlightened self-interest says would have benefitted us both.
Two people trying to go in as house mates to rent a domicile nicer than either could afford alone doesn't mean that either failed to know what they were buying when one of them suddenly decides he's NOT going to renew the lease and is instead going to live in a hotel despite it costing him more and being not really all that much nicer than the house. The other guy's left high and dry and scrambling to find someplace else to live since he can't get a new housemate for that place and still can't afford it alone. But he knew what he was buying; he just was counting on his house mate to act rationally.
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Its an important issue, because while it primarily effects MMO players, it no longer exclusively effects MMORPG players. There are a lot of games with the new, stupid always connected DRM. To date, I have refused to buy those single player games that require continuous connection.
What happens when those host servers go down? Ideally a 'patch to soloplay' in the non-MMO- situations, but is that actually what's going to happen?
Its a brave new world out here and we're kinda standing on the front line of a much bigger fight then I initially realized.
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Oh, certainly. And you'll find that, despite my defense of an MMO-company's legal right to shut down as a necessity, I am very much in favor of allowing people to bloody-well own the games and other programs they buy.
At the same time, I do understand the licensing agreements' purposes, but DRM and the like has gotten out of hand and is failing to serve the purpose for which it was designed. It's the equivalent of a state-of-the-art TSA security system guarding the main entrance with a simple rope off to the side labeled "go in the front, please" as the only thing preventing rule-breakers from simply walking into the airplane terminals without a boarding pass, let alone going through any security to make sure we know who's there.
We need different solutions that follow the rule of transparent security to authorized users, and we are best served by a bit less paranoia. Honestly, laws and court-precedent-systems that were more forgiving of companies hunting down "big" violators of trademark, patent, and copyright even after ignoring "small" violators would help considerably. But obviously that wouldn't be enough. It'd just help allow them to not play the role of jack-booted thug against little fans who just want to be fans without also having to foresake their rights to something should somebody actively try to exploit their creative efforts for profit without sharing.
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I know you've all heard this, but I must again fall back upon my "art" metaphor. If NCSoft bought the original of a classic work of American art, whether a Warhol, a Superman #1, whatever, charged admission to see it, then sold it off, they'd be in their rights. Destroying the work of art when they're done with it is not within their rights.
Or to use Misty's "condo" analogy, one does not have the right to casually bulldoze a listed building. (In the UK, a listed building is one of recognized historical or cultural significance.)
But who says that City of Heroes falls into such a category?
We say.
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As I get some time, I'd like to explore this issue as well, as it's very important to me too. The fact is that in many cases, people pay thousands of dollars over the course of years and sink thousands of hours into these games, yet we have less access and rights subsequent to a shutdown or other corporate maneuvers than for most sub-$20 bargain bin specials at your local GameStop.
I think this post brings up a larger point than you might have intended, considering that $20 bargain bins at a local GameStop are more and more likely to become a thing of the past, so the issue of a consumer's 'rights' (and let's be frank, these aren't merely 'gamers' rights, they're consumer's rights, I payed for CoH with my money and time, so I don't like being saddled with the bias that this is a 'children only concern' which seems pervasive when you label it only 'gamers' rights) in a digital landscape becomes more and more paramount to our ability to consume things in the way we want.
One counterargument I frequently see to the SaveCoH movement goes something like this: "You know that this game was going to shut down at some point, why are you acting all surprised and mad about it?" Or phrased another way, "Do you think you have the right to force a company like NCsoft to keep supporting a product that they no longer want to?"
This becomes increasingly, as I said before, the forefront of all gaming consumer's rights. It's easy for people who had no stake in CoH to not care about the who, when, how or why it was closed. They don't see the pattern that by siding with NCSoft they're basically opening themselves up to this abuse.
It won't be very long before stores like Blockbuster or GameStop are just gone. It won't be long before retailers like Wal-Mart will only carry hardware, if that. We are turning, through our inability, unwillingness or apathy towards shopping from living breathing human retailers, every game and genre into, effectively MMO models of business, that can be shut down at any moment.
This isn't a problem isolated to City of Heroes. This isn't even a problem isolated to 'gamers' as more and more of our products only work if hooked up to the internet. We're turning our cars and fridges into MMO by virtue of building and buying products that require remote authorization to even run (yes, there are many cars that can be remotely disabled). There will be a point where all customers will be at the mercy for strategic "realignments of corporate focus".
This will not remain a problem that only effects City of Heroes for every long. Is that to be our response to anything that we 'bought' that shuts down? If your car manufacturer wants you to purchase their new year model and decides it's not 'strategically profitable' any longer to keep the authentication server this year's model alive and 'realigns' their focus to next year's model, would we hear these same people saying "You know that this car was going to shut down at some point, why are you acting all surprised and mad about it?" or "Do you think you have the right to force a company like Toyoda to keep supporting a product that they no longer want to?". Should we? Where do we draw this line of 'tolerably' being screwed?
I find that many people draw that line merely at their personal investment and no farther. That somewhat angers me.
It's so easy to let this stuff slide here, and blame us, the players and consumers, for wanting the ability, at bare minimal to buy our product for our personal private use. But I guarantee that if, say you, Tony V, started to distribute openly a 'Direct IP' or 'LAN' version of City of Heroes, you'd receive some pretty strongly worded letters to the opposite in at slowest a week.
The simple answer is yes and no. No, I don't necessarily think that NCsoft must keep City of Heroes servers running indefinitely. However, I do believe that companies should plan ahead for when a game is going to be sunset and make arrangements for it to either keep running after the sunset period or transfer it to someone who can do so. I'm imagining a scenario, for example, in which they basically give the game to Steam or gog.com or some service like that (perhaps multiple services, why not?), who can then charge a nominal fee to cover the cost of a VM somewhere run a single server instance so that people can keep playing. No new investments in development, basically no customer service ("My machine won't run the client!" "Noted.") except kicking the server once in a while if it crashes, etc. Just something to ensure that once someone has invested hundreds or thousands of dollars into a game, it won't just *poof!* be lost when they shut the servers off one day.
This has to be our at least bare minimal right as customers, or otherwise companies should stop forcing themselves into positions where they're relied on for the mere continued existence of their product. My PS2 games sure don't require their manufacturers to breathe to continue to run. Those manufacturers didn't force themselves into a position where that was the case. But everything I own on Steam, I'm pretty sure is going to vanish the moment Valve tires of Steam for any reason. Not only will I not be able to play most of the games on it anymore, especially multiplayer ones (most of them don't have a 'LAN' or 'Direct IP' component anymore), but I won't be able to install them anymore, because Steam as far as I know doesn't release ISOs I could burn to a DVD to preserve them beyond either their server cloud or my computer. So if the former goes up and the latter goes up, then the game's gone. Single player or not.
That's why this goes way beyond City of Heroes, or even MMOs. If companies don't want to be relied on to continue the existence of things we bought, they should at very least prepare to give the ability to make these games exist to us, the customer. That should be our basic legal right, the acceptable floor for any provider of any online service.
And they sure as heck shouldn't be announcing upgrades to a service they're about to pull the plug from tomorrow. How that isn't false advertisement, I have no idea.
My stock answer is that after enticing players to spend so much time and money on a game in a genre that's so conducive to that kind of investment, companies like NCsoft have a moral and ethical obligation to not leave players out in the cold like we have been. NCsoft has now done it five times. I wish I had spoken up earlier when they did it to other games, but I don't want to compound my silence then with apathy now. At some point, players have to make a stand and say, "This is not acceptable."
That's exactly why the people telling you to 'Shut up and get over it' are dooming themselves, too. They don't foresee this problem heading their way, and continue to buy things off of Steam and Origin and from Uplay. They still think that this hurricane will never reach them, so it's 'your' problem, and you're a baby for complaining about something they don't deal with.
But it's going to be their problem, so it frustrates me that they can't see that.
There's another thread around here that someone created regarding a Gamer's Bill of Rights. When I get time, I'll probably circle back and read it again and see if we can't get something moving on the idea. Nobody should have to go through this because some faceless corporation decides, "Yeah, we're done with that."
Like I said, this should be broader than just 'Gamer' rights. This is a problem that is going to and is already seeping into every product imaginable. There's a very real possibility that the very heater for the tap water in your house won't work in the winter because of an online service being shut off.
I know you've all heard this, but I must again fall back upon my "art" metaphor. If NCSoft bought the original of a classic work of American art, whether a Warhol, a Superman #1, whatever, charged admission to see it, then sold it off, they'd be in their rights. Destroying the work of art when they're done with it is not within their rights.
Or to use Misty's "condo" analogy, one does not have the right to casually bulldoze a listed building. (In the UK, a listed building is one of recognized historical or cultural significance.)
But who says that City of Heroes falls into such a category?
We say.
And if we don't have the right to say whether or not something like that does, effectively, who's saying that a 'listed' building has cultural or historical significance? It seems entirely arbitrary to point to a dilapidated building and be like "This has cultural significance because many hours of music and plays came from it", but then to look at a game and be like "Oh, that's just a waste of time.".
Oh, we knew what we were buying. We just had hoped that a profitable and beloved entertainment locale wherein we were still spending money would be kept open.
I am not justifying NCSoft's actions, here. I'm just saying that trying to paint the whole industry with a broad brush - to tarnish the game we purport to be wishing we could save with this tawdry metaphor - is a bad idea. NCSoft behaved poorly. Within their legal rights, but outside the bounds of common decency and sense. This left us - who did know what we were buying - shocked and dismayed that the business partner with whom we were working turned out to be an utter fool deliberately screwing up the calculations that enlightened self-interest says would have benefited us both.
I've found that when dealing with entities more concerned with profit than anything else, that the bounds of their common decency and sense is exactly where their legal obligations are, and no further.
If that makes me seem 'anti-capitalistic' or whatever, so be it. That's what happens in a system that uses the lowest common denominator in human motivation (greed) as its sole motivator. It's like powering a car with uranium; it might be effective but any system isn't tempered with protections and oversight but is built on something that dangerous, it's bound to explode over and over again.
Two people trying to go in as house mates to rent a domicile nicer than either could afford alone doesn't mean that either failed to know what they were buying when one of them suddenly decides he's NOT going to renew the lease and is instead going to live in a hotel despite it costing him more and being not really all that much nicer than the house. The other guy's left high and dry and scrambling to find someplace else to live since he can't get a new housemate for that place and still can't afford it alone. But he knew what he was buying; he just was counting on his house mate to act rationally.
Yeah, but what would we do other than introduce basic floors in contract law to prevent such things? Without building 'customer rights' or whatever.
It seems like people expecting us to just give up and be like "Oh well, I knew that the post 2004 future was all a scam, folly to me for living in it!" do nothing but make themselves perpetually screwed over for.. what? So that we can make NCSoft feel better about themselves?
I never understood this idea of siding with an entity clearly in the wrong because people are to unimaginative to envision a situation where they're not a disposable open wallet. NCSoft sure as heck didn't see themselves that way.
When people bash us for being upset that thousands of dollars of our own investment are just gone for, honestly no reason, they're basically saying "Grow up and accept that you're a disposable open wallet. Just lie back, close your eyes, and imagine something not terrible is happening, and try to enjoy the reaming".
Quite the opposite; the UN talks' purpose is to find newer and better ways to give international bureaucrats and autocrats the power to regulate the internet and its content and accessibility in nations they don't already control.
I don't find either are true or false, really. Google isn't some free speech and privacy champion. They love them the ability to squash free speech and to peer into your intimate life the minute they're in the reigns and making a buck off of it. This isn't Evil vs. Good. This is Terrible Idea Makers vs. Terrible Idea Makers and no matter who wins the internet loses.
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I agree largely with what you are saying, Osborn. This is definitely a Consumer Rights issue. Customers are not a commodity, except for the Ferengi; they are people and as such deserve better treatment.
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I've found that when dealing with entities more concerned with profit than anything else, that the bounds of their common decency and sense is exactly where their legal obligations are, and no further.
Common decency, maybe, though I suspect that you're allowing a subset to stereotype the whole. Common sense? "I'm motivated by profit! I have a product that is making me money if I just leave it alone! I'm going to close it down!" That's not sense, common or otherwise. By definition, sense helps you reason your way towards behaviors that lead to your goal.
If that makes me seem 'anti-capitalistic' or whatever, so be it. That's what happens in a system that uses the lowest common denominator in human motivation (greed) as its sole motivator. It's like powering a car with uranium; it might be effective but any system isn't tempered with protections and oversight but is built on something that dangerous, it's bound to explode over and over again.
It's not "greed." It's "enlightened self-interest." When people allow greed for the short-term to blind them to their long term self interest, they are not being enlightened. And, in the long run, unless you permit such people the reins of power to change the rules away from capitalism (as has happened frequently in the last 15 years, most notably with the increasing amounts of regulation that actually help established powerhouses become de facto monopolies by hiking cost-of-entry to ludicrous sums), it hurts those who so allow themselves to be blinded.
Proper capitalism hasn't been in place in my living memory. It was closest when I was a small child in the 80s. Proper capitalism respects life, liberty, and property. Life is the property of those who bear it, and shall not be infringed unless they are using it to snuff out others'. Liberty is the freedom to choose to act as you will, so long as you do not use it to do violence or theft to another. Property is anything you produce through your own industry or obtain from another who gives it willingly. Generally, this is accomplished through trade, but it is within the rights of somebody to simply give away property and make it that of another (willing) recipient, as well.
Swindling, theft, and deception-based "deals" meant to cost people more than they thought are all to be criminalized, as is extortion and violence (when the violence is not done in self-defense or defense of another). Basic rule for liberty: you can swing your fist however you want as long as you don't include my face in its path.
Yeah, but what would we do other than introduce basic floors in contract law to prevent such things? Without building 'customer rights' or whatever.
Nothing. Except, usually, the self-interest of the other. If you fear your partner is going to pull a stunt like this, you can include in your leasing contract clauses meant to prevent it, requiring adequate warning if the contract is not to be renewed or financial penalties to the one who leaves without giving adequate warning. But if you don't put those in, there's nothing that should be enforced by statute against it. You can't legislate morality; you can only teach it and hope that it will be learned. Failing that, you can only hope that social pressure will at least encourage it.
It seems like people expecting us to just give up and be like "Oh well, I knew that the post 2004 future was all a scam, folly to me for living in it!" do nothing but make themselves perpetually screwed over for.. what? So that we can make NCSoft feel better about themselves?
You misunderstand. The reason I, at least, am arguing is that I fear the well-intentioned sentiments of those talking about how the laws should be changed will lead to either preventing more MMOs from being created (out of fear of what the new laws will require) or, worse, lead to still more laws because "well, the auto industry/computer industry/whatever is not so different..."
When you craft laws, you give power to a third party. You are legalizing, ultimately, the use of violence to extort behavior. So you have to be very, very careful what laws you advocate, because every single law is an abridgement of a freedom. Yes, even good ones: the laws against theft abridge my freedom to simply walk into your house and take your computer for my personal use; the laws against battery and murder abridge my freedom to beat you up because I don't like what you're saying about capitalism.
