MMO Players Bill of Rights

[Liberties]

I have seen this mentioned in a couple places, and I thought it would be a good idea to actually get a master document going on it.

Feel free to reply and add, or argue for subtraction from this. I think that a Bill of Rights is needed for MMOs as a counter that gaming companies have to acknowledge they are expected to live up to.

1. We, as consumers of your product, have a right to expect that product to be there so long as it is profitable.
   - This means that it shouldn't be cancelled because it doesn't fit your vision, or you don't like it. It HAS to be non-profitable BEFORE a cancellation can be made, and you should communicate with the community when this sort of thing is becoming a likelihood.

2. We are entitled to frank, and honest communication with the businesses we deal with.
     - Don't Lie to Your Customer Base. I think that's pretty self explanatory.

3. We are entitled to good customer service, cause our patronage should be important to you.
    - Response times from a GM should be less, and frankly while they shouldn't play the game for you, bugs and such are game killers in some cases.

4. We are entitled to good content for our money. If it is a subscription based game we are entitled to regular updates of content.

5.  Our money is valued as money. Should a game be cancelled MONEY shall be returned to the player. Not E-Transaction credit to another game.
    - This is to bring ALL MMO publishers into compliance with the laws protecting citizens in the United States (which are the only ones I know).
   
6. Listen To Us. We are your target audience no matter what your investors or demographic data says.
     - If we say there is a bug, it's likely there if you look.

7. We have a right to try before we buy. MMOs are a huge investment of time and money, and we should be able to have a tour, so to speak.
    -Most games do this already, but I think it's important to make this nod.

8. Gamers are a family, and should be treated as such. We are inviting you into our homes, as a part of our lives and have the right to expect good behavior from a house guest.

9. No one demographic is more important then the other, please treat everyone equally.

(Proposed and Edited for spelling)

10. Paying customers should have the right to play the game they own, even if the publisher doesn't want to continue developing the game.
    - Video games are culture, an MMO publisher closing down an MMORPG effectively prevents past, present and future gamers to play this game in its functioning state, destroying culture. That doesn't oblige the publisher to have developers or community manager maintaining the game or making it compatible with new generations of software, emulation on the client part shall do that. The publisher does the only thing he can do.
(Edit): I would add that Video Games have the protection of an Art Form, and if an artist sold a painting, and then later decided to ruin it, he would still be arrested for damaging someone's property...


Criteria: I'd like to keep it to 10 Simplistic points, with simple explanation behind it.

I think this is something that should be added to EULAs, or sent in to companies as the counter offer inherent to our accepting they're EULA. If EVERYONE is insistent on stating these are our rights and expectations, Game companies will have to realize that the quality of they're games, especially when called Art by society, comes with it certain inherent responsibilities that not every company has been meeting. I also think a "Gamers Bill of Rights" should be written up to more broadly attack this issue for games and content.

Anyone who wants to help with this it would be more then welcome.

Elvnsword

[SithRose]

Can we get a mod to duplicate or move this thread in the City Sunset Legal forum, please? It's something that I would like everyone working on Plan Z to be thinking once (if) we reach the talking to legal people stage.

[Sekoia]

Can we get a mod to duplicate or move this thread in the City Sunset Legal forum, please? It's something that I would like everyone working on Plan Z to be thinking once (if) we reach the talking to legal people stage.

We don't have mod tools to duplicate threads. I also don't think it's a good idea to move it to Sunset, since a lot of people in this forum aren't watching those forums and the topic isn't specific to Plan Z. My best recommendation is that you could post something in Sunset linking to this and discussing it as it applies to Plan Z.

[SithRose]

We don't have mod tools to duplicate threads. I also don't think it's a good idea to move it to Sunset, since a lot of people in this forum aren't watching those forums and the topic isn't specific to Plan Z. My best recommendation is that you could post something in Sunset linking to this and discussing it as it applies to Plan Z.

In which case, I do the legwork! Consider it done. I didn't really want to MOVE it to Sunset, because it's applicable here as well *and* I want people to see it.

[Colette]

While wiser people than me must handle the legal verbiage, I endorse and support this wholeheartedly. It is time for us, the customers, to write the EULA. Viva la revolucion!

[QuantumHero]

This thread is music my ears

[gandales]

I have seen this mentioned in a couple places, and I thought it would be a good idea to actually get a master document going on it.

Feel free to reply and add, or argue for subtraction from this. I think that a Bill of Rights is needed for MMOs as a counter that gaming companies have to acknowledge they are expected to live up to.

1. We, as consumers of your product, have a right to expect that product to be there so long as it is profitable.
   - This means that it shouldn't be cancelled because it doesn't fit your vision, or you don't like it. It HAS to be non-profitable BEFORE a cancellation can be made, and you should communicate with the community when this sort of thing is becoming a likelihood.

Every business has a profit margin, i.e. that a profit that makes worth investing instead of putting the money in the bank. Anyway, no business should be forced to be offen unless it is really a primary need or huge public interest issue. It is pretty much saying that as long a game is deliverying the promised schedules gamers should stay subscribed into them. The shutdown notice is the place were a policy could be made, maybe 3 months is too short, maybe 6 months would be the right thing to do.

2. We are entitled to frank, and honest communication with the businesses we deal with.
     - Don't Lie to Your Customer Base. I think that's pretty self explanatory.

That goes for every business

3. We are entitled to good customer service, cause our patronage should be important to you.
    - Response times from a GM should be less, and frankly while they shouldn't play the game for you, bugs and such are game killers in some cases.

bugs are not intentional, and varying with dev team they could take more or less time to fix. Good costumer service is a subjective concept.

4. We are entitled to good content for our money. If it is a subscription based game we are entitled to regular updates of content.

Define good content. Again, subjective.

5.  Our money is valued as money. Should a game be cancelled MONEY shall be returned to the player. Not E-Transaction credit to another game.
    - This is to bring ALL MMO publishers into compliance with the laws protecting citizens in the United States (which are the only ones I know).

I agree, but given  the precedent of in-store credit only policy in some department stores, not sure if this is really applicable
   
6. Listen To Us. We are your target audience no matter what your investors or demographic data says.
     - If we say there is a bug, it's likely there if you look.

Because, it never happened that a mmo player exaggerate or troll. If you can keep an organized player feedback you can help to fix bugs faster.

7. We have a right to try before we buy. MMOs are a huge investment of time and money, and we should be able to have a tour, so to speak.
    -Most games do this already, but I think it's important to make this nod.

Nice, but how much of the game you want to try. Many games differ a lot between low levels, high levels, and endgame.

8. Gamers are a family, and should be treated as such. We are inviting you into our homes, as a part of our lives and have the right to expect good behavior from a house guest.

Actually, it is a double door, the ground truth of the game happen on the company server so you are a guest too.

9. No one demographic is more important then the other, please treat everyone equally.

you mean race, nacionality? there are things that are consequence of the country laws. Some logistics has to cater to the majority of the playerbase.
 
10. (Left for community development)


I think this is something that should be added to EULAs, or sent in to companies as the counter offer inherent to our accepting they're EULA. If EVERYONE is insistent on stating these are our rights and expectations, Game companies will have to realize that the quality of they're games, especially when called Art by society, comes with it certain inherent responsibilities that not every company has been meeting. I also think a "Gamers Bill of Rights" should be written up to more broadly attack this issue for games and content.

Anyone who wants to help with this it would be more then welcome.

Elvnsword

Not a bad thing, but  just many things are not applicable, at least in a free enterprise environment.

[Mister Bison]

10. Willing paying customers should have the right to play the game they own, even if the publisher doesn't want to continue developping the game. Video games are culture, an MMO publisher closing down an MMORPG effectively prevents past, present and future gamers to play this game in its functionning state, destroying culture. That doesn't oblige the publisher to have developpers or community manager maintaining the game or making it compatible with new generations of software, emulation on the client part shall do that. The publisher does the only thing he can do.

11. (left again for the community)

Information era, doesn't that ring a bell ? We don't live in the past era where you had to physically leave a triple dozen of powerful computers to host a game. You can just cram it in a server farm next to your present games and even have benefits. Hell my personnal pc could probably host a server for 2 or 3 players, or two dozens if I had the bandwidth (or if they were local).

[B_L_Angel]

You can draft all the documents you want but they don't matter. Some of the clauses in there would be difficult for any software house to meet and likely be very expensive as well. Piracy is very real in our world and for game publishers doing things that encourage it would be cutting their throats. Statements about software quality and completeness are also very hard. If you are publishing a boxed product for retail shelves, you may not have much if any choice about when things must be done. Complying with the document in short means additional costs for publishers with no evidence that there would be increased revenue.

From the other side, if you are going to have a revolution you need people willing to sacrifice to make it happen.Without the ability to inflict a penalty on publishers you won't see them agree to anything.  Just how many of our players that truly enjoyed CoH are playing Guild Wars 2 now ? How intense was their lobbying and recruiting people to that game ? These are the people you need to forgo the pleasure of the moment to punish people for things that likely had no effect on them. As a community we were hardly up in arms over Tabula Rasa. What NCsoft did to Auto Assault didn't stop me from playing CoH for one second. 

We had around 100k + people minimum that could log in for the AP rally ? How many did we get 5K ? Somehow I think more than 5k CoH players are playing GW2 and NCsoft certainly knows it.

[Liberties]

You can draft all the documents you want but they don't matter. Some of the clauses in there would be difficult for any software house to meet and likely be very expensive as well. Piracy is very real in our world and for game publishers doing things that encourage it would be cutting their throats. Statements about software quality and completeness are also very hard. If you are publishing a boxed product for retail shelves, you may not have much if any choice about when things must be done. Complying with the document in short means additional costs for publishers with no evidence that there would be increased revenue.

From the other side, if you are going to have a revolution you need people willing to sacrifice to make it happen.Without the ability to inflict a penalty on publishers you won't see them agree to anything.  Just how many of our players that truly enjoyed CoH are playing Guild Wars 2 now ? How intense was their lobbying and recruiting people to that game ? These are the people you need to forgo the pleasure of the moment to punish people for things that likely had no effect on them. As a community we were hardly up in arms over Tabula Rasa. What NCsoft did to Auto Assault didn't stop me from playing CoH for one second. 

We had around 100k + people minimum that could log in for the AP rally ? How many did we get 5K ? Somehow I think more than 5k CoH players are playing GW2 and NCsoft certainly knows it.

I feel this is a defeatist attitude. The only way to institute change is to stand up and say no more. By accurately standing behind a Bill of Rights, gamers can institute change. What you have said about Piracy is true, however, Piracy exists whether or not they are working with us, and if they are working with us I would think that happy gamers are active gamers. I certainly know I am unhappy with a couple gaming companies and have boycotted them myself for years in at least one case. I simply don't buy they're products.

I think your problem with the AP rally is simple to explain, this is a new ground we are treading, some people while sympathetic to the cause are unsure of how much impact we can as a group have. Frankly put no one protests unless they see protests being successful.

I do agree that we might have to forgo playing games that we love simply because we HAVE to get they're agreement to this bill of rights. Once it becomes clear a significant population of gamers are all for it, to the point of CANCELLING ACCOUNTS, then we will have success. That's the inherent issue. Just as with the Declaration of Independence, it can only carry weight if you are willing to fight for it, and on that we I think agree...

[SithRose]

From the other side, if you are going to have a revolution you need people willing to sacrifice to make it happen.Without the ability to inflict a penalty on publishers you won't see them agree to anything.  Just how many of our players that truly enjoyed CoH are playing Guild Wars 2 now ? How intense was their lobbying and recruiting people to that game ? These are the people you need to forgo the pleasure of the moment to punish people for things that likely had no effect on them. As a community we were hardly up in arms over Tabula Rasa. What NCsoft did to Auto Assault didn't stop me from playing CoH for one second. 