The fact that I am a moral man who would not do these things does not change that I do not have the freedom, legally, to do them thanks to those laws.
In order, however, to optimize productivity, one must not remove the freedoms to perform productive behaviors. Because theft, extortion, violence, and murder are detrimental to productivity, optimal law discourages or prohibits them. But the kinds of laws that would arise from the sentiments I see here would hinder productive, honest people in the name of preventing "hardship."
It is up to us as private citizens and members of the business community (whether customers or otherwise) to police good and bad treatment and caretaking of customers and consumer products. We do this as customers by choosing where to spend our money, and as citizens by bringing awareness and scrutiny onto those who act poorly (in this case, NCSoft). As producers, we actively strive to come up with better models and test them by doing business under them, and getting our customers to spread the word about us and hopefully proving the superiority of our methods.
All else is destructive, and thus to be shunned.
This is why I fully support the efforts to destroy NCSoft in a PR battle, to put pressure on them to act as we wish through the court of public opinion, and to find agencies who might take over the product in a fair and legal way if we can persuade NCSoft to cut their losses. We are their customers, and they have angered us. We are well within our rights to scream it to the world so that all know of NCSoft's bad treatment of its customers. That's the market at work. It is why I am against legal action, however; what they have done is bad behavior, socially and economically, and should be punished in those courts. It is not against the rigid laws of ownership, and we should not tamper with those in this fashion. Simply refuse to do business with those who use these ownership models if you truly find them untenable. Otherwise, go in knowing the risks you take.
PR fights to change the minds of those who choose what ownership models to use, and even opening your own company to try out your superior models of ownership, are good. Trying to do it through the courts and the legislative process is bad, because your ideas are untested and cannot be brought into competition with other models for testing if you enforce them as laws from on high. If, in testing, your ideas work, you will not need to impose them as laws; others will adopt them out of that "base greed" you despise, because it gets more customers and thus more profits. By not imposing them as laws, you leave room for still others to try out still newer things, and succeed or fail on their merits, and the successful ones will likewise be mimicked.
This is swarm intelligence at work, and it is the ONLY way societies have ever advanced. When autocratic law stifled such innovation, it nonetheless happened...just in what were called "black markets" and "forbidden research."
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It's sad that all those people are losing their homes, and that they can't find another complex with the same community aspect, but it's the way it is. They can keep all their stuff, but a lot of it doesn't do them much good in other complexes.
This is an awesome thread.
The condo analogy is good, but the problem in terms of the MMO gamer is, they don't even get to keep any of their stuff. OK so you paid the rent to play there, but all the stuff also goes. You walk away with absolutely nothing but staring at a screen with a server disconnect message.
Characters, creations, add-ons, expansion packs, original game purchase, etc etc - all gone. There's nothing.
I used an analogy of a car lease vs. buy in another thread, similar kind of thing. We're basically leasing, not buying. When we lease, we don't own the car, the finance company does. At the end of the lease, we own jack, it goes back to them. BUT....with a lease, there are terms. We know how long the lease is for. And we also have a buyout option at the end.
The finance company doesn't one day out of the blue say, you know what, I know you have a lease on this vehicle for 2.5 more years, but we just don't want to support this car anymore, so the lease ends today. Please give me the keys, k thx bye.
There also is no option for us at the end of the lease to extend or buyout.
There's commitments both sides make. I guess you could say sure, they can stop the game at any point, just as we can stop paying for the game at any point. If we make it contractual they have to keep the game running for 10 years, we'd also have to agree to keep paying for 10 years, using the lease analogy. (arguing with myself here)
So yes I think it's time to re-evaluate what the player gets out of this deal, because it's the player making the commitment of investment of lots of $$$$$$ and time. What that is, I'm just not sure yet. But I'd like to be feeling more that I BOUGHT something, vs LEASED.
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I would disagree on calling it a right to play the game(s).
HOWEVER, I do agree that if a company is going to close an online game, they should be legally mandated to ensure that it remains playable in some form - be it by releasing the server code either publicly or making it available (perhaps for a minimum fee, with no attached warranty) to interested individualswith some legal restrictions to ensure neither the materials nor the IP are misused (probably a very specific license allowing a limited use of IP in relation to running the server only and forbidding any reuse).
Another alternative would be ceasing all content and software updates, consolidating existing shards partially or completely, and switching the game over to a donation-based upkeep model (read: the servers are kept running as long as the player base continues providing enough money to the server fund to cover those costs; the monthly upkeep costs are publicly known)
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You have all articulated this very well.
If I were to make a real world analogy here...
Imagine if you were to buy a condo in a little resort. It's a quirky place, and happens to, by and large, attract the same sort of people as you. First a few of you come together, then you all start to form community groups, and the next thing you know, you have a city that bumbles along with some clashes, but mostly getting along GREAT.
Then the resort comes to you and says "We're bulldozing. The Hyatt offered us ten times for the land."
You say--"WTF??? I BOUGHT this! I've been paying my condo fees all this time!"
The resort says "Read the fine print. You only bought the rights to live in the condo until we kicked you out. Too bad, so sad, buhbye."
It's not an exact analogy, but it's close. And I seriously think that for an MMORPG we should have the right to find someone with a spare server and run it until the last person leaves.
Let's add to this... That, with the condo, comes the materials and supplies to fully decorate your home as you see fit (some is extra bought add-ons). You use those resources to craft picture frames, paintings, sculptures, candleabras, drapes, bedding, rugs, etc. and so on...
And, when the condo is taken away from you, all that stuff is theirs too and not yours.
Anyway, as you said, obviously there are differences and this is just a bit of anaolgy excersise fun, but I thought that added a bit more of the user investment and additional loss.
I, honestly, wonder how much one could squeeze squatting into such an analogy.
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It's just business.
You know what, I'm going to set aside the fictionalized gangster-image that this statement conjures up, and instead go with something else.
The phrase "Its just business" reminds me of another phrase, "I was only following orders."
Both phrases have been used as excuses for terrible things for far too long. I do not, and will not accept either in cases where people have been screwed-over in some fashion.
Now, in other posts you have made it clear that you do support the ability to play what you buy and pay for, so its not you that I'm taking issue with: its simply this phrase. I hate it. I have always hated it, and I will always hate it.
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While I would like some consumer protection for MMO's, it will be a tough one. It is similar to patents that must be licensed under RAND (Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory) terms to competitors for key pieces of technology. This would be awesome, but I don't think that there is the political will to do such a thing. Perhaps wrapped up in consumer protection for purchased digital goods in general?
On a related note: I made purchases from the store that are attached to my account. I don't get a refund for something I bought, but it has been taken from me. Have I misunderstood the fine print of a store purchase?
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Here's another analogy for you ;)
The way I think of CoH is like a traditional family pub that's been in a village for generations. It's the hub of the local community, everyone goes there and buys drinks (of course) but they also go there to have a chat, indulge in an occasional meal, organise and take part in quizzes, maybe play a bit of pool...basically people go there 'just because'.
Then one day a brewery guy comes along and says "Good morning. The brewery that owns this pub is knocking it down. We want to build shiny new micro-breweries instead."
The locals sputter into their pints and say "What? But why? We liked the old pub!"
The brewery guy says "The micro-brewery will have new and exciting beverages, much better than the old-fashioned 'real ale' in the old pub. Of course, you won't be able to drink AT the micro-brewery, but the beverages will be on sale elsewhere."
"But...but..." stammer the locals, "It wasn't just about the beer! Don't you understand? This is a COMMUNITY! It's not just a building where people buy beer and sit and drink it! We do that, sure, but there's so much more!"
The brewery guy just blinks uncomprehendingly and reiterates: "The micro-brewery will have new and exciting beverages. Everyone likes new and exicting beverages."
"We don't understand you brewery guy, we're PAYING your brewery for these drinks! Don't you want our money? This pub is a business, but it's also so much more - why would you throw that away for a factory that just churns out non-descript fizzy crap?"
etc etc...
We all know the words to this particular "Why are you closing us down?" song of course ;)
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Turjan's analogy is a good one. The brewery guy owns the place. He can do this if he wants. It hurts all his loyal customers who have loved the place, but it IS his to do this with.
In truth, he is costing himself their business. If he truly has the money to build a new micro-brewery with "exciting new beverages," he would be wiser to build it elsewhere and use his family pub as a sales site to increase his profits further.
Or, if for some reason he hates the pub-running business, he would be wiser to hire a manager to run it for him, or sell it to somebody who wants it, using that money to help finance his new micro-brewery dream.
Bulldozing the place to build the micro-brewery is idiocy. It's not a failure of capitalism, mind; it's a failure of that man to be rational. No laws will protect against irrationality in the hands of the ones empowered by law to make decisions. At least here, nobody is out money they put into it. If it was a law that gave regulators or bureaucrats discretionary power to approve/deny things, to decide "oh, yes, a micro-brewery would be a better use of that space, so you must bulldoze the worthless pub," it is theft on TOP of a tragically bad decision.
As long as we don't have laws getting in the way, there's also little preventing the town from getting together and building a new pub, perhaps run by the young man who hung around with the idiot's father because he wished he could tend bar rather than inherit his family farm. They rebuild, they support him, their community finds a new home with all they loved. Maybe with the building being newer, there are some things that feel a bit raw, but it also has the annoying tendency of the thatched roof to develop leaks fixed by virtue of being shingled.
Since our "pub-owner," NCSoft, has behaved irrationally, we are turning to the latter solution with the Phoenix Project.
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When you craft laws, you give power to a third party. You are legalizing, ultimately, the use of violence to extort behavior. So you have to be very, very careful what laws you advocate, because every single law is an abridgement of a freedom. Yes, even good ones: the laws against theft abridge my freedom to simply walk into your house and take your computer for my personal use; the laws against battery and murder abridge my freedom to beat you up because I don't like what you're saying about capitalism.
The fact that I am a moral man who would not do these things does not change that I do not have the freedom, legally, to do them thanks to those laws.
In order, however, to optimize productivity, one must not remove the freedoms to perform productive behaviors. Because theft, extortion, violence, and murder are detrimental to productivity, optimal law discourages or prohibits them. But the kinds of laws that would arise from the sentiments I see here would hinder productive, honest people in the name of preventing "hardship."
Wait, what? While I do understand your fears that regulation may do harm instead of good, I really don't like where you go with your parallels. Murder is not a mere detriment to productivity. I do not think this particular way of seeing how markets do or should operate as healthy.
It is up to us as private citizens and members of the business community (whether customers or otherwise) to police good and bad treatment and caretaking of customers and consumer products. We do this as customers by choosing where to spend our money, and as citizens by bringing awareness and scrutiny onto those who act poorly (in this case, NCSoft). As producers, we actively strive to come up with better models and test them by doing business under them, and getting our customers to spread the word about us and hopefully proving the superiority of our methods.
All else is destructive, and thus to be shunned.
I disagree with you strongly here, because you are going to the extreme by giving all the power to the platform owner and none to the platform user, because you believe that if rights of the latter group would be regulated it would also discourage platform owners from creating more platforms. Would it? Maybe in certain cases, but not as a whole, because the invisible hand of the market works miracles where there are money to be made: if there is money to be made, sooner or later money will be made and no amount of regulation can stop it. But I do not want to water down my argument by exploring the business dynamics in various legal environments.
Instead I would like to emphasize - again - that the real issue here is that in the MMO field (and in cloud computing in general) the platform owners have the absolute power over content that is to various extent co-created by platform users, while the latter group is at the mercy of the platform owners to act with their interest in mind. This is bad for us, the users and has to change. And I have no doubt it eventually will, because maybe closure of a niche MMO is not significant enought to make enough people angry, but MMOs are simply a fragment of a bigger picture. One day an important cloud platform, such as Google Docs, will pull a stunt similar to the one that killed City of Heroes and then all regulatory hell will break loose. As an end user of cloud computing products I look forward to that day.
This is swarm intelligence at work, and it is the ONLY way societies have ever advanced. When autocratic law stifled such innovation, it nonetheless happened...just in what were called "black markets" and "forbidden research."
I think you may be reading way too much into it.
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Instead I would like to emphasize - again - that the real issue here is that in the MMO field (and in cloud computing in general) the platform owners have the absolute power over content that is to various extent co-created by platform users, while the latter group is at the mercy of the platform owners to act with their interest in mind. This is bad for us, the users and has to change. And I have no doubt it eventually will, because maybe closure of a niche MMO is not significant enough to make enough people angry, but MMOs are simply a fragment of a bigger picture. One day an important cloud platform, such as Google Docs, will pull a stunt similar to the one that killed City of Heroes and then all regulatory hell will break loose. As an end user of cloud computing products I look forward to that day
Dear Zod, I never made that connection until you mentioned it, but you are absolutely right.
The current MMO model is indeed a type of cloud computing. So, what happens when one day Google, or Amazon, or someone else with cloud-services just up and decides to kill off the service?
Yeah, we definitely need to fight for some end-user rights that are far more comprehensive than what we have now.
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Wait, what? While I do understand your fears that regulation may do harm instead of good, I really don't like where you go with your parallels. Murder is not a mere detriment to productivity. I do not think this particular way of seeing how markets do or should operate as healthy.
No, it is not a "mere detriment," it is an awful crime. But it is still a detriment. I bring it up not because I don't think there are stronger reasons to oppose it, but because I'm heading off arguments I've seen in the past. "Oh, so anything that makes profit is good? I guess you're okay with killing people to make money, then!" You wouldn't believe how often that's a go-to justification for laws inhibiting liberty, and so I choose to use a simplified singular premise as my thesis and show how just from that the protection of life, as well as liberty and property, is essential when crafting law. My apologies if you thought I was saying that's the ONLY reason to prohibit murder. Like I said, I am a moral man, and find murder abhorrent.
I disagree with you strongly here, because you are going to the extreme by giving all the power to the platform owner and none to the platform user, because you believe that if rights of the latter group would be regulated would discourage platform owners from creating more platforms. Would it? Maybe in certain cases, but not as a whole, because the invisible hand of the market works miracles where there are money to be made: if there is money to be made, sooner or later money will be made and no amount of regulation can stop it. But I do not want to water down my argument by exploring the business dynamics in various legal environments.
Actually, I'm giving the single most important power to the platform user: choice to not use. Especially when we discuss entertainment products, if you don't like the terms established by the platform owner, if you don't like the ownership model and the level of control and freedom it gives you, you have every right not to use it.
Moreover, I give the platform user who is dedicated enough the freedom to develop his own platform and his own ownership models and try to sell them. Attract like-minded people who dislike the same things you dislike in the existing ownership models offered to them. If you think it's impossible, then you wait for your opportunity: when you're proven right about the flaws in the ownership model and there are customers crying out in outrage over how they've been unfairly (albeit within the legalities of the framework to which they agreed) dealt with. Then you step in and say, "I know a better way. Come, experience my product, with my better model that will protect your investment of time and energy and emotion." And you make your profits while you watch the supposedly-unbeatable, supposedly-almighty company that used the bad model die.
Living well is the best revenge. 8)
Instead I would like to emphasize - again - that the real issue here is that in the MMO field (and in cloud computing in general) the platform owners have the absolute power over content that is to various extent co-created by platform users, while the latter group is at the mercy of the platform owners to act with their interest in mind. This is bad for us, the users and has to change. And I have no doubt it eventually will, because maybe closure of a niche MMO is not significant enought to make enough people angry, but MMOs are simply a fragment of a bigger picture. One day an important cloud platform, such as Google Docs, will pull a stunt similar to the one that killed City of Heroes and then all regulatory hell will break loose. As an end user of cloud computing producsts I look forward to that day
I dread the day regulation is used to "fix" it. I guarantee it will only make the problem worse, as suddenly only one entity - the government - is deciding what content to allow.
Me, I look forward to the continuing reduction in cost of the resources required to do cloud computing and the like, so that more and more platform-providers enter the market, unrestrained by regulations meant to "enforce fair play" other than "no promising one thing in a contract and then reneging." The various models will be tested, tried, and the ones that work best to satisfy end users will be the ones that thrive. Because they'll attract all the customers.
I think you are reading way too much into it.
Nope. Definitely SI in action. SI is why America had the powerhouse economy it had in the 20th century (and even before, though it was less obvious while it was "merely" catching up to Europe's thousand+ years of development in a tenth the time).
Dear Zod, I never made that connection until you mentioned it, but you are absolutely right.
The current MMO model is indeed a type of cloud computing. So, what happens when one day Google, or Amazon, or someone else with cloud-services just up and decides to kill off the service?
Yeah, we definitely need to fight for some end-user rights that are far more comprehensive than what we have now.
I sincerely hope you organize an effort to build a cloud-computing entity that has the kind of protections you want, and go into competition with Google, Amazon, etc. such that, when they pull that stunt, you can say, "come to me; I have what you need," to the harmed users. And then you will be wealthy, and users will be protected, and we are not paying bureaucrats to decide that no, in fact, they don't want to see you even try.
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Sorry, by that point the harm has already been done.
While I appreciate your stance on the free-market, I don't agree with it.
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Sorry, by that point the harm has already been done.
While I appreciate your stance on the free-market, I don't agree with it.
You will never, ever prevent harm with rules and regulations. You can't, because until you test your rules against a control that lacks them, you can't know how your rules will influence the benefit:harm ratio. Many rules, implemented with good intent, cause more harm than good because they were put in place untested - sometimes because somebody thought "this COULD happen," and others because somebody over-reacted to something that DID happen.
While caution is good, it is best to train people to think for themselves and measure risk for themselves. Rules - good rules - should never protect people from themselves, but from active efforts to prevent them from making free, informed choices. (I am speaking here of mature adults who are in full possession of their faculties; discussion of those with mental deficiencies or too young to know better are sticky in and of themselves and are a whole other topic of conversation. The base assumption, barring other evidence, should always be that the adult decision-makers are capable of rational decision-making if not denied access to needed information.)
A friend of mine likes the following phrase, and it sums up why it will always be too late to prevent harm the first time:
"Rules exist to prevent something from happening a second time."
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I'm a big believer in teaching people to think for themselves.
Unfortunately, that's not going to happen anytime soon.
We're going to have to agree to disagree on this score.
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Common decency, maybe, though I suspect that you're allowing a subset to stereotype the whole. Common sense? "I'm motivated by profit! I have a product that is making me money if I just leave it alone! I'm going to close it down!" That's not sense, common or otherwise. By definition, sense helps you reason your way towards behaviors that lead to your goal.
I'm sure that, had we laid down and shut up, they would had been able to make more money off the closure of a thriving, albeit tiny portion of their portfolio. Their stock has been taking due to negative reputation, not because they couldn't find a way to make money off shutting the game down. That's what I meant by their common sense being motivated by greed.
It's not "greed." It's "enlightened self-interest." When people allow greed for the short-term to blind them to their long term self interest, they are not being enlightened.
Call it what you want. I don't see much of a difference. That sounds like semantics somebody tells themselves to help them get through the day. They're allowing short-term greed to motivate them to make us lose out on our long-term investment. See, me being motivated by greed doesn't mean I, personally, have to pay the long-term costs of my short-term gains. The only way that would be true is if we all lived in our own little bubble dimension. I'm not immortal, if I made a billion dollars right now even if it cost the world 50 times that in 40 years, I'm still gold. I'm not even counting on being alive that long.
I'm not saying all people do this. I'm just saying that it'd be extremely naive to imagine a world where nobody ever did, and just kinda cross your fingers and hope that they wouldn't.
And, in the long run, unless you permit such people the reins of power to change the rules away from capitalism (as has happened frequently in the last 15 years, most notably with the increasing amounts of regulation that actually help established powerhouses become de facto monopolies by hiking cost-of-entry to ludicrous sums), it hurts those who so allow themselves to be blinded.
First, I don't care about sticking to one ideology, I only care about what works. That tends to be a moderated and mixed approach.
Second, I ain't sure what world you've been seeing where we've been moving 'away' from capitalism. We've been deregulating things that were regulated for the last 30 years. Labor laws and public support for labor support has been falling steadily. Call it a victory or a loss at your own discretion, but that's how it's been.
Third, again, wouldn't 'enlightened self interest' compel these 'established' interests to fight for said regulation. Again you're promoting a system that endorses a motivator (however grand you feel it is) then complaining about when the powerful use that motivator to do bad things. It's like you can recognize something is wrong, but you can't and won't blame the ideology, so you are arguing that we just need more of the ideology.
That's why I don't try to strive to 'cleave' to any one ideology and just look at what does or doesn't work, taking a scalpel to the problem where it's needed.
If deregulation in some areas, like the regulation that you claim stops businesses from starting up, can help, I'd be for it. You'd have to prove that it does, and I'd be skeptical that it does.
I'm typically skeptical of taking the advice of the players profiting from the advice, especially if said advice commonly makes everybody (and myself) else pay for it, and it's been these big players that you say are profiting from regulation constantly telling us to let them do whatever they want then hope unicorns and puppies explode out of it, so it would be a tough sell, but I'm not closed to the idea.
But that said, even if you were able to convince me of that, it's not going to necessarily make me strive to some other ideological spectrum.
Fourth, why is it always cool when somebody with a lot of power uses their 'enlightened self interest' to promote themselves, but suddenly frowned on if say, I used my 'enlightened self interest' to band together with my peers to fight for a higher wage. Or to keep a game running that I liked and spend money on. Kinda the pot calling the kettle black a bit. Maybe my best tool in my arsenal is cooperation and teamwork with my peers. Like what we're doing here, with NCSoft. I know for sure that if this effort to save this game was left up to any one man, it would had died on arrival.
Proper capitalism hasn't been in place in my living memory.
'Proper' capitalism hasn't been in place in anybody's living memory, because I don't think any of us here can truthfully claim to had been around in the 1800's.
It was closest when I was a small child in the 80s. Proper capitalism respects life, liberty, and property. Life is the property of those who bear it, and shall not be infringed unless they are using it to snuff out others'. Liberty is the freedom to choose to act as you will, so long as you do not use it to do violence or theft to another. Property is anything you produce through your own industry or obtain from another who gives it willingly. Generally, this is accomplished through trade, but it is within the rights of somebody to simply give away property and make it that of another (willing) recipient, as well.
Here you're mostly just trying to humanize unfeeling abstract concepts, and I'm not really buying it much. Capitalism isn't the smile of a baby, or the first tender kiss of two lovers on a warm spring morning. It's just an extremely complex social and mathematical system of processing resources. That's it. It's not your date, lover, best friend, mother, or son. It's a tool. If it needs to be tweaked, then do so. Capitalism doesn't 'respect' anything, because it's a tool. It can be used to motivate respect for human beings, and it can be used to screw them over, same with any laws or social constructs.
Secondly, property and rights are also human constructs that serve as a polite way to do business slightly less barbarically. They're in the same sort of boat as laws. Idealizing them and humanizing them like such makes you blind to their origins, uses and costs.
You might feel you should have the right to life. But that's a really flexible concept, even then, because then you go on to talk about some exceptions to the right of life, such as defending yourself. That's because your right to life is a pleasantry we as a society give to each other to make society better to live in. It would behoove you though to realize that said right is only backed up in the same way as everything else; through bribery, diplomacy or force, and only exists as long as enough people say it does and have the ability to uphold it.
You might feel you have right to property, but what entitles you to the Earth? You say that you should have the right to things you 'produce' with your own industry, but at what point where you entitled to the materials you 'produced' with? Or the land needed to have space to produce it with. At some point down the economic chain somebody is getting something for nothing.
At some point you have people basically laying claim to things they don't own, telling everybody else that now I own this and you can't have it, then wanting compensation for use of resources that they just kind of said they own. Then smugly telling themselves they have a magical inherent 'right' to all this and the ability to reap everything sown on that land, to the point where people that didn't get to yell 'tag' on the whole of the earth, to make their daily bread, have to work that person's land because they have no other choice and no 'right' to anything that sustains their life.
That system is inherently flawed. You have a ruling caste that smugly tells everybody that they have a special 'right' to the proceeds of their work because they have a 'right' to do what they want with property. Knowing full well that their rights only exist as long as the community doesn't band together and lynch them.
But you know what? Again, I'm not interested in cleaving entirely to one system or another. If parts of capitalism work, if pretending that rights are important helps me get some of the things my own 'enlightened self interest' wants, if working to ensure some people who frankly are competition with me have a 'right' to property they claimed that nobody owned can still make all of us better off, I'm for it.
But I'm not for cleaving to this ideal even if it sinks me. My 'self interest' wouldn't allow it.
Swindling, theft, and deception-based "deals" meant to cost people more than they thought are all to be criminalized, as is extortion and violence (when the violence is not done in self-defense or defense of another). Basic rule for liberty: you can swing your fist however you want as long as you don't include my face in its path.
Yeah, but if you can swing your fist so hard it creates hurricanes, then you have more responsibility with your fists than previously thought, wouldn't you agree? If a man existed, as a thought experiment, that could swing his fist so hard that even if it didn't connect with your face, but created an air pressure difference strong enough that it could blow away an entire neighborhood, would you not have to amend your basic rule for liberty?
That's the state of the world, though, right now. And that's the state of the world as it always has been, and always will be. There are people who can 'swing' their 'fist' of money hard enough to damage those that they don't directly 'hit'. So once again a 'basic rule' or ideology that strives to solve all problems isn't something I want to cling too hard to.
You might think that people swinging their hurricane fists occurs in a victimless bubble, but reality rarely plays that out. Reality requires solutions that are more nuanced than "I'll do whatever I want and hope that my poisoning my portion of the river stays in my side of the river".
Nothing. Except, usually, the self-interest of the other. If you fear your partner is going to pull a stunt like this, you can include in your leasing contract clauses meant to prevent it, requiring adequate warning if the contract is not to be renewed or financial penalties to the one who leaves without giving adequate warning. But if you don't put those in, there's nothing that should be enforced by statute against it. You can't legislate morality; you can only teach it and hope that it will be learned. Failing that, you can only hope that social pressure will at least encourage it.
That's the thing though, putting your hands up and watching a murder and going "Can't legalize morality!" makes for a poor society quickly.
You misunderstand. The reason I, at least, am arguing is that I fear the well-intentioned sentiments of those talking about how the laws should be changed will lead to either preventing more MMOs from being created (out of fear of what the new laws will require) or, worse, lead to still more laws because "well, the auto industry/computer industry/whatever is not so different..."
Giving the code or an executable to the players for something they've paid for that they have no reason to keep secret due to it being buried is hardly an undue burden on an MMO creator. REALLY, NCSoft wouldn't have to had done anything but step back and not get in the way; Tony V's crew was well on its way to reverse engineering a lot of it anyways for the legal purposes of creating this webpage.
I ain't asking for NCSoft to do much in the way of work. Heck, most of us are willing to PAY EXTRA for this. There's a thread like every week of somebody being like "We should start a kickstarter for this!", even though there's nothing to buy yet.
Saying that a company should be 'free' to make a self destructing product only INVITES abuse, majorly. "We shouldn't burden them with the horrible task of making sure their ovens don't break down and leak poisonous gas! If we legislate that even less people will be willing to make ovens!".
When you craft laws, you give power to a third party. You are legalizing, ultimately, the use of violence to extort behavior. So you have to be very, very careful what laws you advocate, because every single law is an abridgement of a freedom. Yes, even good ones: the laws against theft abridge my freedom to simply walk into your house and take your computer for my personal use; the laws against battery and murder abridge my freedom to beat you up because I don't like what you're saying about capitalism.
That's true, but the thing is, the nature of power is that, if it exists to take, somebody will and already has. If I don't give this power to this 'third party' then I'm basically giving it to somebody else.
In this case I'm saying 'building a product that can self destruct at any moment no matter how much of my own obligations I meet' is one of those powers that I don't feel NCSoft has proven themselves worthy of wielding, in the same way that you're saying "Killing people I don't like isn't a power that I or you should wield".
The fact that I am a moral man who would not do these things does not change that I do not have the freedom, legally, to do them thanks to those laws.
Again I agree. I just don't have the faith in people that they're all moral enough people they don't need those laws. Does that make sense? Maybe if 100% of people were you and didn't murder, we wouldn't need such a law. But I don't feel we live in a reality where people can't harm each other, legally, right now, with money. So I'm against letting them do that willy-nilly.
In order, however, to optimize productivity, one must not remove the freedoms to perform productive behaviors. Because theft, extortion, violence, and murder are detrimental to productivity, optimal law discourages or prohibits them. But the kinds of laws that would arise from the sentiments I see here would hinder productive, honest people in the name of preventing "hardship."
Optimizing who's productivity? Ultimately you're gonna have to balance one person's productivity against another. Me having thousands of dollars vanish overnight from this game harmed my productivity. Should I only care about NCSoft's needs?
These actions, again, don't take place in a vacuum. NCSoft's actions didn't take place in a bubble dimension where they have no impact on others.
Why then should I only be concerned with their 'productivity'? Is that in my personal enlightened self interest?
It is up to us as private citizens and members of the business community (whether customers or otherwise) to police good and bad treatment and caretaking of customers and consumer products. We do this as customers by choosing where to spend our money, and as citizens by bringing awareness and scrutiny onto those who act poorly (in this case, NCSoft). As producers, we actively strive to come up with better models and test them by doing business under them, and getting our customers to spread the word about us and hopefully proving the superiority of our methods.
All else is destructive, and thus to be shunned.
That's all well and good when it works. But for every City of Heroes, there's a Tabula Rasa and Auto Assault where this happened and nothing came for it because the community that you're relying on to 'police' the world wasn't capable of it.
I didn't see NCSoft suffer a darn thing from that, aside from the litigation with Garriott, which only then happened because they forged his resignation letter.
So you're basically saying that social justice only matters in cases where it harms a well enough organized base? Does it only matter when it effects 'my' community but isn't a problem with it effects 'theirs'?