We had around 100k + people minimum that could log in for the AP rally ? How many did we get 5K ? Somehow I think more than 5k CoH players are playing GW2 and NCsoft certainly knows it.

As I've said before, I don't see any point in punishing ArenaNet for NCSoft's stupidity. They're in the same exact position that Paragon Studios was in. I don't know about anyone else, but I purchased GW2 back on the first day pre-purchase was available. That was several months before the announcement of COH shutting down. I see absolutely zero reason to waste the money I've already spent by refusing to play the game, especially when it's a game that I enjoy. It IS possible to enjoy more than one genre of MMO, you know. Whether or not I happen to be playing or enjoying a game developed by another studio that also happens to be owned by NCSoft has absolutely no bearing on whether or not I support efforts to save City of Heroes.

(I was in AP17 and AP3 for that rally, by the way.)

This is not a battle that will be fought in numbers of accounts or numbers of players. This is a battle that will be fought in paper, on youtube, on twitter and facebook. This is a battle of public opinion and pressure. The pressure of the press is far more scary to a company than the pressure of a handful of people saying that they're going to boycott further products by a company, especially when it's a population that's fairly unlikely to keep that boycott going for more than six months or so. It's the company's reputation that must suffer first - that will scare them and has far greater long-term potential to hit them in the pocketbook than simply calling for a boycott will. In this case, we have to look at how corporate minds think. And corporate minds don't think that a handful of gamers saying "I'm going to boycott NCSoft" is dangerous.

They DO think that a large number of respected bloggers and social media repeatedly pointing out how stupid their decision was, how badly they've handled it so far, and how they've handled the same decision multiple times in the past will hurt them. THAT is where this battle is being fought right now. Hit them in the PR, not the immediate purse. That'll hurt them a lot more in the long run, and they know that.

[Liberties]

I however do see the point in hitting a boycott to ALL NC Soft Titles, including Guild Wars 2. As you said companies don't see gamer boycotts as "a big deal" they are forgetting it is our money fueling they're coffers. As a group we are far more powerful then any one news agency or blogger, and as a LARGE group we are sure to get those same bloggers and news agencies talking.

By being a GROUP instead of "a bunch of entitled people" and presenting a unified front, like a document, or a ratifying cry, we say No More.

Only by presenting such a unified front can a bunch of entitled people, hope to become a GROUP instead. Look at the way political pressure works, writing a congressman as a single entity won't get you anything, but a group of people rallying together and lobbying a congressman, can cause change on the Hill.

I know, I got politics in your gaming, sorry...

Anyhow, what we need to do is present that unified front, that Gamer's Revolt to the world, with a Bill of Rights, and then follow through and stop the wallet of any company that violates those rights.

We do have the right to be treated like people, and not cash cows.

[HEATSTROKE]

 Your #1 and #10 will never fly. You can force a company or anyone to continue to make a or support a product and you dont own anything in an MMO.

[Liberties]

The point of this Heatstroke is to change that. My time has value, and as such, I expect something I invest time and money in to be a reflection of that value.

#1 is to show that cancelling of a game, just because, is unacceptable.
#10 is in there because it should be apparent that keeping good relationships with a Group is more important then short term profitability by "forcing" the subscribers to a new game. We're not saying to keep the servers up, but to release code, or give Gamers an avenue to address this concern. This is nothing more then an endorsement of Plan Z.

[Segev]

elvnsword, while I respect your desires here, I think you need to be careful about this kind of statement:

My time has value, and as such, I expect something I invest time and money in to be a reflection of that value.

If you invest time and money into watching sports, attending sporting events, etc., what expectation of value reflection do you think you can reasonably have?

If you're a huge fan of a particular mom-and-pop restaurant, and then Mom and Pop decide to retire, closing up shop, do you expect that the hours upon hours you spent at their restaruant, and the probably tens of thousands of dollars over the years, entitles you to more than the meals and ambiance you already got?


Again, I'm not against trying to get NCSoft or any other publisher to make an MMO continue to be available, but I do want to make sure people are aware of the potential directions their well-meaning desires could take things.

[QuantumHero]

All confusion goes away when you seperate product from service.

Product a tangible entity for which we exchanged a form of payment...food, cd, book, car, computer game, clothing, painting, console game, chair, gasoline, log of wood, ball of yarn, lump of gold.  All physical items that you purchase and take possession of and may continue to use or consume.

Service - turning a lump of gold into a ring, putting gasoline in my car, performing a repair on my car, serving me food in a resteraunt, re-upholstering my chair, creating a new song or placing it on a cd, writing a new book/publishing that book, framing a painting/making a print of a paining/creating a new painting.

Selling us disks = product, Selling a server module=product

Hosting and maintaining servers -service

[Segev]

Ah, but they never sold a server module. Nor did you buy one.

And the kitchen and dining room of the Mom and Pop diner in my analogy are "products," too, but they're under no obligation to sell either to you.

[Sekoia]

I'm fond of the idea of an MMO Players' Bill of Rights. However, I'm afraid this isn't really the kind of bill of rights I personally wanted to see.

Many of the points raised here are about the game, or about the relationship between individual customers and the company that owns the game, or about the money involved.

What I want to see protected and acknowledged is the community that is built on top of the game. Refunds and bug fixes and new content are worthwhile, but really they're not among my priorities for a bill of rights.

Every company with an MMO tries to foster a community. That's why they don't just provide a game; they provide a game with social elements integrated. You can talk to other players. You can form not just teams, but supergroups or guilds. You can add friends and you can even ignore people you don't like. Most games have forums. Many games organize events for their players, or otherwise interact with the playerbase as a community. This stuff isn't incidental. Much of the value of an MMO is its community. The MMO companies directly foster that community because they need it to make the game successful.

But that community doesn't just exist to serve the game owner's needs. And they need to acknowledge that. It's unacceptable to build a community up and then abandon it without good cause. If there is good cause for a company to abandon a game, then it's unacceptable for them to bar other solutions to keeping the game and community going. Just as the MMO needs the community, the community also needs the MMO.

The MMO companies need to acknowledge that the MMO belongs to both the company and the community. It doesn't necessarily need to legally enshrine that, but it needs to handle the MMO with that in mind.

That's the kind of stuff I want to see somehow enshrined in a bill of rights. Many of the other things raised here fall under the scope of "Game Players' Bill of Rights" and are not specific to MMOs (or even to games, in some cases). I want to see a focus on what makes the MMO unique: its virtual world and the community fostered within it.

[QuantumHero]

No they never sold a server module and I grant them the right to profit from selling one or allow the "after-market" accessory creator to do the job for them much I  buy parts for my car or gasoline from an outside sourse...even if the car company closes shop or discontinues my model.  The dealership can provide services but they don't stop me from going to other reapir shops.

The analogy of mom and pop's resteraunt does not apply the only product they ever sold was food an maybe monogramed merchandise.  I can continue to use that monogrammed merchandise (cup, t-shirt, etc) they are not rendered non-functional by the closing of the place.  Food is by definition a consumable product that comes with an expiration date.

Two days after mom and pops closes their doors for the last time I can freeze, reheat, or consume any products they have sold me...I just can't get more.  They do not need to sell their equipment o me because I can use any stove.

A program is not a consumable and we do not have an expiration date for safety reasons.

[Graphite]

*signed*

/em thumbup

[B_L_Angel]

I feel this is a defeatist attitude. The only way to institute change is to stand up and say no more. By accurately standing behind a Bill of Rights, gamers can institute change. What you have said about Piracy is true, however, Piracy exists whether or not they are working with us, and if they are working with us I would think that happy gamers are active gamers. I certainly know I am unhappy with a couple gaming companies and have boycotted them myself for years in at least one case. I simply don't buy they're products.

I think your problem with the AP rally is simple to explain, this is a new ground we are treading, some people while sympathetic to the cause are unsure of how much impact we can as a group have. Frankly put no one protests unless they see protests being successful.

I do agree that we might have to forgo playing games that we love simply because we HAVE to get they're agreement to this bill of rights. Once it becomes clear a significant population of gamers are all for it, to the point of CANCELLING ACCOUNTS, then we will have success. That's the inherent issue. Just as with the Declaration of Independence, it can only carry weight if you are willing to fight for it, and on that we I think agree...

This isn't defeatism. These are issues that have to be overcome if you want to make progress.

How do you get gamers to care about what happens to games they don't play ? Once you do, how do you communicate to publishers that they will hurt themselves by ignoring the issue. People will protest if they care. I remember the anti war protests all too well. You had people protesting the war because they were scared out of their wits they would be drafted, what's our equivalent ? Always connected to the net DRM ?

[Liberties]

Our

This isn't defeatism. These are issues that have to be overcome if you want to make progress.

How do you get gamers to care about what happens to games they don't play ? Once you do, how do you communicate to publishers that they will hurt themselves by ignoring the issue. People will protest if they care. I remember the anti war protests all too well. You had people protesting the war because they were scared out of their wits they would be drafted, what's our equivalent ? Always connected to the net DRM ?

The equivalent is that they aren't meeting the Bill. Frankly put the BoR would be our manifesto so to speak, people who read it no matter the game should agree with it, and be willing to fight for the ideas behind it. People didn't JUST protest the war because they were scared of the draft if that were the case it would have been an all male protest against the draft. They protested because they thought it was wrong, or because they thought it was poor decision making by our leadership, in this case that leadership is what we're asking of Game Companies.

"Be examples," we say "Follow this bill of rights and we will buy your games, don't and unfortunately we will have to pass because we are smart informed consumers not some cash cows for you to milk." 

If we follow that Games are Art, then I hold to the euphemism that cancelling a game that is still profitable, without any way to play it after years, and money invested in it, is akin to an artist coming into your home and splashing paint all over they're work they have sold you.

I agree almost entirely with Quantum Hero, it's more like a car that the dealer doesn't make parts for anymore, then a case of the Mom and Pop store closing down. Especially since, to use the Mom and Pop example, what we're going through with CoH is akin to the Mom and Pop store closing, remodeling into a food restaurant you find abysmally bland, and then EXPECTING you to come eat there cause you have no other choice.

[Piledriver]

I don't expect nearly all that. Content updates? Really? No. I realize that servers, housing, bandwidth and basic customer service (up to and including software maintenance/bug-fixing issues) cost. The rest is gravy; benefits of the company attempting to attract more players, to maintain more of the fickle end of the subscriber pool, or generate additional revenue from monetization.

A good faith assumption that a publisher will show interest in the preservation of a serviceable product by any means would be nice. The law, with narrow exception, does not require that publishers not dictate all terms of their relationship with consumers, though.

With this being brought up in reference to a product for which the primary audience is in the US, I wouldn't expect consumer advocates to look twice. Perhaps if the consumers being abused were mostly in Europe someone might stand up, but not here in the land of corporate idolatry. Even Ralph Nader picked only battles where he could scent blood.

Yes, call it defeatist. This avenue, put forth with such excessive demands, looks capable of nothing more than stirring up more enmity with not only NCSoft but gamers and game publishers at large who otherwise might support our cause.

[Mister Bison]

If we follow that Games are Art, then I hold to the euphemism that cancelling a game that is still profitable, without any way to play it after years, and money invested in it, is akin to an artist coming into your home and splashing paint all over they're work they have sold you.