This is why I fully support the efforts to destroy NCSoft in a PR battle, to put pressure on them to act as we wish through the court of public opinion, and to find agencies who might take over the product in a fair and legal way if we can persuade NCSoft to cut their losses. We are their customers, and they have angered us. We are well within our rights to scream it to the world so that all know of NCSoft's bad treatment of its customers. That's the market at work. It is why I am against legal action, however; what they have done is bad behavior, socially and economically, and should be punished in those courts. It is not against the rigid laws of ownership, and we should not tamper with those in this fashion. Simply refuse to do business with those who use these ownership models if you truly find them untenable. Otherwise, go in knowing the risks you take.
You're basically betting on a world where good outcomes only happen basically once in a while. And increasingly so as movers and shakers like the RIAA counter your ability to complain about them. If NCSoft was big and powerful enough of a company, it wouldn't be probably too hard for them to put this forum underground and demolish its support. I don't particularly care for that.
Boycotts have been, historically unsuccessful throughout history. This is a rare case, a mixture of a large enough tight knit community and a weak enough corporate entity. And we're still, honestly, losing. I have hope, but I'll have to admit that hope is largely optimism.
We shouldn't have to boycott every time a company decides there's an acceptable amount of cyanide to put in their hamburgers. Such idiocy should be just straight up illegal.
Again, I'm not advocating for a blanket 'everything is illegal' law, like you seem to think I am.
PR fights to change the minds of those who choose what ownership models to use, and even opening your own company to try out your superior models of ownership, are good. Trying to do it through the courts and the legislative process is bad, because your ideas are untested and cannot be brought into competition with other models for testing if you enforce them as laws from on high. If, in testing, your ideas work, you will not need to impose them as laws; others will adopt them out of that "base greed" you despise, because it gets more customers and thus more profits. By not imposing them as laws, you leave room for still others to try out still newer things, and succeed or fail on their merits, and the successful ones will likewise be mimicked.
I'm sorry, but that sounds a lot like "We should stick our junk in a beehive to see if it works out or not". I think there are definitely some things that are stupid or wrong enough we don't have to 'test out' alternative to.
This is swarm intelligence at work, and it is the ONLY way societies have ever advanced. When autocratic law stifled such innovation, it nonetheless happened...just in what were called "black markets" and "forbidden research."
I think if we have to have a 'swarm' intelligence to tell us that letting somebody close up something that you've invested so much money into on a whim like this is bad for customers, then we are doomed as a species to stupid ourselves off the face of the planet.
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I'm a big believer in teaching people to think for themselves.
Unfortunately, that's not going to happen anytime soon.
We're going to have to agree to disagree on this score.
We half agree, though: we both think people should think for themselves.
I just think that it will only fail to "happen anytime soon" if we continue to allow government to act as a parent to a populace of children. And that's what laws to protect people from the consequences of their lack-of-thinking-for-themselves do.
Pain is tragic but necessary to learning. A mother doesn't hold a child's hand on the hot stove to teach him not to touch it; she warns him that he'll burn himself. And some will listen and heed. But others won't...and they'll learn the hard way.
You don't establish rules that prevent the stove from being on; you give advice to the uninformed, warning them of the danger and letting them check into it and try to reason it out for themselves. (Obviously, the analogy is imperfect, as children are not yet to the think-for-themselves stage, but adults who have never learned to are in the same boat...)
And again, when you don't know, when you lack the test case, you can't be positive. You have a hypothosis! It's probably good. But others are not necessarily wrong to disagree with your hypothesis until it's been tested and proven. And this is why you can't make rules that are guaranteed not to cause more problems than they solve without first seeing what are the consequences of no rules at all (for that topic). Moreover, you're best served by allowing market forces to innovate new "rules" in terms of how they shape themselves because you'll get multiple test cases and find the one that works best, rather than imposing them from on high in a central manner and only testing one rule set at a time.
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The base assumption, barring other evidence, should always be that the adult decision-makers are capable of rational decision-making if not denied access to needed information.
When it comes to City of Heroes, none of us on these boards is capable of rational decision-making. Because the perfectly reasonable person wouldn't be so emotionally tied to it, like we are.
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Dear Zod, I never made that connection until you mentioned it, but you are absolutely right.
The current MMO model is indeed a type of cloud computing. So, what happens when one day Google, or Amazon, or someone else with cloud-services just up and decides to kill off the service?
Yeah, we definitely need to fight for some end-user rights that are far more comprehensive than what we have now.
I had made the argument that this is going to become a several fold problem for more than MMOs when somebody like say, Steam closes down, and will escape into the 'real world' as everything requires online authentication to 'combat theft'.
What happens when your fridge shuts off entirely because its anti-theft/targeted advertisement server shuts down, and it can't authenticate?
We half agree, though: we both think people should think for themselves.
I just think that it will only fail to "happen anytime soon" if we continue to allow government to act as a parent to a populace of children. And that's what laws to protect people from the consequences of their lack-of-thinking-for-themselves do.
I just happen to feel that you're transferring parental ownership of society from government to the rich, I guess, and calling to self interest.
When it comes to City of Heroes, none of us on these boards is capable of rational decision-making. Because the perfectly reasonable person wouldn't be so emotionally tied to it, like we are.
Are you confusing 'reasonable' to 'dead emotionally and calculating like a robot'? A reasonable person has hobbies, and a reasonable person would be upset if their rights in said hobby was trashed on so hard. If this wasn't a video game, but say, Soccer, and somehow the World Cup institute was able to delete all the fields, balls and shoes from the universe in a day, I think you'd have quite a number of people angry.
If you want cold hard calculating reasons, then economically you should be upset that your rights as a customer amount to nothing.
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Segev, while I certainly do not entirely disagree with you, I find it a better place to be to recognize that I don't know for certain which is better, and I humbly suggest that you may be better served by such a mindset.
We can certainly pick a path and have faith in it, but I'm sensing a bit too strong of a belief in it.
And the history and proof of problems within that method that you're adhering to could be used against you. :D
I have a strong conflict within me about wanting people to think for themselves and being anti-bureaucratic entanglements and all that jazz vs. seeing greed run rampant and the suspected natural ramifications of that not coming to pass in a judicious and timely manner for those experiencing the storms.
Mainly, I am not convinced that enough people carry the responsibility to do things well.
Also, this is not a clear case of laws and regulations to force/restrict anything... so, much as potentially rules and agreements to prevent and/or mediate when certain things do occur.
Obviously, laws against murder do not prevent murder (not fully). They don't and can't actually take away your freedom to do such things. They punish you for having committed those acts.
Anyway... I still wonder about a restoration service of some sort. Almost like an insurance company - made of developers who will reverse-engineer the code and deliver some sort of accessible remnant of the previously existing game. As, I too, am leery about laws in this manner... other than some sort of way to broach the IP/trademark/copyright hurdles in my previous idea.
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Anyway... I still wonder about a restoration service of some sort. Almost like an insurance company - made of developers who will reverse-engineer the code and deliver some sort of accessible remnant of the previously existing game. As, I too, am leery about laws in this manner... other than some sort of way to broach the IP/trademark/copyright hurdles in my previous idea.
Such a thing doesn't even really need to happen. At least not on any company dime. The internet is genius for getting stuff like this to happen on its own. All we'd need it for NCSoft to release some data and sit back and let us do the work. Heck, we'd even offer to pay them for the ability to. Just not 80 million dollars.
All we'd mostly need really is for them to back up and get out of our way.
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OK, we're getting political, which, while healthy, is distracting. I will say only this on the topic: We are drifting into EFF-level debate, here, and that probably deserves its own thread under "General Discussion." Most of you are making valid points, and some of you are being silly. Some of you make me wonder if you aren't taking an opposing viewpoint simply for the sake of a decent debate, which, so far, it is. No harm, no foul.
It might be more constructive for a discussion like this to have its own "room." Think of it like a group of Doctor Who fans getting the ST:TNG cast to weigh in on some aspect of Doctor Who. Would it be an awesome discussion? Of course! Is it what 90% of the people in the room are there for? No. They have questions of their own that are pertinent to TNG.
Do I have opinions on this? Absolutely. I'd love to join the debate. You're touching on things that I've been wondering about and thinking about for a while. I just think it has gone to a point where it's not really about Save Paragon, anymore, and is branching into broader areas that deserve their own space.
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I feel the whole idea of using legal tools to combat situations like the one City of Heroes finds itself in has been blown out of proportion. No one, at least initially, proposed a regulation at the government level. That would be excessive. What I would like to see, however, is a lawsuit against a platform owner that carelessly decided to simply dismantle the platform while its users were counting on its continued existence. That would add a stick to the carrot for companies that are considering cloud based business. Sometimes you are simply not in the mood for the carrot anymore, but a stick in a form of a nice precedent will keep you from doing something silly. Like dropping a game with a loyal fanbase due to some office politics related struggle, which is what I believe really happened to CoH.
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The funny thing about this is that it's essentially been tried and proven that it only takes one Paragon employee to keep COH running in maintenance mode. Surely enough COH players would have stuck around and kept paying to cover one guy's salary and at least keep the game alive, albeit without any content updates. Shrug.
Except that as soon as somebody finds the next exploit or something breaks, there'd be no way of fixing it. You'd have to have more than one person available.
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Such a thing doesn't even really need to happen. At least not on any company dime. The internet is genius for getting stuff like this to happen on its own. All we'd need it for NCSoft to release some data and sit back and let us do the work. Heck, we'd even offer to pay them for the ability to. Just not 80 million dollars.
All we'd mostly need really is for them to back up and get out of our way.
Indeed, but that requires them complying and/or there being no legal obstacles in the way of users achieving that.
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OK, we're getting political, which, while healthy, is distracting. I will say only this on the topic: We are drifting into EFF-level debate, here, and that probably deserves its own thread under "General Discussion." Most of you are making valid points, and some of you are being silly. Some of you make me wonder if you aren't taking an opposing viewpoint simply for the sake of a decent debate, which, so far, it is. No harm, no foul.
It might be more constructive for a discussion like this to have its own "room." Think of it like a group of Doctor Who fans getting the ST:TNG cast to weigh in on some aspect of Doctor Who. Would it be an awesome discussion? Of course! Is it what 90% of the people in the room are there for? No. They have questions of their own that are pertinent to TNG.
Do I have opinions on this? Absolutely. I'd love to join the debate. You're touching on things that I've been wondering about and thinking about for a while. I just think it has gone to a point where it's not really about Save Paragon, anymore, and is branching into broader areas that deserve their own space.
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Noted, then I apologize for my contribution to this, and I'll probably not reply anymore to this topic to further aggrieving this problem.
I'm sorry if my responses have broken any rules or offended anybody.
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You have all articulated this very well.
If I were to make a real world analogy here...
Imagine if you were to buy a condo in a little resort. It's a quirky place, and happens to, by and large, attract the same sort of people as you. First a few of you come together, then you all start to form community groups, and the next thing you know, you have a city that bumbles along with some clashes, but mostly getting along GREAT.
Then the resort comes to you and says "We're bulldozing. The Hyatt offered us ten times for the land."
You say--"WTF??? I BOUGHT this! I've been paying my condo fees all this time!"
The resort says "Read the fine print. You only bought the rights to live in the condo until we kicked you out. Too bad, so sad, buhbye."
It's not an exact analogy, but it's close. And I seriously think that for an MMORPG we should have the right to find someone with a spare server and run it until the last person leaves.
An even better analogy would be for them to say, "We're bulldozing. There's no real good reason for this; we simply choose to bulldoze."
Surely we have to have SOME kind of legal rights. We bought the game expecting that, barring NCSoft closing or it not making money, it would continue to exist. They sold us a new powerset nine days before they announced they would close it. Before that, new content was on the horizon, and we had every right to expect that it would be delivered, as the parent company was not (and still isn't, unfortunately) in financial trouble. And they closed it for no real good reason-- it was costing them nothing that wasn't being recovered.
They have cheated us, plain and simple.
I just find it hard to believe that we have absolutely no legal recourse in what appears to me to be a clear-cut case of fraud. Has anyone here actually spoken with a lawyer about this? Is the EULA ironclad?
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Is the EULA ironclad?
EULAs have in fact been successfully challenged in the past.
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EULAs have in fact been successfully challenged in the past.
Well hell-- we should probably get on this. A class-action lawsuit would be a nice big headache for NCSoft, which is reason enough for me to do it. Of course, this could backfire-- it could make them want to sell the game, but be unable to find a buyer because of the possible attendant liability. I don't know how this would work, though, because IANAL.
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Their stock has been taking due to negative reputation, not because they couldn't find a way to make money off shutting the game down. That's what I meant by their common sense being motivated by greed.
Enlightened self-interest - emphasis on that first word - would have caused them to study their audience and realize that, if there is money to be made on the shut-down, they'd best make sure they can keep the squawking to a minimum.
They misjudged. Whatever the analysis they did that told them this was a good move, they failed to account for our enthusiasm and outrage. And it's killing them. I think this evidence that my thesis is, in fact, accurate: a badly managed company operating on a flawed model is suffering for their bad choices. Are we hurt? Yes! Is NCSoft hurting? Yes! Will this motivate others to try NOT to repeat their mistakes, as it is motivating us to make our own, better system to preserve our community? Hopefully! If not, then the market will punish those fools, too. And hopefully we'll do well enough to attract people with our model and show others how to do it right. All without laws changing to force us to do it the way some politician came up with.
They're allowing short-term greed to motivate them to make us lose out on our long-term investment. See, me being motivated by greed doesn't mean I, personally, have to pay the long-term costs of my short-term gains. ... I'm not immortal, if I made a billion dollars right now even if it cost the world 50 times that in 40 years, I'm still gold. I'm not even counting on being alive that long.
Fair enough. If you are a sociopath who doesn't even value his children's future, you can profit in this fashion. However, I bet you have to trick people into signing on, since there are people who DO care about their children's future. And who are, themselves, young enough that they'll be around in 40 years.
So now you're tricking people and engaging in the sort of non-productive activity that would be outlawed due to its trickery-based theft from those who would not have given you money if they'd known the costs you did know to be coming.
First, I don't care about sticking to one ideology, I only care about what works. That tends to be a moderated and mixed approach.
"Mixed" of what and what? I mean, I could mix Mercantilism and Communism, or Aristocracy with Feudalism, and get results that, history has shown us, are less effective than some of our more modern systems. "Mixed" is a buzzword, like "moderate" and "centrist." It doesn't have a guaranteed "best option" status, and often the "mix" is a "compromise" where one side says to the other, "You compromise with me by giving me everything I want, and I compromise with you by passing what I want that you've agreed on."
I, too, only care about what works. "Ideology" is meaningless without functionality. I don't adhere to ideas for their own sake, but because they are a refinement of what works. You will not find me being a martyr to ideology. Not in the sense that I will keep trying failed practices and bemoaning that they aren't working this time. (I won't abandon it, either, so I might qualify as a "martyr" in the "because I won't lie and support something I think is false to spare myself the pillory.")