I agree almost entirely with Quantum Hero, it's more like a car that the dealer doesn't make parts for anymore, then a case of the Mom and Pop store closing down. Especially since, to use the Mom and Pop example, what we're going through with CoH is akin to the Mom and Pop store closing, remodeling into a food restaurant you find abysmally bland, and then EXPECTING you to come eat there cause you have no other choice.

In fact, it's more like closing your neighbouring loop circuit when you have a sports car only allowed to run there. You still have the car, but you can't drive it anywhere. And they closed the circuit because they decided to make love boats, even if the circuit was still profitable to maintain. And they own the patent to make loop circuits.

[Kaiser Tarantula]

FAIR WARNING: Potential wall of text incoming!  Brace yourself!

I have seen this mentioned in a couple places, and I thought it would be a good idea to actually get a master document going on it.

Feel free to reply and add, or argue for subtraction from this. I think that a Bill of Rights is needed for MMOs as a counter that gaming companies have to acknowledge they are expected to live up to.

I agree wholeheartedly, but honestly I think your proposed Bill of Right is just a little too restricting.  Let me toss some ideas your way, and let me know what you think.

1. We, as consumers of your product, have a right to expect that product to be there so long as it is profitable.
   - This means that it shouldn't be cancelled because it doesn't fit your vision, or you don't like it. It HAS to be non-profitable BEFORE a cancellation can be made, and you should communicate with the community when this sort of thing is becoming a likelihood.

This is a bit unfair to developers and publishers.  I mean, sure, one game might be profitable, but it might not be profitable to save the companies involved due to mismanagement of other games and such.  I know CoH is not that case - NCSoft is blatantly closing us down despite the fact that it's solvent and CoH is still profitable, but let's be a little circumspect of the developer/publisher situation.  I have a proposed edit later on that will eliminate the need for this item.

2. We are entitled to frank, and honest communication with the businesses we deal with.
     - Don't Lie to Your Customer Base. I think that's pretty self explanatory.

I agree wholeheartedly.  Transparency is important, both with shareholders and with customers.  A lot of companies think that they only need to satisfy their shareholders and can let the customers rot, but without customers you have no means of paying your shareholders, and that will quickly lead to you, y'know, not having shareholders and either going bankrupt or being bought out.  I'm not saying that customers should be invited to listen in on shareholder meetings, but regular communication and "state of the game" addresses should be the norm.  This item should stay untouched.

3. We are entitled to good customer service, cause our patronage should be important to you.
    - Response times from a GM should be less, and frankly while they shouldn't play the game for you, bugs and such are game killers in some cases.

The presence and activity of GMs on a game directly reflects how much care and attention the publisher & developers care about their customers.  Like above, a company that doesn't show some interest in keeping its customer base around will quickly cease to have a customer base.  Further, any game, and MMOs in particular, due to the amount of content one has to put out to make a good one, will have bugs.  It's important to have someone on hand, with the powers necessary to address the bugs, in the event they become a problem for your players.  Frustrated players stop playing, and players that stop playing, stop paying.  It's just good business sense.

4. We are entitled to good content for our money. If it is a subscription based game we are entitled to regular updates of content.

This might be going a bit far.  I agree that we should be entitled to good content for our money.  But I'd disagree on the term "regular" - if a game doesn't have enough content to satisfy its subscribing playerbase, and the company refuses to add more, the game will flop on its own, or players will start creating private servers to implement the changes that they want to see.

Look at Ragnarok Online, another Korean-owned MMO.  Due to mismanagement in how they handled International RO's updates (Gravity America had to purchase updates from its Korean branch in order to provide them to American players), many updates were horrendously delayed for a very long time.  This led to the creation of tons upon tons of private servers based upon Korean RO, because players were fed up with waiting for Gravity.  These players basically re-localized the Korean version of the game themselves - no small effort.

In short, I don't feel this item is really necessary.  If the developer and publisher refuses to update content regularly, or the content they do push out isn't quality, they're eventually going to kill their own game.  Future items in the MMO bill of rights will have provisions for handling that.

5.  Our money is valued as money. Should a game be cancelled MONEY shall be returned to the player. Not E-Transaction credit to another game.
    - This is to bring ALL MMO publishers into compliance with the laws protecting citizens in the United States (which are the only ones I know).

I agree wholeheartedly with this one.  Ideally, no MMO should have to refund any money for subscriptions or microtransactions, but in the event that they do, it should be provided as money.  For example, a check, cash, Paypal payment, or wire transfer to the account of you (the player's) choice.  Not credit for other games.

Publishers, realize - sometimes, the customer you're offering a refund to does not have the ability or interest to play any of your other games.  That customer is just as entitled to a refund as all of the others who are.  You stiff those customers, and that's going to make for bad word-of-mouth for you.  Everyone likes money (well, except Freakshow), so giving back money when you need to do refunds is good business practice.
   

6. Listen To Us. We are your target audience no matter what your investors or demographic data says.
     - If we say there is a bug, it's likely there if you look.

I also agree with this one.  Publishers and devs take note: you ignore your customers at your own peril.  Sure, the bulk of the crowd's gonna be dumb as rocks, but you owe it to them and yourself to sift through that  pile of rocks for the diamonds.  Who knows, you might score yourself some prime GM or development talent among the community, or at least find yourself someone really good at hunting and pinning down bugs.

7. We have a right to try before we buy. MMOs are a huge investment of time and money, and we should be able to have a tour, so to speak.
    -Most games do this already, but I think it's important to make this nod.

Yep.  No MMO I can remember has ever sold well without a demo or trial period.  MMOs, even the most casual of MMOs, tends to be a big timesink, and that's a significant thing for a customer to invest.  No customer's going to take a chance on you sight-unseen unless they really have a lot of money to burn and nothing else to spend it on.  Even then, they ain't gonna stay; the same flightiness that lead them to you in the first place will eventually lead them on to the next thing.  You can't rely on players like that for revenue.  Again, good business sense strikes again.

8. Gamers are a family, and should be treated as such. We are inviting you into our homes, as a part of our lives and have the right to expect good behavior from a house guest.

Publishers, devs, it's important to note here that just as customers can invite your game into their home, they can just as easily kick it out if you mistreat them.  If I can submit an anecdote, I played Mabinogi all of 1 day.  Why?  Because at the end of an essential tutorial quest to get the skills required for my chosen Destiny (the closest thing Mabinogi has to character classes), I felt so cheated and insulted that I quit the game out of sheer frustration.  I don't wanna play a game that insults me (and involves me in a little girl's attempt to start a pedophile relationship with an older man.  Ew.)

9. No one demographic is more important then the other, please treat everyone equally.

The minute you step into the International Market, all of your customers are going to be comparing their experiences to the experiences of customers in other branches of your MMO.  If you don't treat them all equally, you're going to get complaints.  Scroll back up a little to the example I gave with Ragnarok Online, and you'll see why.

10. Paying customers should have the right to play the game they own, even if the publisher doesn't want to continue developing the game.
    - Video games are culture, an MMO publisher closing down an MMORPG effectively prevents past, present and future gamers to play this game in its functioning state, destroying culture. That doesn't oblige the publisher to have developers or community manager maintaining the game or making it compatible with new generations of software, emulation on the client part shall do that. The publisher does the only thing he can do.

Here we go, the main point I wanted to address here.

There are two sides to every story.  There's the publishers and developers, and the playerbase.  Now, the playerbase does not want to see their favorite games closed down.  But for one reason or another, sometimes companies have to.  CoH's not one of those cases (surprise closedown + lack of communication + baldfaced lies = no right to any benefit of the doubt), but for any MMO, a closedown is eventually going to happen.  It's the nature of any service provided - eventually, the people providing that service are going to be unable to provide that service.  The problem here is that MMO video games, as a service, are unique.  You can call any plumber, and expect them to be able to fix a leaky pipe.  You can only call one company, and expect them to provide City of Heroes.

That's the heart of the problem here.

Rather than saying "we have a right to play a game we've spent money on, even if the developer or publisher doesn't want to continue it" is pretty restricting.  If we (meaning MMO players as a whole) start insisting that this be fact, companies are just going to move out of the MMO biz entirely and just make ordinary singleplayer/multiplayer games.  MMO, as we know it, will be dead.

What I'd instead suggest is that we, as players, have a right to a responsible shutdown, and be given alternatives options to enjoy the game after the publisher or developer has ceased interest in continuing it themselves.  Let me explain what I mean by that.

When a game shuts down, a company has a lot of options of what to do with it.   Let me give you a few examples.

• The NCSoft Approach: Kill the game, squat on the IP like a vulture defending a carcass, refuse to allow anyone else to ever play the game again.  This is unacceptable to the community.  Examples: Auto Assault, Exteel, Dungeon Runners, potentially City of Heroes.
• The SEGA Approach: Kill the game, but have a built-in single-player/offline mode that will allow your playerbase to continue enjoying the game to some degree, even after the multiplayer servers have gone dark.  Examples: Phantasy Star Online, Phantasy Star Universe
• The "Blind Eye" Approach: Kill the game, but turn a blind eye to players developing their own private servers of it.  I can't give examples here, as I don't want to run the risk of getting into legal trouble, but rest assured this happens.  This is risky for the IP-holder, because the private server developers may be able to challenge the IP-holder's right to keep it due to lack of defense.
• The Public Domain: Kill the game, but then release the server software to the public domain and allow players to download it freely.  After a few months of distributing it, stop, and let players do with it as they please.  I can't give any examples of this because I've never seen any examples: I guess IPs are just too valuable to just wholly let go of like this.  Still, it's an option.
• Server Licensing: Rather than kill the game, simply stop development and server support, and offer licenses at a reasonable price, allowing players or companies to pick up and run the game in your place, in return for an upfront fee and a portion of profits.  All profit for the company, with no outlay required; you can even stipulate that you owe the new distributor no support.  Examples: Ragnarok Online - Gravity America is actually just a sublicensor of RO operating the International server.  That's why they have to pay the home company to get updates.
• Selling the IP: If you can't, or don't want to continue running the game, sell it to someone who does.  It keeps the game running and makes you a quick buck in the process.  That IP isn't earning you any money in the meantime, so why not?  Example: City of Heroes (when Cryptic sold the rights to NCSoft).

Now, none of these options are anything new to anyone who reads these boards, most likely.  Now, option 1 is unacceptable.  That's killing the game, and it's not a responsible shutdown.  Option 2 would be better but it's unfeasible - it would require some radical alterations to make CoH an entirely single-player game.

So, with those out of the way, let's consider options 3-6.  ALL of these options have one thing in common: they allow the player to continue playing the game, in its current incarnation, with little to no interruption.  They all have their benefits and drawbacks, but one thing's for certain - the game is preserved in a playable state, and its playerbase is not left homeless.  This is the big thing here, and what we're all desperately wanting for CoH, right?

Option 3 would be good, but extremely legally-gray.  All it would take for a fiasco to happen is for someone to use the "blind eye" policy to go to court and say "Hey, they're not defending their IP, I want it moved to the public domain!" and then there's trouble.  No longer could the company turn a blind eye, and there'd be C&D letters and shutdowns all over.  Legal proceedings would be a mess.

Option 4 would be ideal, honestly.  Heck, if that happened, we could run our own server right here on Titan, and keep our closeknit community intact.  But it's also the most unrealistic - corporations, simply, are not going to give up a potential source of revenue or assets that easily, and honestly I think it's a bit unfair to ask them to.

Option 5, honestly, is what I'd consider the most ideal approach within the bounds of reason.  All NCSoft would have to do is set the price for licensing low enough that a community member, or group of community members, could reasonably hope to acquire it.  NCSoft doesn't have to owe any sort of support, and they'd get a portion of whatever profits are made by their licensee.  They'd also keep the IP.  Profits would doubtless be lower than what they would be if NC was running the game themselves, but if THAT'S a problem, then they should just continue running the game themselves in the first place.  It's the best option I can see that kills their involvement with the game while also making them a profit AND keeping the game open to players.