And since what works is Swarm Intelligence - that is, unleashing people to make their own choices and innovate a thousand different ways to do things and adopt what they see others doing that works - that's what I advocate. Since what doesn't work is trying to regulate with one rigid set of rules - or worse, a set of rules that are mutable but only by people who are third parties and have no stake other than to enhance their own power - for every situation, shutting down innovation into how they work, I oppose that.
Second, I ain't sure what world you've been seeing where we've been moving 'away' from capitalism. We've been deregulating things that were regulated for the last 30 years. Labor laws and public support for labor support has been falling steadily. Call it a victory or a loss at your own discretion, but that's how it's been.
I am not goign to devolve into a political "he said she said," which is where this is leading. I will state, once, that we have not "de-regulated." We have had more expansion of government regulatory agencies than ever, and we've seen crony capitalism - which is not capitalism at all - at the highest levels as things "too big to fail" are bailed out and other things are nationalized and directed by the government. It's a mess, and it's a huge step away from capitalism.
[W]ouldn't 'enlightened self interest' compel these 'established' interests to fight for said regulation. Again you're promoting a system that endorses a motivator then complaining about when the powerful use that motivator to do bad things. It's like you can recognize something is wrong, but you can't and won't blame the ideology, so you are arguing that we just need more of the ideology.
Flawed argument. I am promoting the establishment of a system which harnesses this inescapable aspect of human nature, and protects the enlightened form of self-interest while penalizing and disabling selfish, harmful acts. It achieves this by very narrowly defining those harmful acts as violation of life, liberty and property of another, punishing theft and violence - even if the theft is achieved via trickery rather than stealth or violence - and protecting the rights of individuals to use their lives, time, and property as they see fit.
This encourages people to produce for themselves and those about whom they care. It rewards innovations that work, and allows natural consequence to penalize those that don't. Risk does have failure as a possible outcome, which is why we want to allow people to choose to take risks or play it safe. Let each actor evaluate risk:reward himself, and if he succeeds, let others follow his example or risk a different path. If he fails, let others learn from his example or risk trying to tweak it to make it work. Up to them.
I don't "advocate" that humans are greedy or will work towards promoting their own wealth and comfort. That's a given. It's inescapable. You will never, ever change it, unless you can serve as the second coming of Christ.
Does this mean those powerful few who are building a corrupt system to siphon wealth away from the productive for their own selfish greed will fight any effort to change it? If course! To use an extreme example, a dictator will always fight to retain his dictatorship; it is still right to get rid of him and put in place something better.
I am outlining what that "something better" is. Something that exploits the natural human tendency that we cannot change for good, and penalizes all its evil (defined as harmful to productive and happy society) manifestations.
In the context of this thread, I am advocating leaving us free to try to come up with something better, rather than tying our hands and delivering our industry on a platter to those greedy and selfish forces that are building a system to empower themselves at the expense of others' productive efforts. (And yes, I'm aware I'm waxing a bit melodramatic here. Such is the nature of ideological discussion, even when discussing it in terms of "what works" v. "what doesn't.")
I'm typically skeptical of taking the advice of the players profiting from the advice, especially if said advice commonly makes everybody (and myself) else pay for it, and it's been these big players that you say are profiting from regulation constantly telling us to let them do whatever they want then hope unicorns and puppies explode out of it, so it would be a tough sell, but I'm not closed to the idea.
Actually, if you pay attention, the CEO of GE and Warren Buffet and the like are amongst the biggest proponents of expanding governmental oversight into their various industries. They're often held up as examples of "wise" and "not selfish" rich people who prove that it's really just greedy SOBs who oppose expanding regulations. In truth, these people have MADE theirs. They can absorb new regulatory costs easily, while their competitors cannot. Further, these new costs bar people who are not independently wealthy from even trying to get in, and vastly increase the risked losses should a venture fail. It helps protect, if not a monopoly, then at least an oligopoly of the established industry giants.
The ones pushing for de-regulation are the ones who want IN, or who are just starting up. The ones that are trying the new, innovative models they think are better, that they think will make customers happier. The ones who will be pushed out by regulations telling them "no, you can't do it that way."
Fourth, why is it always cool when somebody with a lot of power uses their 'enlightened self interest' to promote themselves, but suddenly frowned on if say, I used my 'enlightened self interest' to band together with my peers to fight for a higher wage.
Who said it was bad? Go for it! It's a perfectly valid tactic. I don't advise trusting modern big unions to do it for you, though, as they have their own highly-paid, wealthy bosses who are in it for their own power and not for your sake. I recommend forming your own little agreement-community to handle these things.
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Or to keep a game running that I liked and spend money on. Kinda the pot calling the kettle black a bit. Maybe my best tool in my arsenal is cooperation and teamwork with my peers. Like what we're doing here, with NCSoft. I know for sure that if this effort to save this game was left up to any one man, it would had died on arrival.
You'll note I'm in here with you fighting to give NCSoft's black eyes some painful prodding through market forces to get them to see their enlightened self-interest aligns with their customers' desires.
This is wholly in line with everything I've been outlining! The only part to which I'm objecting is the calls for regulations to force things. Use your voice! Use cooperation! Band together and remind NCSoft that we're not infinite money sources to be sucked on and discarded! But do it in a way that measures how to make it in their interest to cooperate, and then to make it painfully obvious to them that their interests WILL align with ours because all other legal routes are self-destructive.
That's what we've been doing, and it's been working.
Let's not get the law involved. Last time the US government got involved in big businesses losing big bucks because they'd screwed their customers too hard, the government decided they were "too big to fail" and bailed them out. Can you imagine if the US decided the correct course of action was to bail out NCSoft as their stocks fell? CEOs who engage in the siphoning game rather than trying to actually please their customers by providing something of value are very adept at telling politicians sob stories. I'm sure Kim could talk Obama around to how it's not his fault; the game just wasn't doing well enough, and while it's too late for the game, he can make sure it doesn't happen to B&S and to GW2 if they get some stimulus...
[P]roperty and rights are also human constructs that serve as a polite way to do business slightly less barbarically. They're in the same sort of boat as laws. Idealizing them and humanizing them like such makes you blind to their origins, uses and costs.
False. Property rights are an extension of liberty.
Do you agree that the absence of liberty to choose NOT to do something is slavery?
If so, then you have to agree that property rights are an extension of liberty. Theft is the taking of property without the permission of its owner (by definition). Property is something that you have produced, or obtained from somebody else who willingly gave it to you (often in exchange for something else you produced...or did; thus can service translate to property).
Blacks were enslaved on plantations, forced to produce cotton whether they wanted to work there or not. What if, instead, they'd been told, "work these fields and you may do as you like with the cotton," and thus those who chose to work those fields were working of their own accord, needing no overseer? Then the plantation owner, after the cotton was produced, simply took it. That would be theft. The product of the workers' labor was taken without their permission.
Slavery just cuts out the middle man, and takes the labor without permission. It's the same thing in the abstract and in the end, except that the slave is at least not under any illusions about how he is being exploited.
Thus, without the right to what one earns, whether by making it oneself or convincing others to give it to one in exchange for other property or services rendered, one has no right to one's own labor. With no right to one's own labor, one either is a slave, forced to work for another against one's will, or one has no incentive to work at all, and produces nothing.
One is immoral, the other wasteful. Both prevented with proper protection of property rights.
Creative partial abridgement of property rights obscures the damage done by merely diminishing incentive, but it leads to a creeping corruption as those with the power of partial abridgement slowly amass more wealth on the backs of those who produce it.
You might feel you should have the right to life. But that's a really flexible concept, even then, because then you go on to talk about some exceptions to the right of life, such as defending yourself. That's because your right to life is a pleasantry we as a society give to each other to make society better to live in. It would behoove you though to realize that said right is only backed up in the same way as everything else; through bribery, diplomacy or force, and only exists as long as enough people say it does and have the ability to uphold it.
Oh, sure. In truth, there is only one thing that matters in terms of whether you CAN do anything: power.
"Can I do it? Can you stop me?"
The whole point of the construct of laws is to optimize things such that using one's power to do things that harm productivity and society ultimately is prevented (at least from happening a second time, through means such as jail and other separation-from-society punishments). Swarm Intelligence requires certain rules of behavior, but they're designed only to prevent forces that artificially inflate one's success-value at the expense of another, not to protect agents from making mistakes. To do the latter is to, again, artificially inflate success-values, and obscure the true value of the choices people make.
You might feel you have right to property, but what entitles you to the Earth? You say that you should have the right to things you 'produce' with your own industry, but at what point where you entitled to the materials you 'produced' with? Or the land needed to have space to produce it with. At some point down the economic chain somebody is getting something for nothing.
Generally speaking? I believe the traditions of the past were "first claim," but nowadays we have all the land generally claimed by somebody, and thus ownership is established. If you find something nobody claims? I guess it's yours! If nothing else, you put in the effort - the labor - to "produce" it by going to it and obtaining it. As long as you're not stealing it from somebody else - e.g. picking the apples off of somebody else's tree - then it's legitimate. This really isn't a hard concept (though it leads to some interesting races to stake the best claims when there are frontiers). Whether people using this philosophy in the past were actually stealing from prior claimants is irrelevant; nowadays, the only "unclaimed" land is in Antarctica and space, and I don't think you'll be forcing any natives out of there if you manage to get there.
At some point you have people basically laying claim to things they don't own, telling everybody else that now I own this and you can't have it, then wanting compensation for use of resources that they just kind of said they own. Then smugly telling themselves they have a magical inherent 'right' to all this and the ability to reap everything sown on that land, to the point where people that didn't get to yell 'tag' on the whole of the earth, to make their daily bread, have to work that person's land because they have no other choice and no 'right' to anything that sustains their life.
Oh, it can get sticky. Fortunately, we're beyond that point right now with earthly resources. We'll likely establish rules for it when we start exploring space, but honestly, simply claiming something and doing nothing with it other than charging people to go try to use it will generally fail.
And really? If you went out and claimed it and are going to charge people to use it? You're going to first have to convince them it's worth paying you to use. And if you, for instance, found gold in your new area, you HAVE done a service: you've located a valuable resource. You've cut down the costs of those you're charging for the privilege of mining it by telling them where to look!
So again, even THAT is a service done.
That system is inherently flawed. You have a ruling caste that smugly tells everybody that they have a special 'right' to the proceeds of their work because they have a 'right' to do what they want with property. Knowing full well that their rights only exist as long as the community doesn't band together and lynch them.
Sure. And if that ruling caste really never does anything but leech? They're gonna get lynched eventually. Some that genuinely DO contribute value commensurate with their claims get lynched anyway. There's a reason laws are tricky in the specific; the base philosophy of optimality guides their formation, but HOW to do it sometimes is a little fuzzy. What constitutes "finding" property? How far can you claim? These are laws that do need founding.
That "ruling caste" exists in our politicians these days. They smugly tell everybody hat they have a special 'right' to hand out largesse to the masses, and that the masses should be grateful to them and keep voting for them so they don't let those greedy "rich people" steal it all from them.
In today's world, the right to property is either inherited, bought, or earned through service/trade. The first is the only "free" one, and falls under the right of a property owner to do what he wills with it...including choosing who gets it when he can't use it anymore.
But you know what? Again, I'm not interested in cleaving entirely to one system or another. If parts of capitalism work, if pretending that rights are important helps me get some of the things my own 'enlightened self interest' wants, if working to ensure some people who frankly are competition with me have a 'right' to property they claimed that nobody owned can still make all of us better off, I'm for it.
But I'm not for cleaving to this ideal even if it sinks me. My 'self interest' wouldn't allow it.
Ah, see, you admit, you're acting with greed. Not enlightened self-interest, which looks towards elevating the wealth of all by growing the productivity and thus getting you a larger share and better advances than would otherwise be, but instead focuses on greedily hoarding what you can get your mitts on and screw anybody who actually produced it.
(I actually doubt you truly feel that way, but you're making my point for me about the difference between greed and enlightened self-interest as you mis-use the term.)
Yeah, but if you can swing your fist so hard it creates hurricanes, then you have more responsibility with your fists than previously thought, wouldn't you agree? If a man existed, as a thought experiment, that could swing his fist so hard that even if it didn't connect with your face, but created an air pressure difference strong enough that it could blow away an entire neighborhood, would you not have to amend your basic rule for liberty?
Only the wording of it. The rule is, more precisely, that one has a right to act as long as one is not willfully destroying another's life, liberty, or property. And, generally, one is liable for unwillful/accidental destruction of the same, but generally speaking, "restitution" is all that's needed there. If one willfully causes such destruction, restitution AND punishment are in order, because such behaviors must be discouraged strongly enough that one can't make a cost/benefits analysis and decide that one can do harm, pay restitution later, and profit personally overall to the detriment of the one harmed.
That's the state of the world, though, right now. And that's the state of the world as it always has been, and always will be. There are people who can 'swing' their 'fist' of money hard enough to damage those that they don't directly 'hit'. So once again a 'basic rule' or ideology that strives to solve all problems isn't something I want to cling too hard to.
Depends how you define "harm."
Nobody has lost life nor liberty due to the closing of CoH. I would even go so far as to say nobody has lost property, but I can see the counter-argument regarding whether micro-transaction-purchased "things" constitute property or simply licensed usage. This goes back to the ownership model NCSoft and other MMOs use being flawed, and the best solution being new models being tried and better ones thus being found and adopted.
You might think that people swinging their hurricane fists occurs in a victimless bubble, but reality rarely plays that out. Reality requires solutions that are more nuanced than "I'll do whatever I want and hope that my poisoning my portion of the river stays in my side of the river".
See, this is an area where the whole living in a community thing comes in. You can either come to an agreement with your neighbors regarding your responsibilities in not letting what you do ruin their portion of it...or you can deal with them doing such things as preventing your pollution from contaminating their land by building a dam on their land just beyond your border and flooding your land with water and pollution.
Me, I'd work out an arrangement, because I think the flooding of my land might be bad. NCSoft, on the other hand, seems to think we didn't have the guts to build the damn, and now they're drowning.
That's the thing though, putting your hands up and watching a murder and going "Can't legalize morality!" makes for a poor society quickly.
Fallacy. I did not say "well, murder's okay, I guess, because we can't legislate morality." I explicitly stated that murder should be illegal for optimality reasons if nothing else. Moral ones are also good, but from the standpoint of optimizing a society, murder MUST be illegal.
Giving the code or an executable to the players for something they've paid for that they have no reason to keep secret due to it being buried is hardly an undue burden on an MMO creator. REALLY, NCSoft wouldn't have to had done anything but step back and not get in the way; Tony V's crew was well on its way to reverse engineering a lot of it anyways for the legal purposes of creating this webpage.
I agree. I'm not saying they shouldn't have done something like this. I still hope to convince them that selling the IP to somebody who'll keep it running is in their best interests. All I'm saying is they have a right, legally, to do as they've done, and that changing the laws would cause more harm than good. They SHOULD have the right to make this idiotic decision, just as we should retain the right to go prove how wrong they were both by doing what we're doing on a PR front and by striving to build something and running it in a way that is better.
Saying that a company should be 'free' to make a self destructing product only INVITES abuse, majorly. "We shouldn't burden them with the horrible task of making sure their ovens don't break down and leak poisonous gas! If we legislate that even less people will be willing to make ovens!".
This is a foolish argument. A company that makes such faulty ovens will not stay in business long. And if it IS killing people and they knew it, then they either aren't informing their customers (remember how I keep saying that deception-based transactions are also theft, and thus should be punished?) or their customers are willing to poison themselves. I don't think the "willing to poison themselves" demographic will buy enough ovens to keep EvilSears in business.
That's true, but the thing is, the nature of power is that, if it exists to take, somebody will and already has. If I don't give this power to this 'third party' then I'm basically giving it to somebody else.
The power remaining with the guy who built the thing is only moral. What has that third party done to deserve it, other than get a bunch of people together to say, "Yeah, we want to steal that thing, so give it to him?"
Do you think that, if I got everyone on this community to somehow agree that I should have your computer, you should have to ship it to me? I somehow doubt it. It's YOURS, so the power to decide whether or not you keep it should remain with you.
In this case I'm saying 'building a product that can self destruct at any moment no matter how much of my own obligations I meet' is one of those powers that I don't feel NCSoft has proven themselves worthy of wielding, in the same way that you're saying "Killing people I don't like isn't a power that I or you should wield".
You agreed to this when you started doing business with them. Sure, you, like most of us, trusted that they'd act more responsibly. We were proven wrong, and I am sure not only that we won't make that mistake again, but that our efforts here make NCSoft realize how big the mistake was and serve as an object lesson to others who might be in their position in the future.
Does it suck? Yeah. But they exercised their right to poison their part of the river up stream, so we're exercising our right to build a dam on our property that is flooding their land.
Again I agree. I just don't have the faith in people that they're all moral enough people they don't need those laws. Does that make sense? Maybe if 100% of people were you and didn't murder, we wouldn't need such a law. But I don't feel we live in a reality where people can't harm each other, legally, right now, with money. So I'm against letting them do that willy-nilly.
Uh, even if 100% of people "wouldn't" murder, having laws against it would be good. Because it's something that harms the optimality of the society.
Nobody is causing harm to anybody who didn't at least agree to the risk that it COULD happen as it has happened. We all made the mistake of thinking NCSoft would act in the interests of making profit, and thus treat their customer base with respect. But we knew the possibility existed under the ownership model they offered.
In the future, we will likely work to make sure the ownership model is more to our liking, more something that we can defend our ability to use what we pay to use beyond the period the provider is willing to support it. Lesson learned, sadly and painfully, but at least it is learned.
We have the power to act to prevent ourselves from being in this position again, if only by never doing business with anybody using NCSoft's ownership model for an MMO.
Optimizing who's productivity? Ultimately you're gonna have to balance one person's productivity against another. Me having thousands of dollars vanish overnight from this game harmed my productivity. Should I only care about NCSoft's needs?
Who does the balancing? Reality does it. You had thrown that thousands of dollars away on an entertainment product. It was gone one way or another. If it truly is a waste, then you'd have wasted more if it continued. If it was worth it, then it was worth it. You knew that this could happen. Just because you didn't think it would doesn't mean you were wronged in the sense of your productivity being stolen. You agreed to the risk, you just thoguht it wouldn't ever happen. Not this way.
You don't "balance" productivity. Productivity - and the choices one makes with its fruits - is its own measure, provided you prevent theft. If people agree to something that squanders their productivity, then the diminishment of their productivity is a measure of the wisdom of their choices.
Sad as it is, we've had it proven to us that trusting NCSoft was unwise, and we feel whatever pain we feel because of it. We will strive to do better, and not make this mistake, in the future. Meanwhile, NCSoft is feeling the pain for its own foolish choices. The measure of their productivity is demonstrating how bad it was.
These actions, again, don't take place in a vacuum. NCSoft's actions didn't take place in a bubble dimension where they have no impact on others.
Why then should I only be concerned with their 'productivity'? Is that in my personal enlightened self interest?
That's all well and good when it works. But for every City of Heroes, there's a Tabula Rasa and Auto Assault where this happened and nothing came for it because the community that you're relying on to 'police' the world wasn't capable of it.
Note that those were losing money. NCSoft's actions there were understandable, even to the customers. They were sad, but they didn't act as we are because they knew that it was useless. NCSoft couldn't continue running a losing product forever. It was literally impossible, and fighting as hard as we have been is exhausting. Even more so when you know it can, at best, grant a stay of execution, not a genuine reprieve.
I didn't see NCSoft suffer a darn thing from that, aside from the litigation with Garriott, which only then happened because they forged his resignation letter.
They weren't harmed by their customer base because the risk they'd taken was that the thing would be profitable, just like NCSoft had. Both lost. They WERE punished for what they did to Garriot because they stole from him - in this case, his good name, which is of tremendous value...and the value of the stocks they denied him the ability to sell at an optimal time. Theft, again, was punished.
NCSoft and the customers both suffered loss based on the unprofitability of those games. Nobody fought it because, frankly, punishing somebody because they don't defy gravity with the power of their will is a non-starter. And that's what making a company run a game at a loss amounts to; they can do it by jumping and flapping their arms...but they'll fall back down when they run out of "jump."
So you're basically saying that social justice only matters in cases where it harms a well enough organized base? Does it only matter when it effects 'my' community but isn't a problem with it effects 'theirs'?
I have no idea where you're getting this. Since it's not something I've argued, I see no point in arguing it now.
You're basically betting on a world where good outcomes only happen basically once in a while. And increasingly so as movers and shakers like the RIAA counter your ability to complain about them. If NCSoft was big and powerful enough of a company, it wouldn't be probably too hard for them to put this forum underground and demolish its support. I don't particularly care for that.
woah, woah. Who said I was against allowing people to complain? I'm all for it! I love the First Amendment! Did I ever say to stop complaining? I'm right there with you, shouting about how horrible NCSoft has been in this!
All I'm saying is, don't clamor for new laws and regulations. Guess who'll get to formulate such things? That's right: "movers and shakers like the RIAA." And do you really think they'll make them to protect your interests? The best solution is to deny anybody that kind of power.
Boycotts have been, historically unsuccessful throughout history. This is a rare case, a mixture of a large enough tight knit community and a weak enough corporate entity. And we're still, honestly, losing. I have hope, but I'll have to admit that hope is largely optimism.
We shouldn't have to boycott every time a company decides there's an acceptable amount of cyanide to put in their hamburgers. Such idiocy should be just straight up illegal.
The success we're having isn't due to any sort of boycott. It's due to our PR. And I'm all for it.
Also? Even if we don't get the IP sold to soembody who'll use it, we are still currently free to try to build a replacement that uses a better model. The Phoenix Project is founded around the idea that our customers are valuable and should be treated with respect.
Again, I'm not advocating for a blanket 'everything is illegal' law, like you seem to think I am.
I never said I thought that. You're advocating for increased regulations governing what MUST be done with private property. This will result in harm to all involved except the bureaucrats.
I'm sorry, but that sounds a lot like "We should stick our junk in a beehive to see if it works out or not". I think there are definitely some things that are stupid or wrong enough we don't have to 'test out' alternative to.
Ah, but how do we know that it's that obviously stupid? Because we've seen the consequences of similar actions.
I think if we have to have a 'swarm' intelligence to tell us that letting somebody close up something that you've invested so much money into on a whim like this is bad for customers, then we are doomed as a species to stupid ourselves off the face of the planet.
As you yourself noted, it hasn't harmed people enough to create this level of outcry before. Wiser moves would include studying to see WHY this time it was a bad choice. The reason I hypothesize centers around THIS product having been profitable.
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If you want cold hard calculating reasons, then economically you should be upset that your rights as a customer amount to nothing.
Well, that assumes I didn't actually "get" what NCSoft was selling me. NCSoft is saying that I "got" everything I paid for...and then some, if we count the three months extra.
Now, from my perspective, I felt I was entitled to more. Indeed, I am upset that my fun was taken away from me. But am I justified in feeling upset?
Am I? If I am, please tell me why, because I'm not sure anymore.
It seems to me, upon reflection, that I might be no more justified in feeling upset than the compulsive gambler would be if we kicked him out of the casino. I bought into the neon lights of the virtual Las Vegas, checking myself in to the Hero Hotel. Do I feel like a hero now? Frankly, I feel like a fool.
After all, NCSoft owns the means of my fun, ownership gives them the right to destroy my fun or exploit my fun as they see fit. I shouldn't have believed that my fun was anything to them other than a commodity to be exploited and discarded as they saw fit.
They did just that, and how can I blame them? You can't blame the bourgeois for using the means of production to exploit those who depend on them any more than you can blame the tiger for eating the deer.
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They did just that, and how can I blame them? You can't blame the bourgeois for using the means of production to exploit those who depend on them any more than you can blame the tiger for eating the deer.
I don't buy that for a second.
We are not Tigers, nor are we Deer. As human beings and social animals we have the ability to think of others as well as ourselves. To take responsibility for our actions, and to cultivate a sense of responsibility to the social groups and larger world we are connected to, whether we wish to be connected to them or not.
A company should have responsibilities other than making a profit. Its that simple.
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EULAs have not only been successfully challenged, many have been shown to be outright false in their clams. No EULA can enforce an illegal doctrine, nor can it remove asserted rights from the user. That said, EULA's CAN affect any litigation arising out of any disagreements between the contracting parties.......and the rest of the legalese in them is mostly there to 'convince' the end-user who actually reads them that they ARE giving up their rights, and that legal action would be easily dismissed or crushed under said EULA.
The big problem here is not that we need laws to enforce 'continuance' of services. A company has every right to discontinue a service as long as that service is not essential to health and well-being (like utilities.) The problem is the ability of a company to 'squat' on IP and copyright to bully, squash competition, and stifle innovation. Despite many who understand the issues fighting the creation of laws to extend copyright to ridiculously long durations, allow use of 'IP' to fuel lawsuits to crush smaller competition and developing niches, and line the pockets of big-business with even more litigation proceeds by civil action against supposed 'infringers' with penalties so out-of-proportion to any real damages has put the law on the side of the corporations, not the people.
We need many of these laws repealed, and the rest overhauled. It used to be that you had 7 years to profit from an idea while being protected. Now, we have life + 75 years. Do we see the problems here? If NCSoft couldn't just 'squat' on the IP, they'd sell it in a heartbeat, rather than it simply be re-done by someone else.
This is the crux of the matter. We've allowed corporations to lobby in legislation that makes them immune to responsibility, able to live off things they created long ago by threat of lawsuit, and exist as entities with no criminal and limited civil prosecutability. NCSoft and others like them only care about bottom lines.....not those affected in raising them......because they've been allowed to make it legal.
Software companies, electronics innovation, and so much more thrived before these laws existed. Now, progress is actually slowing down because of these laws which supposedly 'protect' innovation. They don't protect innovation, they protect corporate profits.
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New legislation would take too long and tie up all our energy (see, for example, this thread).
Guys, I'm all for a philosophical discussion but I want to know what practical action we can take, and by practical I mean something devastating to NCSoft (nothing illegal, mind you) that can force them to give up the IP. A EULA challenge seems to me like a realistic route. If not, what other actions can we take?
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Well, that assumes I didn't actually "get" what NCSoft was selling me. NCSoft is saying that I "got" everything I paid for...and then some, if we count the three months extra.
Now, from my perspective, I felt I was entitled to more. Indeed, I am upset that my fun was taken away from me. But am I justified in feeling upset?
Am I? If I am, please tell me why, because I'm not sure anymore.
There are some arguments for and against. Some other posters in this thread are quite good at pointing the latter, so I will concentrate on the former:
- You have co-created the content, be it in the form of costumes for your characters, their bios, super groups or forum posts. As such you may be viewed as a co-author and at least be entitled to the data you produced. I believe some EU laws cover this, they just weren't tried in a case like this.
- You were counting on the continued existence of the platform and had no reason to expect imminent closure. In the business world if a company fails to disclose such thing ahead of time to its investors, shareholders or even clients, it is at the risk to be tried for fraud. Or misconduct. It would be open to the court to decide these rules apply in this situation, but until such ruling exists, we can't know for sure.
- Because of the point above, Paragon Studios could also have a chance to make a case for the court. I was actually expecting them to do that, and am wondering what stopped them.
- The company has stated that it exhausted all options to sell or otherwise prolong the game existence, which now appears to have been a lie. Lies in business world often bring legal trouble for those that articulate them.
- Better yet - if you could be seen as co-author, they lied to mislead you in order for you to drop any action preventing the game from closing down. I am trying to avoid legalspeak, because I am no lawyer myself, but this again smells like misconduct or something similar.
edit: And hey, NCsoft has been known to break the law before. In particular they are no stranger to fraud, misconduct and forgery: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NC_Soft#Controversy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NC_Soft#Controversy)
It seems to me, upon reflection, that I might be no more justified in feeling upset than the compulsive gambler would be if we kicked him out of the casino. I bought into the neon lights of the virtual Las Vegas, checking myself in to the Hero Hotel. Do I feel like a hero now? Frankly, I feel like a fool.
A gambler does not add any creative value to the casino operation. A MMO player does.
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Noted, then I apologize for my contribution to this, and I'll probably not reply anymore to this topic to further aggrieving this problem.
I'm sorry if my responses have broken any rules or offended anybody.
None of these! The thread is going in an interesting direction, but it's a little further than a simple tangent.
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I'm deleting this message because I really shouldn't be trying to make this into such a political thing, and need to take my own advice to not do so.
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If not, what other actions can we take?
Curiously, it's the concept of us - gamers - ourselves taking action that I believe has led to the recent (and ongoing) successes of Kickstarter video game projects.
The gulf between game developers and game publishers is widening - the publishers see a successful formula and keep churning it out in the belief that if it worked once, it'll work again - and better second time around because it'll have moar cowbells, as it were. In this category we find the infinite number of Call of Dutys and of course the infamous Korean grindfests.
Game developers however tend to have a different view. They want to keep adding and expanding and innovating, not mass-producing the same title over and over with tweaks.
And this is why game developers are turning to Kickstarter rather than the big name publishers, and seeking funding directly from gamers. The gamers have an actual say in the game's creation, and therefore also the whole issue of The Right To Play.
In the same way that Myspace made the record companies panic because it took control out of their hands and put it back into the hands of the musicians themselves, I foresee the same thing happening with Kickstarter video game designers and the big games publishers.
Kickstarter promises a sense of community, a level of personal involvement that the publishing companies simply cannot offer. People like to feel special, that they're part of something. No one likes to think of themselves as some faceless statistic, another number to be ticked off on a monthly sales graph. Empowering the gamer is what Kickstarter projects are all about.
And for the games publishing companies, an empowered gamer is something to be feared. The more successful games projects Kickstarter produces, the more I believe the games industry will be forced to change the way it treats gamers. Gamers are no longer the cash spewing dupes they've been taking them for all these years.