Option 6 would be a good secondary to Option 5.  It allows NCSoft to totally wash their hands of CoH and anything to do with it.  NC will no longer hold the IP and won't be making any more profit off of it, but at least their customer base is happy and they're no longer hemorrhaging bad publicity from disgruntled players.  If they want to continue making a profit off CoH and keep the IP, I'd suggest that they scroll up and reread option 5.

Options 3-6, and especially 4-6, are what I'd consider responsible ways to close an MMO.  Release the game to the players, or otherwise ensure that it continues to be playable despite your lack of involvement.  This is what, I feel, we should be demanding as our right.

[TimtheEnchanter]

I feel like this all could be summarized into a general message to any business. And that statement would simply be this.

"We are people. Not numbers."

And even something that simple will never fly, because too many companies want to think without a moral conscience.

I also feel like this might be better off being done in the form of a manifesto, and given some poetic flair, like you're writing a Declaration of Independence and want the whole world to not just read what you're saying, but feel it.

[Victoria Victrix]

I feel like this all could be summarized into a general message to any business. And that statement would simply be this.

"We are people. Not numbers."

And even something that simple will never fly, because too many companies want to think without a moral conscience.

I also feel like this might be better off being done in the form of a manifesto, and given some poetic flair, like you're writing a Declaration of Independence and want the whole world to not just read what you're saying, but feel it.

I like the idea of this being a Manifesto rather than a Bill of Rights.  The Manifesto always comes first, and you expect to lose some things during the negotiation with the Powers that Be that leads to a Bill of Rights.

[houtex]

Hm.  Ok, I'll participate in this... but from a company standpoint.  I've skimmed the thread, so If I repeat something, ah well.  Great minds and all that.  And as I'm comin' from the company's side, it's not going to be pretty.  You are all fairly warned here.  Passion is NOT a company's bottom line... tactics and profits are.  Everything else is detrimental to a company's existence.  Oh, it's nice if it can be done, the whole passion thing, but not important to a company's running.  Xs and Os, if you wll.

And with that... Bill of Rights for MMO players?  Really?  You think that a *company* is going to agree to some arbitrary, player decided, bill of rights?  That company will go *broke fast*, and they will just NOT offer the product up.  So... this is a non-starter for that reason.  Period.  However, be that as it may...  Wall-o-text powers, activate!

1. We, as consumers of your product, have a right to expect that product to be there so long as it is profitable.
   - This means that it shouldn't be cancelled because it doesn't fit your vision, or you don't like it. It HAS to be non-profitable BEFORE a cancellation can be made, and you should communicate with the community when this sort of thing is becoming a likelihood.

You, as a Consumer, have a right to buy or not buy a product.  We, as a Company, can decide to pull that product.  Regardless of any reason.  And we do not have to tell you, and we can weather the storm of the few passionate people who would rather the product continue.  Because it is likely it was on its way to being a dead product anyway.  Why let it linger, suffer, fester?  Cut it off clean is always best for company's bottom lines, and corporate visions.

2. We are entitled to frank, and honest communication with the businesses we deal with.
     - Don't Lie to Your Customer Base. I think that's pretty self explanatory.

You are entitled to enjoy the product.  And you may communicate with us.  However, we do not have to say anything back if we so choose.  If you do not like this policy, you can find another product.  We will miss you, but there are other users upon which our company will survive.

3. We are entitled to good customer service, cause our patronage should be important to you.
    - Response times from a GM should be less, and frankly while they shouldn't play the game for you, bugs and such are game killers in some cases.

One incident in one million is not a bug, necessarily, but can be quite annoying to the person(s) involved, we grant this.  And long wait times are not something we as a company strive for.  But there must be some sort of balance of Game Masters and Players.  What balance would you like?  1 per 100?  1 per 1000?  That is a lot of salary/wages.  We will do this, 24/7, in three rotating 8 hour shifts, but the game will now be subscription per month, forever, and all transactions, including adding items to your content, will cost more. 
 
We do not wish anyone to spend $10,000 per month on the game, because nobody will do so, first, and secondly, it is simply too much to ask to have that many staffed for occasional issues.  So a lesser ratio is required, and that is based on average amount of users, as well as average amount of incidents.  This is the best, most reasonable approach to the problem, anything else costs more, and will require more payment.

4. We are entitled to good content for our money. If it is a subscription based game we are entitled to regular updates of content.

Of course, but without the 'entitled' part.  Other than this one issue, we agree that expanding the product as much as can be done, regularly, is a good thing.  The product can grow, new experiences can happen.  But there is always going to be some irregularity with the schedule, and for that we apologize.  Like a fine wine, time is something that should be spent wisely on expansion of the product.  Releasing it on a definitive schedule, instead of simply 'soon(tm)', may not be the best course.  But we will expand as we can and get it ready.

5.  Our money is valued as money. Should a game be cancelled MONEY shall be returned to the player. Not E-Transaction credit to another game.
    - This is to bring ALL MMO publishers into compliance with the laws protecting citizens in the United States (which are the only ones I know).

To enjoy our product, you will sign an Agreement.  That Agreement will contain stipulations that refunds OR credits as decided by The Company will be acceptable in the event you are required to be refunded/credited for whatever the reason might be.  As you must agree to the stipulations to enjoy the product, you like either a refund or a credit as decided by us... or you do not want to enjoy our product.  In the case of the latter, we are sorry that you will not be enjoying the product, but there are certain things we simply cannot do, and not everyone can be satisfied.  We urge you to read and click Accept, but we cannot force you to do so.  This is wholly your choice.

   
6. Listen To Us. We are your target audience no matter what your investors or demographic data says.
     - If we say there is a bug, it's likely there if you look.

This seems to be a slight repeat of an earlier demand, in regards to 'bugs', but the Customer is NOT always right, no matter what the adage might lead you to believe.  And further, you do not know what "our target audience" might be.  We happen to be looking to get only Millionaires from Ireland, for example, to enjoy our product, and anyone else who also enjoys it is a complete and utter bonus for The Company.  Also, what one person might consider to be a bug, may actually not be economically desireable to 'chase', if you will, if it is a singular issue, and never happens again.  Further, the code may require changes that, in the grand scheme of the overall product, as well as the number of incidents and level of acceptance, may not be desirable to even investigate in any short order.

7. We have a right to try before we buy. MMOs are a huge investment of time and money, and we should be able to have a tour, so to speak.
    -Most games do this already, but I think it's important to make this nod.

No.  You do not.  You can buy it for one month, and if you do not like it, you may not continue as you see fit.  It is only one month, and any product that was free for any length of time upon release will simply not exist, as there is no way to pay for the investment.  Even 'free' at launch does have other means of revenue.  Or the product may be, for the lack of a better term, byproduct of a company's research or magnanamous gesture.  Quake Live comes to mind.  Regardless of special cases, at some point, to draw in others who were 'on the fence', we may at our sole discretion, allow a trial date, and then maybe turn it free to play with microtransactions or such.  But there will be NO freebies at the outset, short of a contest or such promotion.  Further, we will use whatever means possible and desired to promote the game and give you a tour in that manner, in the hopes that you will see something you like, and perhaps try our product.

8. Gamers are a family, and should be treated as such. We are inviting you into our homes, as a part of our lives and have the right to expect good behavior from a house guest.

Gamers are much like a person ordering a meal at a fast food restaraunt: You want food, you will pay for it.  Such it is with our product.  You want to use it, you should pay for it.  Any 'family' is a byproduct amongst yourselves, and it clearly stipluates in the Agreement that any emotional or realism issues you might have before, during, or after using our product are your own affairs, and will not be attached or blamed or otherwise involved with the use of our product.  You are not inviting us into your homes, you are paying to use a product.  We are a company.  We are not family.  We thank you for using our product, sincerely, and for paying.  If you think, however, that we are bad 'guests', then please do what you feel must be done, and stop using our product.  We understand, and we will strive to perhaps win you back in the future.

9. No one demographic is more important then the other, please treat everyone equally.

This is categorically, and scientifically, proven to be quite a mistaken thought process, but there is no quest to treat anyone any differently in the first place.  There may, however, be some process whereby certain demographics (and might we refer to the Irish Millionare demographic?) are targeted to increase their use of the product, through advertising or other mechanism, but it will go no further than this, and is not in any way a bias, nor preference, but a simple... well, balancing, let us say, of the use of our product amongst as many potential users as possible.

10. Paying customers should have the right to play the game they own, even if the publisher doesn't want to continue developing the game.
    - Video games are culture, an MMO publisher closing down an MMORPG effectively prevents past, present and future gamers to play this game in its functioning state, destroying culture. That doesn't oblige the publisher to have developers or community manager maintaining the game or making it compatible with new generations of software, emulation on the client part shall do that. The publisher does the only thing he can do.

We would like to point out that the product is licenced to you, the user, and you do not own it.  As such, if the decision is to shut down the product, you do not own any rights to that product, as they are still retained by The Company.  As such, if the product is no longer viable, The Company can and will shut it down if it sees this to be the best option.  It is possible that it could be released or sold or resurrected or defended as required in the future.  Any other discussion on this matter is moot based on this known business law on software.  Your passion regarding the product is noted, and commendable, but ultimately not a part of the picture. 

Thank you for your concerns.  We look forward to your future business with us.  Please try our new product, it's 20% more shiny, has much improved graphics, and is brand new.  You WILL love it, or your money ba--- er, credit towards another of our fine products will be given.

A High Mucky-Muck.
The Company
 
---
 
I applaud the passion and desire in these 'rights', but simply put... not gonna happen.  It would be an unfair practice upon the businesses.  Put these on other businesses, and you'll see why.  I suggest cars, restauraunts, and... oh... MTV, yeah, that's a good one.  It's not MTV anymore, is it?  Should they go back to just videos?  Of course not, they are doing just fine NOT showing videos.  But this 'bill' would force them to go back to the video only format, in effect, because of the viewers, like me, who don't care for their new stuff.  The music videos *were* City of Heroes for them.  They make more money doing what they're doing now, even if the videos were doing well.  I do miss the VJs and waiting for the next new dang videos though... ah well.
 
Let us not pursue this, for it is the howling of the hurt, and not the discussion of reasonableness.  No company would go with this, and no person should honestly expect it to be done.  It is silly, business wise.
 
Mike
 
/prepares asbestos undies...

[Victoria Victrix]

And this is one reason why sales of video games are dropping across the board.  Because players are getting tired of being *censored.*

[Burnt Toast]

I agree with houtex. Nuff said.

[Victoria Victrix]

Well it is worth pointing out that at every single point in the history of Consumer Rights and Consumer Protection, businessmen have screamed and cried and wept saying that protecting the consumer in any way would bankrupt them.

Funny thing, it seldom happened.  Someone in that same business (often even them) went on making money.  Sometimes by charging the consumer a little more.  Sometimes by just biting the bullet and dealing with it by making such a superior product or giving so much consumer support that they were never called on to ante up.  Sometimes they even found that giving the consumer protection and rights made more money for them.

Do I expect everything in this posting to happen?  Of course not.  Obviously, we do not have crash proof cars.  But we do have cars that we can reasonably expect will not murder us when the operator is fully in control of the vehicle and himself, which was not always the case even as little as forty years ago.  For that matter, there are "lemon laws" that require a manufacturer to refund someone whose brand new car is seeing the shop more than it is seeing the owner's garage.  And if there is a factory defect, manufacturers are required to issue a recall and give full refunds or appropriate repairs for free--all of which were decried when they were first proposed.

I see no reason why Consumer Protection will not eventually be applied to software--and yes, games. 

[Ponderer]

And as I'm comin' from the company's side, it's not going to be pretty.  You are all fairly warned here.  Passion is NOT a company's bottom line... tactics and profits are.

Exactly, passion is not a company's bottom line, but passion is what drives consumers to remain with the product, which is why active community engagement and unified action can hold a company to a higher standard.

Bill of Rights for MMO players?  Really?

I'd like to offer my thoughts for consideration.  I'm gonna do this 'in character' and 'out of character' just because I started writing in character and it seems so confrontational.  I welcome impassioned conversation, but the points brought up here deserve a fulsome consideration that I hope - for my part- to give.  It's also going to make this very long and for that I do apologize ahead of time.  I intend to write this is from the standpoint of an active and engaged consumer base and why I feel it is important.  As such I will be taking the role of a unified consumer front that will hold a corporation to a standard of quality, since that's the point of having customer standards - going below them means that your product will not be purchased.  I will take that role as juxtaposed to the 'not pretty' company.

You, as a Consumer, have a right to buy or not buy a product.  We, as a Company, can decide to pull that product.  Regardless of any reason.  And we do not have to tell you, and we can weather the storm of the few passionate people who would rather the product continue.  Because it is likely it was on its way to being a dead product anyway.  Why let it linger, suffer, fester?  Cut it off clean is always best for company's bottom lines, and corporate visions.You are entitled to enjoy the product.  And you may communicate with us.  However, we do not have to say anything back if we so choose.  If you do not like this policy, you can find another product.

We have chosen to  exercise that power.  We will not offer our money in exchange for unilateral control over the creators we enjoy the work of, or over our knowledge of the game.  You are free to assume that we do not matter, and that there are other users to fill the gaps in our leaving, however to defy an active and engaged consumer base is far more dangerous than defying a passive one.  You risk a large evacuation from your product which can snowball.  If you wish to continue to do so you are welcome, as there are other products on the market for us to interest ourselves in.  We, as you pointed out, are not required to continue buying your product, however, our buying the product is why you have created it in the first place.

We do not wish anyone to spend $10,000 per month on the game, because nobody will do so, first, and secondly, it is simply too much to ask to have that many staffed for occasional issues.  So a lesser ratio is required, and that is based on average amount of users, as well as average amount of incidents.

Dear Muck, we the consumers invite this is a distraction from our stated goals.  We did not ask nor expect to pay 10,000 dollars per month per user, as that expense is not necessary to maintain a smooth play experience.  Your statement dismisses offhand an expectation for good customer service.  Continuing to deny that imperils your own profits, what you ideally would like to spend is the minimum needed to maintain revenue.  You are in this to make money and all money reinvested into the game is not profit.  However, we are invested in this for enjoyment, and intend to hold you to a standard of quality that you do not want to live up to because it can slim profit margins in the short term - at least before good reputation might inevitably expand your player base.

To enjoy our product, you will sign an Agreement.  That Agreement will contain stipulations that refunds OR credits as decided by The Company will be acceptable in the event you are required to be refunded/credited for whatever the reason might be.  As you must agree to the stipulations to enjoy the product, you like either a refund or a credit as decided by us... or you do not want to enjoy our product.

This is incorrect.  You can try to enforce the terms of your agreement upon the player base, but there are places in which those agreements clash with local or federal laws in various nations.  In such instances you will be required to behave within those laws regardless of your insistence that we must not buy your product and still expect rights.  Moreover, your exercising of those rights is not a gavel-slam finality.  It is an exercise of power.  Should we disagree with your use of that power, we will use our own collective efforts to hold you accountable until we feel you have adequately redressed our grievances.

If you do not like that, that is irrelevant.  This is business, Mr. Muck, and though your business may be our pleasure, you are woefully misinformed to speak as if that makes us irrelevant.

This seems to be a slight repeat of an earlier demand, in regards to 'bugs', but the Customer is NOT always right, no matter what the adage might lead you to believe.

That adage refers to a simple truism that it is now becoming easy to see that you don't understand, Mr. Muck.  The phrase 'the customer is always right' is stated so because the customer is the one purchasing the product.  You can say the customer is wrong not to like the product, but in the end if he chooses not to purchase the product, it is YOU that must change the product.  In this way the phrase is not put 'every customer' is always right because 'the customer' as a whole refers to the majority of your customers.  Therefore your talk of ignoring your current players as your target demographic  is perilous, because should you in any way alter the product that your current player base enjoys in pursuit of your irish millionaire demographic, we reserve every right to leave and render your product no longer financially viable.

To say we don't know what your target audience might be is irrelevant, we're the ones purchasing the product right now, ignore us at your peril.

No.  You do not.  You can buy it for one month, and if you do not like it, you may not continue as you see fit.

I don't think you understand the nature of this, Mr. Muck.  I may be able to buy it for one month, but I'm telling you that without a reasonable way to test the product to ensure that it is enjoyable, I and my compatriots simply will not make that purchase.  You will arrange for us to play it, or you will find yourself without customers.  Since we are unified in this, you are going to find a way, because having a three to seven day trial is far preferable than having a meager few popping in to try it and then leaving because the large majority of your consumer base has written you off as unwilling to provide for them.

We fund your work, and when we are unified in our desires, historically you most certainly can and do provide.

Gamers are much like a person ordering a meal at a fast food restaraunt: You want food, you will pay for it.  Such it is with our product.  You want to use it, you should pay for it.  Any 'family' is a byproduct amongst yourselves, and it clearly stipluates in the Agreement that any emotional or realism issues you might have before, during, or after using our product are your own affairs, and will not be attached or blamed or otherwise involved with the use of our product.

We are uninterested in your disavowing our community.  We are simply informing you that as we grow accustomed to your product, we will become even more tight knit and unified.  As that continues, we will expect you treat us with proper and respectful and welcoming service.  If you choose to ignore that component and act with dispassion or indifference toward us, you risk losing your player base as we seek out a more inviting experience.

I feel the need to remind you that you are in the BUSINESS of ENTERTAINING people.  You seem - from your statements - to misunderstand that.  It is heartily naive for you to believe that simply because you control the product, you can then expect total and unilateral control over the players experiences, regardless of their desires, without suffering financial losses.  That would happen even with a relatively passive player base, but with an active group of consumers, you may as well close up shop before you even dictate your first unpopular fiat. 

This is categorically, and scientifically, proven to be quite a mistaken thought process, but there is no quest to treat anyone any differently in the first place.  There may, however, be some process whereby certain demographics (and might we refer to the Irish Millionare demographic?) are targeted to increase their use of the product, through advertising or other mechanism, but it will go no further than this, and is not in any way a bias, nor preference, but a simple... well, balancing, let us say, of the use of our product amongst as many potential users as possible.

On the one hand, you say there is no quest to treat anyone differently, on the other hand, you say that there can be a quest to treat others differently, and you summate that thought by saying 'but we don't really treat them differently'.

I'm not saying that in character I'm just wondering what you mean, I have a few guesses as to the intent (businesses seek out new demographics not to injure people) but if so it may actually be best to say 'yes businesses do sometimes treat people differently, but that doesn't mean they intend to be injurious'.  Once again though, not sure on that, but I'm not trying to poke at you, when you have a lot of thoughts at once sometimes it doesn't come across as you mean, heck maybe I even misread, just let me know! 

Now, as to the original statement about treating everyone equally, I feel it is far too vague.  I believe that City of Heroes should cater first and foremost to comic book readers and those who enjoy superhero fantasy.  So treating your intended player base with elevated interest is a good thing, in my opinion.  One thing I will say is that I would expect a business, after releasing a product, to worry first and foremost about the demographics they have earned and how to expand their user base among those people.  Only after they have done so and with careful consideration on the impact of their current customers should they consider trying to expand the appeal of the product.  Otherwise, they risk alienating their current user base and damaging their own business.  Okay, back into my unified consumer persona:

We would like to point out that the product is licenced to you, the user, and you do not own it.  As such, if the decision is to shut down the product, you do not own any rights to that product, as they are still retained by The Company. ... Any other discussion on this matter is moot based on this known business law on software.

That is irrelevant, Mr. Muck.  Our statement is to clarify that we expect you to take some measures with regards to letting us continue the experience when commercial viability has become suspect.  As with all of these points we are in a transactional relationship and if you assure us that you are trying your best in some way, you will likely suffer no ill will from your former player base even if you cannot succeed.  However should you be seen as acting in bad faith, we the unified players will take our negative word of mouth to the streets and it can and will hurt your business.  Since at this point the player base should have shrunk down to a smaller size, you may finally be in a position where ignoring us is a possible option, but as always...you do so at a peril to your business. 

[Ponderer]

You WILL love it, or your money ba--- er, credit towards another of our fine products will be given.

Those of us that live in areas where refunds are legally required will get them regardless of your desires.  Assuming you have business sense, you will not risk a class action suit simply because it feels good to try to put your thumb on the heads of your former customers.  The others?  You ignore their demands at peril to your future business, Mr. Muck.

I applaud the passion and desire in these 'rights', but simply put... not gonna happen.  It would be an unfair practice upon the businesses.  Put these on other businesses, and you'll see why.  I suggest cars, restauraunts, and... oh... MTV, yeah, that's a good one.  It's not MTV anymore, is it?  Should they go back to just videos?  Of course not, they are doing just fine NOT showing videos.  But this 'bill' would force them to go back to the video only format, in effect, because of the viewers, like me, who don't care for their new stuff.

Yes!  They'd have to cater to the larger active consumer base, regardless of wanting to water their product down to get as many people as possible regardless of the value to the consumer.  Active consumerism is about forcing a company that wants to act purely in amoral business interests, to act instead in the interests of those that will withhold profits from them lest they concede. 

Businesses are not all-powerful gods, and this is not the first time I've seen one of these long 'you do as you're told, mr. consumer' statements.  Of course my response turns that conceit simply to the flip axis, let us be clear.  There is no one completely unified player base, but players who remain even GENERALLY unified in their demands (Koreans got refunds for Diablo 3 regardless of Blizzard's no refund policy) will get what they want.  Oh, the Diablo 3 example involved (though was not wholly consisting of) violence so that's a bit tangential in that regard, just making it clear that wasn't my point. 

Let us not pursue this, for it is the howling of the hurt, and not the discussion of reasonableness.  No company would go with this, and no person should honestly expect it to be done.  It is silly, business wise.

This, I offer, is actually the prime flaw of your argument to my mind.  The demands I spoke on here were:

1. Don't trash a viable product.

That is not silly, that is wise.  A business shouldn't be doing this in the first place, and though you add the caveat that it may be dying, informing consumers and giving them time to prepare for the end of their entertainment is good customer service, which is not silly either.

2. Be honest with consumers.

This can get sticky at times, the adage is something like 'everyone likes sausage but no one likes to see how it's made'?  I think.  But even though I offer you that small point in that I don't think players should absolutely know everything, I do not think it is 'silly' to expect a generally straightforward transactional relationship with the people you want money from.

3. Offer good customer service.

You then took the meaning of 'good' as 'absolutely without flaw and funded to a point of 24 hour redundancy', when THAT seems a silly leap.  Offering good customer service is good business, even though what provides the perception of 'good' can be more costly than what a business may prefer to offer - if it is impossible to achieve and still maintain profits then you have a problem with your business, not your customers.