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They're listening to us:
http://www.holdtheline.com/threads/layoffs-at-ncsoft-seattle.3936/
Check out the main page:
http://www.holdtheline.com/
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Hold the line! Love isn't always on time! Oh oh oh.
That's great news, thanks for the tip VV.
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Curiously, it's the concept of us - gamers - ourselves taking action that I believe has led to the recent (and ongoing) successes of Kickstarter video game projects.
The gulf between game developers and game publishers is widening - the publishers see a successful formula and keep churning it out in the belief that if it worked once, it'll work again - and better second time around because it'll have moar cowbells, as it were. In this category we find the infinite number of Call of Dutys and of course the infamous Korean grindfests.
Game developers however tend to have a different view. They want to keep adding and expanding and innovating, not mass-producing the same title over and over with tweaks.
And this is why game developers are turning to Kickstarter rather than the big name publishers, and seeking funding directly from gamers. The gamers have an actual say in the game's creation, and therefore also the whole issue of The Right To Play.
In the same way that Myspace made the record companies panic because it took control out of their hands and put it back into the hands of the musicians themselves, I foresee the same thing happening with Kickstarter video game designers and the big games publishers.
Kickstarter promises a sense of community, a level of personal involvement that the publishing companies simply cannot offer. People like to feel special, that they're part of something. No one likes to think of themselves as some faceless statistic, another number to be ticked off on a monthly sales graph. Empowering the gamer is what Kickstarter projects are all about.
And for the games publishing companies, an empowered gamer is something to be feared. The more successful games projects Kickstarter produces, the more I believe the games industry will be forced to change the way it treats gamers. Gamers are no longer the cash spewing dupes they've been taking them for all these years.
The problem though with Kickstarter as a 'solution' to the problem with publishers are that Kickstarters don't generate enough cash to get the sort of Triple A titles that people demand often (causal gaming is successful, and indie gaming is successful, but they're not mutually exclusive with Triple A titles; they scratch different itches). The most successful Kickstarters are done by people who, frankly already have the clout that most people wouldn't have had to start with without a publisher. Though there are plenty of exceptions to that rule, they aren't the 'Big Bad Boring Publisher' killer that people think they will be. The 'record' Kickstarters are raking in maybe 3 million dollars. And that certainly isn't the median. I wouldn't expect much but niche gaming from them anytime soon.
The second problem is that, Publishers often weather losses that I don't think a Kickstarter group is going to tolerate. Too many people throw cash into a Kickstarter thinking it's effectively pre-ordering a game in a year. But not every game makes it to the shelves. There are a lot that just end up vaporware for various reasons (or should had stayed that way. See: Duke Nukem Forever). Publishers do take big risks sometimes and have the clout and money to absorb the occasional loss. That's why they favor 'boring and samey' games like Call of Duty 32,946, because that's a constant revenue stream that brings in the bacon to allow them to finally take a risk or two.
But we're just waiting, really, for a Kickstarter that gets really big, and I mean like, 3 million dollars big, to fail. Then all hell is going to break loose in the Kickstarter world, and it's going to get the same sorts of rule and regulations that are going to turn it basically into another stock market/publishing arm the same as every other company ever, I bet.
That's why Tony V's been very wise to not try to rely yet on crowd funding at this stage in either the Save CoH effort or Plan Z efforts, even though the longer he waits the less he'll be able to make period. While I'm sure he'd love to have the largest bankroll possible for whatever direction this effort takes, the effort would suffer many fold more if things didn't pan out and people basically donated for nothing.
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These guys are seriously into ethics in gaming (and other places) and the folks who are posting here could do a WHOLE lot worse than add their voices over there.
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These guys are seriously into ethics in gaming (and other places) and the folks who are posting here could do a WHOLE lot worse than add their voices over there.
WHOLEHEARTEDLY AGREED.
Some of the stuff I've read in this thread alone should qualify some people to head over there and start posting... Get your voices heard!
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The problem though with Kickstarter as a 'solution' to the problem with publishers are that Kickstarters don't generate enough cash to get the sort of Triple A titles that people demand often
But that's the point - it's the 'Triple A' titles that end up being bloodless reanimated cropses of their former selves. It's the very notion that such titles are "the way to go" that needs to be abandoned if gamers are to see any justice or have any personal power. It's like the Brawndo drink in the film Idiocracy - people aren't demanding it, they've just been drinking it so long they have no concept of drinking anything else, because the company slogan "Brawndo - it's got electrolytes" has become a mantra. Even though they have no idea what electrolytes are...
Thankfully, Idiocracy isn't reality. Not yet at least ;)
In reality, no single product can appeal to everyone, which is why so many of the big game titles seem so bland and shallow - they have to be in order to maximise sales. But niche gaming IS the future because that's where gamers can find the product that appeals to them as individuals. And there too they can exercise the most say and therefore have the most control.
The second problem is that, Publishers often weather losses that I don't think a Kickstarter group is going to tolerate.
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That's why they favor 'boring and samey' games like Call of Duty 32,946, because that's a constant revenue stream that brings in the bacon to allow them to finally take a risk or two.
There was a time I'd have agreed with you about publishers having the clout to take a risk, but I think the sad truth these days is they just don't seem to want to bother with risk titles any more. If they did, Kickstarter games wouldn't even exist at all. With very few exceptions, the big publishers have bought into their own hype that it's easier to simply keep churning out the same titles over and over.
And the very fact that Kickstarter is crowd funded means the game developers can't weather a loss - that's the point. They commit to a project and their backers commit to them. Everyone knows that at the outset, so it's not really a case of a group tolerating a loss, the fiscal mechanic is entirely different.
That's why Tony V's been very wise to not try to rely yet on crowd funding at this stage in either the Save CoH effort or Plan Z efforts, even though the longer he waits the less he'll be able to make period. While I'm sure he'd love to have the largest bankroll possible for whatever direction this effort takes, the effort would suffer many fold more if things didn't pan out and people basically donated for nothing.
Absolutely. The main reason why Kickstarter was mostly being rejected in the early days of our campaign was because of the IP hassles. It's not possible to Kickstart "City of Heroes" because it wasn't ours to Kickstart. And as long as plans are still afoot to try and regain the original CoH IP we all know and love rather than concentrate 100% on an entirely new "spirit of CoH" project, it would be both impractical and previous to try to put a Kickstarter together.
Maybe, should everything fail, and NCsoft squat on the CoH IP like some bloated Shelob in their ever-darkening lair, then Kickstarter may well be the way ahead for us with an incarnation of Project Z/Phoenix/whatever we choose to call it. You said yourself it works best for niche markets, and that does pretty much sum up what we are! :)
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But that's the point - it's the 'Triple A' titles that end up being bloodless reanimated corpses of their former selves. It's the very notion that such titles are "the way to go" that needs to be abandoned if gamers are to see any justice or have any personal power. It's like the Brawndo drink in the film Idiocracy - people aren't demanding it, they've just been drinking it so long they have no concept of drinking anything else, because the company slogan "Brawndo - it's got electrolytes" has become a mantra. Even though they have no idea what electrolytes are...
Thankfully, Idiocracy isn't reality. Not yet at least ;)
Ignoring your Idiocracy quote as I believe it harms your argument more than it helps because that movie is terrible, I don't really see a need to 'abandon' Triple A titles. A lot of very good games came out of it. Even lately, titles like Skyrim, Portal 2, Assassin's Creed, Mass Effect etc. came out of the Triple A industry.
And my point was, really, that Kickstarters aren't going to be able to produce those games. And when they do make enough bank to produce them, eventually something is going to fall through because, as I said, many games don't make it to shelves (or shouldn't). But I don't think customers who pay into Kickstarters do it with the proper mindset.
I don't like EA. I really don't like publishers, at all. I don't like the fact they can own IP rather than lease them, and can bury them without intent to use them like they're doing with CoH. But EA is capable and willing to put money on a risk that normal customers, if they were educated, probably wouldn't.
It's really a ticking time bomb for something to get both mega huge and to fold up without any product. I don't think Kickstarter users are prepared to deal with crowd funding 10 million dollars into a game to have it vaporware. And it will eventually happen.
In reality, no single product can appeal to everyone, which is why so many of the big game titles seem so bland and shallow - they have to be in order to maximise sales. But niche gaming IS the future because that's where gamers can find the product that appeals to them as individuals. And there too they can exercise the most say and therefore have the most control.
I don't even think niche games are going to appeal to everybody, that's not their point either? I'm not sure your point. Mainstream games don't appeal to everybody either, or you wouldn't be here complaining about them. Are you trying to argue that Kickstarters allow customers to exercise more control over the market than just buying games? Because really you exercise the same amount of control either way.
There was a time I'd have agreed with you about publishers having the clout to take a risk, but I think the sad truth these days is they just don't seem to want to bother with risk titles any more. If they did, Kickstarter games wouldn't even exist at all. With very few exceptions, the big publishers have bought into their own hype that it's easier to simply keep churning out the same titles over and over.
Two things with that. One, I don't think publishers used to take more risks. I think they take about the same amount of them now as they have since pretty much forever. There was a whole library of the same doughy kinda but not Mario like platformers on the NES. Not taking risks with the exception here or there is something publishers have been doing for basically ever. This isn't some sort of new age of non-risk taking, that's been pretty much static ever since money was involved in this system.
Secondly, you seem to think that people will either buy a Triple A title like Skyrim or play something like Minecraft and there's no middle ground and none of them ever play both. Kickstarters exist not because people won't play Triple A titles, because considering the major bank games like Call of Duty 30 thousand they apparently are playing those games, but because people can and will play both.
And the very fact that Kickstarter is crowd funded means the game developers can't weather a loss - that's the point. They commit to a project and their backers commit to them. Everyone knows that at the outset, so it's not really a case of a group tolerating a loss, the fiscal mechanic is entirely different.
You seem to be in some sort of bizarre reality where spending money automatically equates success in a project, but that's not the case in the reality I've witnessed. Game developers can surely still blow through their Kickstarter funds. Actually what you said there is a good example, to me, of the mindset people who pay into Kickstarters have that is going to make them eventually fail as a thing.
You, right there are basically telling me that you believe these things are magically perfectly guaranteed. But that's not how reality plays out. Things happen. Sometimes a project being worked on needs to start over. Sometimes a designer dies. Sometimes the fad moves on and the developer needs to change tactics. There will come a point where SOMETHING will come up to a million dollar + Kickstarter and it won't be able to continue without another infusion of another millions dollars. This is a reality of publishing anything with high enough development costs.
This is why Kickstarter, as is, is a time bomb. Eventually it will grow big enough to fund a game with the scope of something like Skyrim. And those projects fail all the time. Eventually one of them is going to fail, and people like you who think that "I threw money at it, that means I was committed, and they were committed" are going to have to look at the reality of this failed project and reevaluate this funding method.
And, as I said, I don't think the general internet crowd is going into this with the right mindset. You're all going into Kickstarters with the mindsets that it's this basically flawless plan, like if you put 50 dollars into the Kickstarter you're basically pre-ordering a finished and guaranteed product.
That is the very mindset that's going to burn people when inevitably something backfires.
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This is why Kickstarter, as is, is a time bomb. Eventually it will grow big enough to fund a game with the scope of something like Skyrim. And those projects fail all the time. Eventually one of them is going to fail, and people like you who think that "I threw money at it, that means I was committed, and they were committed" are going to have to look at the reality of this failed project and reevaluate this funding method.
And, as I said, I don't think the general internet crowd is going into this with the right mindset. You're all going into Kickstarters with the mindsets that it's this basically flawless plan, like if you put 50 dollars into the Kickstarter you're basically pre-ordering a finished and guaranteed product.
It depends on who is behind the Kickstarter proposal. One I backed was the Ogre Designer's Edition (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/847271320/ogre-designers-edition), put up by Steve Jackson Games -- a gaming company with a known track record, who had produced the original version of the game. And they were wildly successful, getting more than $900,000 in pledges against a $20,000 goal. But I admit that this is a special case, and the run-of-the-mill Kickstarter project organizers aren't going to be anywhere close to having that kind of recognition and confidence that they would be able to deliver on everything they're promising.
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Ignoring your Idiocracy quote as I believe it harms your argument more than it helps because that movie is terrible
lol If you prefer then, think instead of the 1951 Cyril M. Kornbluth story called "The Marching Morons" on which Idiocracy was mostly based.
Secondly, you seem to think that people will either buy a Triple A title like Skyrim or play something like Minecraft and there's no middle ground and none of them ever play both. Kickstarters exist not because people won't play Triple A titles, because considering the major bank games like Call of Duty 30 thousand they apparently are playing those games, but because people can and will play both.
I never said that people who play Call of Duty 'to the Nth' don't play anything else as well, I said that everyone has a unique set of preferences, and a generic title cannot satisfy them the same way a tailored game can. Continuing that 'tailored' analogy, folk will buy a 'nearest fit' off-the-shelf item, but if given the choice, they'll prefer to take one that's been tailored specifically to them.
This is why Kickstarter, as is, is a time bomb. Eventually it will grow big enough to fund a game with the scope of something like Skyrim. And those projects fail all the time. Eventually one of them is going to fail, and people like you who think that "I threw money at it, that means I was committed, and they were committed" are going to have to look at the reality of this failed project and reevaluate this funding method.
I think you're painting people with a very broad brush here. Your statement implies you assume that everyone who backs a Kickstarter project is some sort of financially naive idiot. You may disagree with the system, but that's no reason to insult the people who do back Kickstarter projects - especially when you're implying they're committing money blindly and without thought.
And, as I said, I don't think the general internet crowd is going into this with the right mindset. You're all going into Kickstarters with the mindsets that it's this basically flawless plan, like if you put 50 dollars into the Kickstarter you're basically pre-ordering a finished and guaranteed product.
That is the very mindset that's going to burn people when inevitably something backfires.
I must say, you seem to have as negative a view of Kickstarter as you're accusing me of having a positive one! :P
I can certainly understand reticence or caution - such a mindset is wise when it comes to committing any money to anything, especially in these financially troubled times - but I fear your attitude of Kickstarter doom may be bordering on the pathological ;) Before anyone backs a project at Kickstarter, they are directed to the Basics and FAQs. And key among those are these :
Kickstarter Basics: Accountability (http://www.kickstarter.com/help/faq/kickstarter%20basics#Acco)
Why can't Kickstarter guarantee projects? (http://www.kickstarter.com/help/faq/kickstarter%20basics#WhyCantKickGuarProj)
It's there in black and white, before even a single dollar is pledged. No one is forcing anyone to invest their money, and the Kickstarter system itself makes it quite clear that nothing is 100% guaranteed.
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Play nice, or by all that is holy I will turn this thread around and NOBODY gets ice cream!
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...no.....ice cream????
(https://i.imgur.com/b7W7Hl.gif)
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The problem though with Kickstarter as a 'solution' to the problem with publishers are that Kickstarters don't generate enough cash to get the sort of Triple A titles that people demand often (causal gaming is successful, and indie gaming is successful, but they're not mutually exclusive with Triple A titles; they scratch different itches). The most successful Kickstarters are done by people who, frankly already have the clout that most people wouldn't have had to start with without a publisher. Though there are plenty of exceptions to that rule, they aren't the 'Big Bad Boring Publisher' killer that people think they will be. The 'record' Kickstarters are raking in maybe 3 million dollars. And that certainly isn't the median. I wouldn't expect much but niche gaming from them anytime soon.