4. Being entitled to good content for the money.

The argument here is the meaning of 'entitled', I offer it means that a company should try its reasonable best to provide this, which seemed to be the whole of your point, so for me that's a distinction without a difference.  However I'm sitting here thinking about what you may mean, and if you're saying it shouldn't be a lock-solid, dead set thing that any delays in the delivery of that content should damn the business, I totally agree.  I read it differently but if that is what you meant - that entitled made the statement too absolute, I can agree with the sentiment even if I don't feel that sentiment from the statement.

5. Offer a refund for e-transaction money that is not spent.

Even NCSoft (eventually) agreed with this.  If you think it's silly, you may want to take it up with actual High Mucky Mucks.

6. Listen to your customers.

That allows you to provide a better service, that doesn't seem silly either.

7. Give players a chance to sample the product.

That's a very hefty demand, because then your product must be best-face-forward, and cannot be released early to make your financial statements look good in an ideal spot.  However, if customers all grow to expect that, businesses will provide.  That's not silly, it's simple transaction, many games offer a demo or trial period before purchase.

8. Treat your gaming community with respect.

This, boiled down, is very much like points 3 and 6, with an implied intent to maintain a place for interested players to converge.  That's not silly, as long as it can be done without too much expense, it is actually good for the longevity of your product as it encourages a bonding which lasts beyond the limitations of your hardware.  Encouraging community can very well help a product.

9. Treat everyone equally.

I disagree with this one as well, and would instead prefer it to be 'treat your current customer demographic with utmost preference before considering expanding to other kinds of players'.

10.  Make efforts to allow for MMO's to be playable in some form even when it is no longer financially viable for you.

Another tough one, especially considering that how one may do so can be near impossible.  However, instead of a 'right' to that playability, a 'reasonable expectation of best effort' could be expected for sake of good will and maintaining a good consumer relationship.  In this way, I am definitely understanding of your thinking.  After all, should every product be made thinking forward with how to cope with possible failure?  Planning to blunt the effects of a possible failure can be helpful of course, but I don't think it should be mandated.


A final point I want to make here is that the nature of the transaction in all of this business worship talk is invariably backward.  On day one, it is the consumer that has what the BUSINESS desires, income.  IT IS NOT the other way around.  Though the nature of a well run business invariably assures that all its power is unified toward a single goal, an active consumer base really does hold all the cards.  It may be one individual card at a time, but they are the ones with the desired item, money. 

It is up to the business to earn that item, it has NEVER been elsewise.  When they provide something the player wants, it is COMPLETELY reasonable to expect that an active consumer base will withhold their money if their desires are not met, and if they do so, they will get what they desire so long as it can be provided for them while still maintaining a profit for the business.  Businesses have an amoral approach, but just because making people happy is not their ultimate goal (profit is), they STILL NEED to make their customers happy enough to earn that money.  The more unified consumers are in their expectations, the more they will get from the businesses that seek to gain their money.

Where are we?  Well in many cultures, consumers are less passionate advocates.  Seeing how 'Kickstarter' is reviving genres long dismissed as dead by publishers, we are certainly not so passive as to be flippantly dismissed.  However, nor are we to a point that MY extreme example is viable either.  But I didn't make this statement to be contrarian.

I made this statement because I feel someone standing up and saying 'we should all expect this, who's with me', should NOT be mocked or shouted down or dismissed.  Every journey begins with a single step, and it is not foolish to want to hold businesses accountable for what you WANT from them, regardless of the fact that all they want is money.  They need to earn it, that's the point.

[Segev]

Well it is worth pointing out that at every single point in the history of Consumer Rights and Consumer Protection, businessmen have screamed and cried and wept saying that protecting the consumer in any way would bankrupt them.

Funny thing, it seldom happened.  Someone in that same business (often even them) went on making money.  Sometimes by charging the consumer a little more.  Sometimes by just biting the bullet and dealing with it by making such a superior product or giving so much consumer support that they were never called on to ante up.  Sometimes they even found that giving the consumer protection and rights made more money for them.

Do I expect everything in this posting to happen?  Of course not.  Obviously, we do not have crash proof cars.  But we do have cars that we can reasonably expect will not murder us when the operator is fully in control of the vehicle and himself, which was not always the case even as little as forty years ago.  For that matter, there are "lemon laws" that require a manufacturer to refund someone whose brand new car is seeing the shop more than it is seeing the owner's garage.  And if there is a factory defect, manufacturers are required to issue a recall and give full refunds or appropriate repairs for free--all of which were decried when they were first proposed.

I see no reason why Consumer Protection will not eventually be applied to software--and yes, games.

Generally speaking, consumer protection works best when it is done on an "educated consumer" level. The efforts of this forum at spreading the word is the first step, and I actually think we're having a big wider impact in the "silent majority" of the MMO audience than we might think. Remember that people will vote with their wallets by simply choosing another product without saying a word in far more numbers than they will actually post reviews or protests.

I'm not saying we're some sort of huge movement that is going to change the world, but NCSoft is going to feel the sting...if they ever want to do business in the West again. (That could be part of our problem; they may simply not care to do business over here. This begs certain questions about their working with Nexon, but...)

The problem with most "consumer protection" is that, yes, the Big Guys do go on to make money. They actually support the so-called "protection" for "consumers," and lobby for it in governmental halls of power. This is often because they can afford the hit to their bottom line that meeting new standards will cost. And then they'll go on to make that hit back...not because consumers "trust" them more due to good PR, but because the Little Guys can't afford the new regulations. Whether it's standards for how you have to pack your meat into cans or new laws forcing you to risk law suits or hemorrhaging money when a product fails to return the way you'd hoped, the big guy can afford to weather the storm and slowly kill off the product by making it so boring and annoying that the players give up. The little guy becomes on the hook to provide services he literally cannot afford. And the potential cost of that will force him to never build the product and take the risk in the first place.

So now, these "consumer protections" have helped create de facto semi-monopolies by making cost-of-entry into the industry so prohibitively high.

I'm not advocating for total "hands off." Protecting everybody from dishonest business practice is essential to a free market. But the best response to what NCSoft is doing right now, should the worst come to pass and they squat on their IP in some miserly fashion, is supporting anything Formerly Paragon tries to do and/or Plan Z. Those are both valid approaches.

Honestly, Titan's reverse-engineering project is an excellent one. Once they have it working, they need to make sure to file off all the serial numbers. "Archfoe" might be a clockwork mastermind whose staff is a much-sought-after bit of gear; the Black Pentagram might engage in some thorny mysticism, perhaps involving circles; the Forsaken are strangely mutated humans that you discover are experiments performed by aliens known as the Kitri, and Doctor Lockenstien leads the Lockenstein villain group who create hideous mutants and Frankensteinien horrors.

How hard you file off the serial numbers is up to you, but you just have to change things enough that you're doing a "shameless knock-off" rather than using any of their IP. None of their proprietary art, names, etc.

VV, correct me if I'm wrong, but if I were to take one of your Valdemar novels and rewrite it in my own words, changing all of the names and setting it in a Sci-fi Space Opera setting, you couldn't stop me from publishing it due to copyright violations, could you? (It would be a stupid and shameful thing to do, particularly if that was my elbow-nudging "totally unintentional" result, but...) I mean, consider the number of direct-to-video movies came out around the time of each major Disney release in the 90s that were really cheap imitations.

...I seem to have wandered off of my point, here.

My point is, the way to combat this is to provide a service and product that suits better than what the so-called juggernaut is doing, and do it according to the standards in which you believe. This will generally result in doing better than the bad business practices of those you're defying, and the best revenge IS living well.

[Moonfyire101]

If you purchase a game and the company no longer wishes to host it you should have the right to host it yourself. You as the people who supported the game and purchased it have the right to play the game when they no longer wish to host it. GameS which are not sold and hosted by a company should be open source for the people who PAID FOR IT. It angers me to no end i bought CoX and the expansion and paid 15 a month for several years and i can't play it just becuase they no longer wish to host it. i paid for it dammit!

[Mister Bison]

If you purchase a game and the company no longer wishes to host it you should have the right to host it yourself. You as the people who supported the game and purchased it have the right to play the game when they no longer wish to host it. GameS which are not sold and hosted by a company should be open source for the people who PAID FOR IT. It angers me to no end i bought CoX and the expansion and paid 15 a month for several years and i can't play it just becuase they no longer wish to host it. i paid for it dammit!

Moreover, some of us still want to pay, blimey !

[Moonfyire101]

Moreover, some of us still want to pay, blimey !

Exactly!

[eabrace]

[Ponderer]

So now, these "consumer protections" have helped create de facto semi-monopolies by making cost-of-entry into the industry so prohibitively high.

Considering my breakdown of player demands above, there are only a few I'd modify or remove.  For those, let's remove them from the equation for now.  For the others: listen to your customers, provide good customer service, be honest, don't abandon the project if it is still viable...

These are historically much easier to provide when a business is smaller.  They wouldn't hurt a small business that is focused on growing its consumer base and attracting the most dollars.  However it DOES prevent selling off an IP early to write off losses and maximize gains in an otherwise tough financial quarterly (for example), the kinds of things that are good for short-term profit and bad for the consumer they serve.  Maximizing profits by minimizing developer presence, etc.  You won't find big name companies clamoring to get these kinds of thing in a bill.

For my part I think consumer demand, and not legal threat, should do the heavy lifting here.  But a world where businesses can't wait to pass ACTUAL legislation to slim down their own profit margins because it might ALSO hurt other businesses, that's not really what we get.  I'm not saying that businesses don't push advantageous legislation via lobbyists under the GUISE of consumer protection, but that's different from them actually wanting consumer protection because it might hurt their competition and them at the same time.

In example, can you name the legislation and the de facto monopoly it has created?  I think as you look through them, you'll find the 'protections' were never even vaguely about providing a better service to the consumer.

[Victoria Victrix]

I can certainly tell you (having lived through that period) that the auto industry HATED the "lemon laws" and fought against them tooth and nail...but smaller "specialist" auto builders had no problem with them, because they had stringent quality control in the first place (the folks that build Catterham Lotus cars, for instance).

[JaguarX]

I have seen this mentioned in a couple places, and I thought it would be a good idea to actually get a master document going on it.

Feel free to reply and add, or argue for subtraction from this. I think that a Bill of Rights is needed for MMOs as a counter that gaming companies have to acknowledge they are expected to live up to.

1. We, as consumers of your product, have a right to expect that product to be there so long as it is profitable.
   - This means that it shouldn't be cancelled because it doesn't fit your vision, or you don't like it. It HAS to be non-profitable BEFORE a cancellation can be made, and you should communicate with the community when this sort of thing is becoming a likelihood.

2. We are entitled to frank, and honest communication with the businesses we deal with.
     - Don't Lie to Your Customer Base. I think that's pretty self explanatory.

3. We are entitled to good customer service, cause our patronage should be important to you.
    - Response times from a GM should be less, and frankly while they shouldn't play the game for you, bugs and such are game killers in some cases.

4. We are entitled to good content for our money. If it is a subscription based game we are entitled to regular updates of content.

5.  Our money is valued as money. Should a game be cancelled MONEY shall be returned to the player. Not E-Transaction credit to another game.
    - This is to bring ALL MMO publishers into compliance with the laws protecting citizens in the United States (which are the only ones I know).
   
6. Listen To Us. We are your target audience no matter what your investors or demographic data says.
     - If we say there is a bug, it's likely there if you look.

7. We have a right to try before we buy. MMOs are a huge investment of time and money, and we should be able to have a tour, so to speak.
    -Most games do this already, but I think it's important to make this nod.

8. Gamers are a family, and should be treated as such. We are inviting you into our homes, as a part of our lives and have the right to expect good behavior from a house guest.

9. No one demographic is more important then the other, please treat everyone equally.

(Proposed and Edited for spelling)

10. Paying customers should have the right to play the game they own, even if the publisher doesn't want to continue developing the game.
    - Video games are culture, an MMO publisher closing down an MMORPG effectively prevents past, present and future gamers to play this game in its functioning state, destroying culture. That doesn't oblige the publisher to have developers or community manager maintaining the game or making it compatible with new generations of software, emulation on the client part shall do that. The publisher does the only thing he can do.
(Edit): I would add that Video Games have the protection of an Art Form, and if an artist sold a painting, and then later decided to ruin it, he would still be arrested for damaging someone's property...


Criteria: I'd like to keep it to 10 Simplistic points, with simple explanation behind it.

I think this is something that should be added to EULAs, or sent in to companies as the counter offer inherent to our accepting they're EULA. If EVERYONE is insistent on stating these are our rights and expectations, Game companies will have to realize that the quality of they're games, especially when called Art by society, comes with it certain inherent responsibilities that not every company has been meeting. I also think a "Gamers Bill of Rights" should be written up to more broadly attack this issue for games and content.

Anyone who wants to help with this it would be more then welcome.

Elvnsword

This is interesting stuff. I think for good customer service this should be it.

Well number one, I see one slight niggle of a point that may be brought up. If a company have to wait until they start losing money to shut down a game, even if it's been going downhill for a while, who will reinburse them for the loss money? I think if that one was to be enacted, then we can say good by to anything that is not a WoW clone or is risky, or a game full of novel and new ideas.

Add on: oh and how long would it have to be unprofitable? A day, a week, a quarter and then they pull plug?

[Liberties]

Anyhow, I think the comparison to Lemon Laws is quite apt. We are simply approaching this from a more aggressive, grass roots stance. Think of it this way, if we put this out to every gamer in the world, and got them ALL to sign on board with this, with a central council deciding when a game or company are in violations. With even a percentage of the playerbase involved we could as a group, ruin the financial prospects of games which violate the BoR. Simply by asking each member to refrain from buying on release day could send the message that it is NOT going to fly anymore.

To continue with the Lemon Law example, lots of people loved the Ford brand, it was one of the oldest running brands of cars, considered reliable and affordable. So when they came out with the Ford Pinto in 1971 as a compact, affordable car people bought into it. Turns out it had a MAJOR issue, one in which it could burn you alive in a minor accident, because the gas tank could rupture easily. As a result lemon laws were passed and people were safer with they're investment.

We are as consumers asking for our personal rights to be addressed in this. We don't want a game that is simply going to vanish in a few years.

You can't tell me companies CAN'T keep games active after they stop being profitable, look to Everquest, the first game is still up and running, they have ended production of new content ages ago, but kept the servers up and running.

Also look at the game Eve Online, when players were dissatisfied with the game designers decisions in that game the held a massive IN GAME protest that shut down commerce in the game. Eve is a kind of unique microcosm, however it should show that passionate players will affect your bottom line.

That's the point of the BoR, We are not your profit margins, we are people who paid for and play the game you create. What we ask is that you respect our wishes and rights granted by consumer protection laws. Frankly put we are in a dark time in the gaming world when we are held to the whims of a company board most of whom have likely never even played the games they are making decisions on.

What this document is meant to convey is, We Are Gamers, and We Stand United. We Vote, We Pay, We Play, without our Pay, or our Play, your product will sink. Your profit margins exist because of us and without us you don't have a profit. Thus, you must adhere to logical reasoning and do what's best for the Player. I am not asking a company to go into debt for us, I am asking for them to communicate effectively months prior to a game cancellation letting us know it is getting close to unprofitable and give us goals to keep our game intact. If we can't meet those goals the game should go into a holding mode like Everquest did, keeping one or two servers online held in place with minimal profits by player subscriptions.

I cannot accept that CoH is in anyway inferior to Everquest (given the higher subscriber rate on CoH I think that's a fair point), so why is Everquest treating it's gamers right, and CoH is (albeit unwillingly on the part of Paragon Studios) being forced to close shop. The reason I think is obvious given the timing. Guild Wars 2 just came out, and Blade and Soul is coming out. NC Soft wants it's subscribers on these two new expensive games and doesn't care if we don't want a Sword and Sorcery game cause the board doesn't see a difference, and don't understand the Player's wishes to not be stuck with another WoW clone.

As to the claims "It would be an unfair practice upon the businesses." I agree that is the same cry heard from automotive manufacturers when lemon laws were instated. I reaffirm, games have been granted the status of Art, so it's time for game makers and publishers to start acting like it.

[Segev]

What you're asking for is good customer service and intelligent company policy. That we're not getting it from NCSoft is not criminal, but it is awful business.

The best response to this is not a manifesto demanding legal action to force company behavior. If you must have a manifesto, use it as the basis for your decisions on which companies with whom to do business, and for any companies you start. Start one that lives by that manifesto, and treats its customers with respect. Drive NCSoft and its ilk out of the market by aggressively being the company with whom people would rather spend their money.

That is how to deal with this sort of thing. Trying to get laws and changes thereto involved invites power for lobbyists. Lobbyists work for established money. Between NCSoft and us, who has more established money right now?

[QuantumHero]

Airline passenger bill of rights ...now written into law because an industry would not do the job voluntarilly....and we aren't even dealing with safety concerns or centuries of "law of the sea/law of the skies".  It was corporate greed/policy ratherthen true captain's law making the problem decisions that made those laws a realty and need...this industry could actually learn from the lesson.

[emu265]

I like this.  I agree with everything you've included.  However, companies aren't going to start changing their policies based a bunch (even if there were more of us) of angry gamers.  They'll only change if there is serious loss of money in the industry, and that's a power the SaveCoH movement doesn't exactly possess. 

I can still see this being effective at gaining sympathy from outsiders to our cause, though. 

[Ponderer]

I disagree emu265, but only in so far as what's considered 'a bunch'.  If this spread enough to become a large swatch of the gaming public expecting these, then ignoring these expectations would lead to a financial loss.  I think what we should focus on now is making each individual point read to be as reasonable, as desirable, and as eloquent as possible.  You may be right though in that today, even a huge uprising may do little, it might be considered a fad and the companies would test the waters ignoring individual points strategically - here and there - to try to break that expectation.

However, if this spreads slow and steady and becomes a common trend in thinking, eventually the bullet points themselves won't be necessary.  People will just stand up together and demand that their games can be enjoyed the way they want.  With the player base using their cards at the table, these simple, reasonable desires will be fulfilled.  Moreover, businesses will eventually stop complaining about them because that kind of customer appreciation will not only become expected, but it will help a good company enjoy a more loyal player base.

Right now, however, we have to fight a common perception in some places that business holds the cards.  That they have what you want and you'd better accept it and go along.  It's been a popular way of viewing things, but it's not based in reason.  Businesses fund these things because they want your money, they're the ones with the desire that predicates their existence.  We just want to have fun.  The ones who need something to exist are NOT in a position of power over the ones who are simply here for sport.  They've just gotten their side spun effectively thanks to help from the 'whiny nerd' stereotype helping people see unhappy consumers in a less favorable light while they can paint themselves as simply 'doing their job' (by screwing consumers) and it's not personal, it's just business.  THEY are, those silly gamers make it personal and they need to be more mature.

In this way some see them as the adults in the room forced to deal with unruly children.  However to look at their behavior (when businesses are acting without regard to their customers, obviously, not at all times), it is clear who the child in the room is.  They want what they want, when they want it, and they'll cajole and lie to get it (Turbine sold an Asheron's Call 2 expansion pack that wouldn't even install to get a burst of funding RIGHT before they shut down the game...then lo and behold, they somehow had the money to pay for the Dungeons and Dragons IP!).  When they have it, if they took it unfairly as above they'll completely ignore people unless forced to give it back.

[Liberties]

TY Ponderer!

This is exactly what we need, to make these read as well as we can so they will naturally spread, and organically come to represent the average gamer.

What we also need is organization, as I am afraid that at least at first there will be massive resistance to any sort of change from the industry. We need to understand and use our power to vote with our wallets.

So, let's make this eloquent and easier on reading point by point; point one

1. We, as consumers of your product, have a right to expect that product to be there so long as it is profitable.
   - This means that it shouldn't be cancelled because it doesn't fit your vision, or you don't like it. It HAS to be non-profitable BEFORE a cancellation can be made, and you should communicate with the community when this sort of thing is becoming a likelihood.

To expand, it has come to the community's attention that CoH was still serving up profits for this last quarter, more then games that did not get cancelled, but fit a style more akin to Guild Wars, or any other two bit WoW clones. In fact, some games hadn't posted profit at all (AION), in North America.

So how do we improve this talking point?

[Ponderer]

Quick diatribe:
People love capitalism.  Capitalism of course is only an engine, it needs purpose to be viable, but as an engine for creativity and drive it does do its job - it's really kind of incredibly awesome.

This is also a large factor in people dismissing these kinds of consumer complaints.  "It's just business" is very much akin to "don't knock capitalism".  Of course the problem with that is that even capitalism as a concept has been usurped in the culture by moneyed interest talking points.  You hear people talking all the time about 'free market principles', and how the market is driven by them, it sounds very nice, all these free market principles.  However, that's not really how it works, as there is a different word that belongs - and used to be - at the end of that phrase.  The market is actually driven by free market COMPETITION.  Working for peoples dollars, if people are forced to buy a product, then you have an enslaved market.  Fortunately that is not the case here, our dollars are spent all in good fun, which means if business principles are defied for the sake of a short term buck, you have...

Bad business.  It is bad business to dump a healthy product, it may provide a very shiny short term gain and allow you to project strength into the market and raise your market share yes yes, it all sounds wonderful to you when you've got your head stuck in the mechanics but...

It's still bad business. 

Which makes our quick-snap talking point very simple:
We need to stop rewarding bad business.

You can then look for interesting visuals to drive the point home, calling those who ignore the basics of good customer service 'Child King CEO's', or something of the like, implying that they have great power but poor understanding of its implications, etc.  Either way, this is all thinking pretty far ahead, we aren't at the point I think where people are going to be picking up phrases from this movement.  So, Diatribe over, let's do point 1, and I'm a bit busy so I may not return here for a bit, I'll try to keep an eye out for what others are adding though.  Sadly right now I don't have time to slim it down, so this one is going to be too long I fear, feel free to snip and chop and refactor and do as you please, everyone!

1.  The foundation of a successful business is profit.  Where a product is profitable, it should remain in the free market to flourish.
    - Where a profitable product is tied to a failing one, all reasonable efforts within profit margin should be made to bolster the failing product or sever the two.  Reinvestment into the product for the purpose of expanding the viability, longevity and market presence is good for both the consumer and the business.  It is fundamental.

Gotta pop off quick!

[emu265]

I disagree emu265, but only in so far as what's considered 'a bunch'.  If this spread enough to become a large swatch of the gaming public expecting these, then ignoring these expectations would lead to a financial loss.  I think what we should focus on now is making each individual point read to be as reasonable, as desirable, and as eloquent as possible.  You may be right though in that today, even a huge uprising may do little, it might be considered a fad and the companies would test the waters ignoring individual points strategically - here and there - to try to break that expectation.

However, if this spreads slow and steady and becomes a common trend in thinking, eventually the bullet points themselves won't be necessary.  People will just stand up together and demand that their games can be enjoyed the way they want.  With the player base using their cards at the table, these simple, reasonable desires will be fulfilled.  Moreover, businesses will eventually stop complaining about them because that kind of customer appreciation will not only become expected, but it will help a good company enjoy a more loyal player base.