Kickstarter or any other crowdfunding venues are not a "solution to the problem with publishers" as you put it. Instead they are a complementary funding channel. I'm not certain where the notion of dichotomy came from, however I can't help but see that point of view as fundamentally flawed and not in line with what is Kickstarter's purpose.
That's why Tony V's been very wise to not try to rely yet on crowd funding at this stage in either the Save CoH effort or Plan Z efforts, even though the longer he waits the less he'll be able to make period. While I'm sure he'd love to have the largest bankroll possible for whatever direction this effort takes, the effort would suffer many fold more if things didn't pan out and people basically donated for nothing.
With all due respect (and sympathy) for the people involved with various incarnations of Plan Z, at this point in time none of the projects covered by that umbrella term comes even close to qualify for being a passable candidate for crowd funding and I would imagine TonyV and other people leading the efforts are quite aware of that fact.
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OK, back up a sec.
Ice cream?
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Play nice, or by all that is holy I will turn this thread around and NOBODY gets ice cream!
slightly lactose intolerant anyways. lol.
But one thing I dont understand about kickstarter and hope someone can clear this up, is what happens to all the money if a project folds, especially the ones that rake in a substantial amount?
Fro mwhat I gather, kickstarter sounds risky for the investors.
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Play nice, or by all that is holy I will turn this thread around and NOBODY gets ice cream!
But Comrade Mooooommmm, an equal share of ice cream is my right as a member of the proletariat!
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Just a little sidenote (WALL OF TEXT INCOMING! TYPO ADD!):
I read words like "own stuff" multiple times in this thread.
Has anyone ever read the ToA of CoX/NCS. It is clearly stated that you will lose any of paid for stuff or created stuff in CoX if NCS wishes so. We all just bought a plain crappy allowance to use their software in the way they wanted us to use.
From the legal term here in germany:
If NCS would now resurrect the franchise, makeing a movie and use all of our player creates content (heroes/villains/story arcs) we couldn't do nothing.
The problems are the ToA and the EULA. By using their product we accepted the lost of our intelectual property.
There real comics of heroes wich were created in the game floating around. My main is one of those. We would never ever gain a cent if they want to use them as money machine...also they will lose their identity if NCS would do so.
VV made a nice analogy wich actually DOESN'T fit. In her thoughts we would even have the right to have stuff there. But actually the only.stuff we had, was a signed paper with...you know...that sort of text like:"Ha!Ha! All your ideas and your base belongs to us!".
Pretty poor actually and pretty common to have millions of potential ideas under ones own IP.
About the emulation stuff.
Well: Even it NCS says "You are not allowed to create an emu" < this is just really big BS!
You are allowed to create whatever you want, as long as you do it on your own.
The main problem is: You are not allowed to make changes to the client itself.
I know the legal stuff about serveremulation pretty well, due the fact I have plenty years of experience in it and was also part of multiple really big projects. There is always alot of time, know how and of course money involved, since UO/OSI opened the doors for the emulation scene. Sadly it is more treated like piracy, even if people just want to save their game (ex.: SWG Pre CU <> SWGEmu).
In the end I just can say: Yes there should be some sort of right to a fan to create a platform/server for his game. Or at least a basic platform (like a pretty basic coreserver) should be given to the fanbase, if a game is about to disappear. What a fan does with the stuff given to him might be up.to him, but I guess every Dev would luckily smile if he knows that the game he created still lives under the watchful eyes of it's fans :). At least it would be a thing I would wish for my games.
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re: Kickstarter.
Read it here:
http://www.kickstarter.com/help/faq/kickstarter%20basics (http://www.kickstarter.com/help/faq/kickstarter%20basics)
The project can't fold, or the project holder is going to be in hot soup. Not only is their reputation down the toilet on *any* future ideas, but the money is supposed to be fully refunded to those who want it. Now whether that can happen or not... I dunno, IANAL, but it's in the agreement, and there is a good chance someone who donates could either a) be a lawyer, or b) own enough money and be irritated enough to hire a lawyer, so that c) that project dude/dudette is not going to be very happy folding up.
Also, it could be that d) Kickstarter doesn't want the bad pub, and will actively go after whoever tries to not refund, so as to continue Kickstarter's "good feels about this? donate here, people!" thing going.
The thing is on this, once funded, it is supposed to be a no brainer, can do it, will happen thing. Otherwise, don't bother using this service, go get VC like any other startup/idea shop..
And the other side of the coin is that there has to be enough people to say "Oh, yep, I believe you will do that when you say. I like you. You're shiny, here's a dollar." If there's not enough, then the project is a no-go.
Convincing enough people is the key, and that means credibility in pullin' it off.
That... may be a lil' difficult to achieve with this project, but I am no way sayin' it can't be done.
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Just a little sidenote:
I read words like "own stuff" multiple times in this thread.
Has anyone ever read the ToA of CoX/NCS. It is clearly stated that you will lose any of paid for stuff or created stuff in CoX if NCS wishes so. We all just bought a plain crappy allowance to use their software in the way they wanted us to use.
From the legal term here in germany:
If NCS would now resurrect the franchise, makeing a movie and use all of our player creates content (heroes/villains/story arcs) we couldn't do nothing.
The problems are the ToA and the EULA. By using their product we accepted the lost of our intelectual property.
There real comics of heroes wich were created in the game floating around. My main is one of those. We would never ever gain a cent if they want to use them as money machine...also they will lose their identity if NCS would do so.
VV made a nice analogy wich actually DOESN'T fit. In her thoughts we would even have the right to have stuff there. But actually the only.stuff we had, was a signed paper with...you know...that sort of text like:"Ha!Ha! All your ideas and your base belongs to us!".
Pretty poor actually and pretty common to have millions of potential ideas under ones own IP.
About the emulation stuff.
Well: Even it NCS says "You are not allowed to create an emu" < this is just really big BS!
You are allowed to create whatever you want, as long as you do it on you own.
The main problem is: You are not allowed to make changes to the client itself.
I know the legal stuff about serveremulation pretty well, due the fact I have plenty years of experience in it and was also part of multiple really big projects. There is always alot of time, know how and of course money involved, since UO/OSI opened the doors for the emulation szene. Sadly it is more treated like piracy, even if people just want to save their game (ex.: SWG Pre Cu/SWGEmu).
In the end I just can say: Yes there should be some sort of right to a fan to create a platform/server for his game. Or at least a basic platform (like a pretty basic coreserver) should be given to the fanbase, if a game is about to disappear. What a fan does with the stuff given to him might be up.to him, but I guess every Dev would luckily smile if he knows that the game he created still lives under the watchful eyes of it's fans :). At least it would be a thing I would wish for my games.
Yes, I have read the EULA and TOS agreements very, very carefully. I had to, since we were writing a book series with characters that originated in the CoX universe.
You are misreading it. NCSoft ONLY has the right to use your characters in a limited fashion in PROMOTIONAL venues only. Otherwise, you own the right to the character.
Here are examples of what they could do:
Put your character in a promotional ad or video.
Use the IMAGE of your character, and possibly the name, in a comic book or other form of media.
HOWEVER, they could NOT use the backstory you had created (if any) nor any fiction you had written about your character, nor any art you had created, or had commissioned.
The likelihood of anyone NCSoft actually doing comics, movies, or videos is...well, winning the lottery has a better chance. The comics did not do well, the books sank like a lead weight, and even making direct-to-video is an expensive proposition.
And YOU are not prohibited by the EULA from doing comics, movies, books or videos with your character. Once you did that, you would be protected by the Berne Copyright Convention which is international, and NCSoft would be unable to do anything other than copy the LOOK of your character.
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But Comrade Mooooommmm, an equal share of ice cream is my right as a member of the proletariat!
So is an equal share of NO ice cream!
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*hums..'nuthin from nuthin is nuthin'...(https://i.imgur.com/jtOIT.gif)*
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*hums..'nuthin from nuthin is nuthin'...(https://i.imgur.com/jtOIT.gif)*
I hadn't thought about that Billy Preston song in years.
I also liked your posted response to No Ice Cream. I remember my mom threatening that to get us kids to behave when I was 9.
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*shares ice cream with JR*
(https://i.imgur.com/VXBUOl.jpg)
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Nobody makes ice cream look as delicious and desirable as children do. We all feel that way about it, but only kids are capable of expressing it properly.
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*shares ice cream with JR*
(https://i.imgur.com/VXBUOl.jpg)
8) TY for the Awesome, Healix! ;D
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Yes, I have read the EULA and TOS agreements very, very carefully. I had to, since we were writing a book series with characters that originated in the CoX universe.
You are misreading it. NCSoft ONLY has the right to use your characters in a limited fashion in PROMOTIONAL venues only. Otherwise, you own the right to the character.
Here are examples of what they could do:
Put your character in a promotional ad or video.
Use the IMAGE of your character, and possibly the name, in a comic book or other form of media.
HOWEVER, they could NOT use the backstory you had created (if any) nor any fiction you had written about your character, nor any art you had created, or had commissioned.
The likelihood of anyone NCSoft actually doing comics, movies, or videos is...well, winning the lottery has a better chance. The comics did not do well, the books sank like a lead weight, and even making direct-to-video is an expensive proposition.
And YOU are not prohibited by the EULA from doing comics, movies, books or videos with your character. Once you did that, you would be protected by the Berne Copyright Convention which is international, and NCSoft would be unable to do anything other than copy the LOOK of your character.
Thanks for clearing that up VV. It was as far as I understood a loss of the intellectual proberty.
And that's something I really went up the walls. Because everyone knows: ideas, phantasy, thinking = freedom ;)
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Yes, I have read the EULA and TOS agreements very, very carefully. I had to, since we were writing a book series with characters that originated in the CoX universe.
You are misreading it. NCSoft ONLY has the right to use your characters in a limited fashion in PROMOTIONAL venues only. Otherwise, you own the right to the character.
Here are examples of what they could do:
Put your character in a promotional ad or video.
Use the IMAGE of your character, and possibly the name, in a comic book or other form of media.
HOWEVER, they could NOT use the backstory you had created (if any) nor any fiction you had written about your character, nor any art you had created, or had commissioned.
The likelihood of anyone NCSoft actually doing comics, movies, or videos is...well, winning the lottery has a better chance. The comics did not do well, the books sank like a lead weight, and even making direct-to-video is an expensive proposition.
And YOU are not prohibited by the EULA from doing comics, movies, books or videos with your character. Once you did that, you would be protected by the Berne Copyright Convention which is international, and NCSoft would be unable to do anything other than copy the LOOK of your character.
Not to mention that courts, depending on how they feel at that moment, I guess, have thrown out cases where EULA writers have written basically complete illegal nonsense into their TOS when the EULA writer has tried to prosecute the case.
The EULA can write stuff in the contract like "We have a right to secretly raid your house for all your good and services and you're not allowed to even call the police", but that doesn't mean it'll stick in court.
There's an inherent problem with allowing only one side of the supply and demand chain to define all the contracts as leases, and we're seeing it here first hand. It's only a matter of time until this problem hits all of computing, which will soon the more and more we rely on cloud computing and online entertainment distributors like Netflix or Steam. Technically you don't 'own' your DVDs or Bluray games and stuff. Eventually you won't 'own' anything, not even your own pants. But never in recent history was a company empowered to tell you you're only leasing everything you buy and put into your home or body, and also capable of remotely zapping that stuff into non-functionality.
But that said, EULAs aren't written in stone carved by the blood of priestesses. Courts have proven many times they won't uphold things they see as overstepping the court's bounds. Just because your EULA says you waive your right to a court's judgement doesn't mean that'll stick.
Our major problem right now is that, while Old Important People(TM) see things like Movies or Television or Music as Serious Business(TM), they still see Video Games and gamers in general as children or man-children, and tend to show that bias through on their judgements. But that won't be that way forever as those people age out and are replaced by people who grew up with gaming, or when Our Problem becomes Their Problem.
I know it might be too late for some now, but I know that, now that I've seen this first hand with CoH, I'll no longer ever be dismissive of another MMO going under, personally, where as when Tabula Rasa went under, I not only didn't think it mattered to me, I had no idea who even made or what Tabula Rasa was about.
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First, the girl in that picture looks like she's about to take that ice cream away in a very forceful fashion.
Second, I know I've said this before, but I would have liked to be a fly on the wall for the talks between Jim Butcher and NCSoft for him to have the right to make and keep a Harry Dresden character. :)
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First, the girl in that picture looks like she's about to take that ice cream away in a very forceful fashion.
Second, I know I've said this before, but I would have liked to be a fly on the wall for the talks between Jim Butcher and NCSoft for him to have the right to make and keep a Harry Dresden character. :)
His people talked to their legal people, provided proof he was the property owner, and likely signed some sort of agreement saying he wouldn't sue the begeezus out of them. S'bout it.
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You are officially no fun. :P
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This is a no fun zone. Saving City is SRS BSNESS! D:
/me tweeks dw's nose and flees
WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP!
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I solved the problem ahead of time by contacting then-Cryptic and giving them a written blanket permission for anyone to name any of their characters after any of mine as "fair use." I counted it as fan-fiction. When NCSoft took over, I reminded them I had done so. By the time NCSoft spun off Paragon Studios, so far as I know it had become policy with regard to my work.
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OK, you guys are really destroying my naive notion that these kinds of scenes read like an Aaron Sorkin teleplay! :'(
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re: Kickstarter.
Read it here:
http://www.kickstarter.com/help/faq/kickstarter%20basics (http://www.kickstarter.com/help/faq/kickstarter%20basics)
The project can't fold, or the project holder is going to be in hot soup. Not only is their reputation down the toilet on *any* future ideas, but the money is supposed to be fully refunded to those who want it. Now whether that can happen or not... I dunno, IANAL, but it's in the agreement, and there is a good chance someone who donates could either a) be a lawyer, or b) own enough money and be irritated enough to hire a lawyer, so that c) that project dude/dudette is not going to be very happy folding up.
Also, it could be that d) Kickstarter doesn't want the bad pub, and will actively go after whoever tries to not refund, so as to continue Kickstarter's "good feels about this? donate here, people!" thing going.
The thing is on this, once funded, it is supposed to be a no brainer, can do it, will happen thing. Otherwise, don't bother using this service, go get VC like any other startup/idea shop..
And the other side of the coin is that there has to be enough people to say "Oh, yep, I believe you will do that when you say. I like you. You're shiny, here's a dollar." If there's not enough, then the project is a no-go.
Convincing enough people is the key, and that means credibility in pullin' it off.
That... may be a lil' difficult to achieve with this project, but I am no way sayin' it can't be done.
thanks that answered my question about that portion. I just been wondering what happens to the money for a while guessing that not every single kickstarter program makes it and some may fold due to not hitting target and or need more funding than it could gather.