Right now, however, we have to fight a common perception in some places that business holds the cards.  That they have what you want and you'd better accept it and go along.  It's been a popular way of viewing things, but it's not based in reason.  Businesses fund these things because they want your money, they're the ones with the desire that predicates their existence.  We just want to have fun.  The ones who need something to exist are NOT in a position of power over the ones who are simply here for sport.  They've just gotten their side spun effectively thanks to help from the 'whiny nerd' stereotype helping people see unhappy consumers in a less favorable light while they can paint themselves as simply 'doing their job' (by screwing consumers) and it's not personal, it's just business.  THEY are, those silly gamers make it personal and they need to be more mature.

In this way some see them as the adults in the room forced to deal with unruly children.  However to look at their behavior (when businesses are acting without regard to their customers, obviously, not at all times), it is clear who the child in the room is.  They want what they want, when they want it, and they'll cajole and lie to get it (Turbine sold an Asheron's Call 2 expansion pack that wouldn't even install to get a burst of funding RIGHT before they shut down the game...then lo and behold, they somehow had the money to pay for the Dungeons and Dragons IP!).  When they have it, if they took it unfairly as above they'll completely ignore people unless forced to give it back.

I definitely agree that, over time, this could have a huge impact.  I was speaking strictly in the sense of what it can do today.  I like your thinking, though.

[Gothica]

The problem I see with any bill of rights as such is that to my lawyerly ear, any time someone mentions the word "right," then that places someone else under a duty. If you're not using the word "right" in a legal sense, but rather in the sense of what companies should do (as opposed to what they must legally do), then the bills of rights have no legal teeth and the companies may safely ignore them (even while paying lip service to them, no doubt.)

So, for instance (and to take an extreme example) if gamers have the legal right to play a game forever, then the game owner has the legal duty to make it available forever, and the owner simply isn't going to agree to have his hands tied like that. Since  corporations are going to chafe at any such legal restrictions on their right to run the game how they want, subject only to what their business model says is good for the company, they're not going to be inclined to grant any rights that they find too restrictive. And if you could somehow force them to accept these rights, at some point at least some companies would decide developing a new game isn't worth the hassle.

I think that what we will actually see is an evolution of IP law that will recognize some legal IP rights in the players. If this develops gradually over time, and slowly becomes a legally-imposed industry standard, the corporations would probably accept it. Part of it would be market-driven; even if most corporations decided not to develop games because the new rules made such development too burdensome, the increased potential market share of potential gamers without games to play would entice other companies to publish games despite the new legal requirements.

I think that we'll eventually see this happen for a couple of reasons. First, EULAs are generally seen as adhesion contracts, which the law sort of dislikes anyway, especially when the terms they impose are inequitable. But more importantly, as just about everyone here can attest, we the players _have_ built a world within Paragon City, which includes characters that are at least somewhat individualized, AE story arcs, and personal relationships (i.e., it isn't NCSoft that's built the community and the friendships, but we the players). Some of this IP input, moreover, has been of extremely high quality, which might have an impact on valuation. (I always get envious whenever I read a character bio that is so much more imaginative and creative than anything I could come up with.) We've also done this not in minutes, hours, or days, but by putting in a great deal of time, hundreds or thousands of hours in the case of some people. I thus think that, ultimately, the Lockean theory of labor-based value and modern psychology and sociology are on our side.

One practical effect of time is that the youngish gamers of today, who really understand the community dynamic of gaming, are currently law students and young attorneys, but thirty years from now they'll be judges and legislators, and they'll shape the law according to their experience. I'm already reading some of the Young Turks' legal analysis, and if these people become judges and legislators--and some of them doubtless will--they're going to be very open to redefining MMO IP rights.

What will the new rights be? Will some of the rights listed in this thread be among them? Your guess is as good as mine, but some games may already be showing us the way. Second Life's EULA expressly recognizes that players have some IP rights. EVE Online has some sort of panel of players' representatives, formally recognized and listened to by the corporation, elected by the players. So I think that we do have some possibilities. But the process will be slow, and it's full of imponderables.

[JaguarX]

The problem I see with any bill of rights as such is that to my lawyerly ear, any time someone mentions the word "right," then that places someone else under a duty. If you're not using the word "right" in a legal sense, but rather in the sense of what companies should do (as opposed to what they must legally do), then the bills of rights have no legal teeth and the companies may safely ignore them (even while paying lip service to them, no doubt.)

So, for instance (and to take an extreme example) if gamers have the legal right to play a game forever, then the game owner has the legal duty to make it available forever, and the owner simply isn't going to agree to have his hands tied like that. Since  corporations are going to chafe at any such legal restrictions on their right to run the game how they want, subject only to what their business model says is good for the company, they're not going to be inclined to grant any rights that they find too restrictive. And if you could somehow force them to accept these rights, at some point at least some companies would decide developing a new game isn't worth the hassle.

I think that what we will actually see is an evolution of IP law that will recognize some legal IP rights in the players. If this develops gradually over time, and slowly becomes a legally-imposed industry standard, the corporations would probably accept it. Part of it would be market-driven; even if most corporations decided not to develop games because the new rules made such development too burdensome, the increased potential market share of potential gamers without games to play would entice other companies to publish games despite the new legal requirements.

I think that we'll eventually see this happen for a couple of reasons. First, EULAs are generally seen as adhesion contracts, which the law sort of dislikes anyway, especially when the terms they impose are inequitable. But more importantly, as just about everyone here can attest, we the players _have_ built a world within Paragon City, which includes characters that are at least somewhat individualized, AE story arcs, and personal relationships (i.e., it isn't NCSoft that's built the community and the friendships, but we the players). Some of this IP input, moreover, has been of extremely high quality, which might have an impact on valuation. (I always get envious whenever I read a character bio that is so much more imaginative and creative than anything I could come up with.) We've also done this not in minutes, hours, or days, but by putting in a great deal of time, hundreds or thousands of hours in the case of some people. I thus think that, ultimately, the Lockean theory of labor-based value and modern psychology and sociology are on our side.

One practical effect of time is that the youngish gamers of today, who really understand the community dynamic of gaming, are currently law students and young attorneys, but thirty years from now they'll be judges and legislators, and they'll shape the law according to their experience. I'm already reading some of the Young Turks' legal analysis, and if these people become judges and legislators--and some of them doubtless will--they're going to be very open to redefining MMO IP rights.

What will the new rights be? Will some of the rights listed in this thread be among them? Your guess is as good as mine, but some games may already be showing us the way. Second Life's EULA expressly recognizes that players have some IP rights. EVE Online has some sort of panel of players' representatives, formally recognized and listened to by the corporation, elected by the players. So I think that we do have some possibilities. But the process will be slow, and it's full of imponderables.

This is good stuff.


New laws with industries can be iffy. And even if IP laws are made up do it only apply to US companies, and or how would these laws be applied to international companies. One one hand, I think there should be more protection to players or better warnings. On the other hand, especially with the friendship and community part, I think that can be taken apart by them saying that those relationships, if real in the first place, can be manifested through any media, and the ending of a game should not have much effect on continuing that personal relationship,like this forum plan on continuing to run even when the game shut down.

I hope that eventually IP and player rights get a look at, but I think it might be better chance of legal reform if worded as more of consumer rights instead of game player rights as any politician that is looking to be re elected probably wont touch a game issue with ten foot pole. Not because they dont care about the plight of gamers but it wouldnt look proper pushing laws through for gamer protection while there is no laws to prevent people from their boss coming into their office and giving them the pinkslip and telling to go home because the company is trying to save money. I'm not saying it's important and me replying means in itself that I find your answer very interesting and valid.

And yeah a player's selected representative group sounds like a good idea on paper, but in practice...meh. I already thought that the COX community was more of a popularity contest to begin with from the forum postings there over the years and many of those that probably would be elected by popular vote dont think would represent this community very well as a whole or have the community's interest at heart and use it more to push their own ideas and try to make the game what they want to play and not always what the community wants to play. Not being negative but just my observation there over the years that certain people get passes for the craziest idea while someone less popular with same concept is flamed and trolled to no end because they are less known and or popular. But that result is not COX specific I think. I think it just tends to happen with many elected groups. First, they seem like they are going to bat for the community then in the end it's a realization that they are only going to bat for what they feel personally is a good idea or want to see implemented.

[Liberties]

So revamped point 1.

1.  The foundation of a successful business is profit.  Where a product is profitable, it should remain in the free market to flourish. When your business flourishes so too does our game, and it's world.
    - Where a profitable product is tied to a failing one, all reasonable efforts within profit margin should be made to bolster the failing product or sever the two.  Reinvestment into the product for the purpose of expanding the viability, longevity and market presence is good for both the consumer and the business.  It is fundamental that profit is good, and as such bolstering profiting enterprise should be the primary goal of any company.

I think this is business-ese version of the same thing I said in the first post, but I like the wording to a degree.

[Ponderer]

Indeed, I think that's important.  Presenting these points in terms of a business mindset.  When you present them as what players should get alone, it's going to be easy to satirize.  When it is presented instead as 'stick to the business practices that are good for both you and your customers', it's more likely to gain traction.

[Olantern]

I just realized that I forgot to post in this thread ...

In general, I agree with everything Gothica said.

Over in Legal Considerations, I argued that player bills of rights are fine, but they're risky for publishers.  If a publisher explicitly agrees to some of these things, they create all sorts of risks for the publisher and may even get invalidated as contract terms if a player sues to enforce them.  (See Legal Considerations for my theories as to why.)

Thus, they ought to be developed by players alone as aspirational goals rather than by players and publishers as terms of service agreements.  (That's what this thread is doing, I think.)  That way, they're essentially out in the popular culture as "do this, or we'll take our business elsewhere" statements.  That kind of general, economic risk is more or less a standard cost of doing business and thus much more legally palatable to a publisher than being legally bound to operate at someone else's will.

[JaguarX]

And if these "rights" thing make into writing or not, we have to be serious about it. I think in a gaming community we can form some type of "player's union" or similar. Buisness come from all over the world, speak different languages, have different values but one thing they all speak is money. And if it do form, remember to keep it platyer rights and not trying to strike because a developer isnt making updates fast enough or something silly like that. And most importantly it CANNOT BE USED AS A TOOL TO ADVANCE THE MOTIVES OF FEW! Even if true "factions" and "groups" do it, we should aim to be the model that other groups would want to and should follow.  If the practices of the buisness dont look up to snuff of what we expect, they may get some money but it shouldnt be any of yours and go somewhere that have a more decent track record.

Now WHO'S WITH ME!! WE MUST TAKE THAT HILL BY NIGHTFALL AND MAKE THE ENEMY MAKE THE ULTIMATE SACRIFICE FOR THEIR COUNTRY!!! oh wait sorry, old army coming out. lol.

[Ponderer]

I'll take that first step.  I think having a group of people signing a petition like statement of expectations can be powerful.  It can be good not only for the players, but for the developers who have to fight for a bigger cut of the profits to reinvest into the game.  When you have a bunch of consumers at your back saying that unless you get what you need, they blackout or leave entirely, you might find yourself with even more funding.

[Liberties]

I just realized that I forgot to post in this thread ...

In general, I agree with everything Gothica said.

Over in Legal Considerations, I argued that player bills of rights are fine, but they're risky for publishers.  If a publisher explicitly agrees to some of these things, they create all sorts of risks for the publisher and may even get invalidated as contract terms if a player sues to enforce them.  (See Legal Considerations for my theories as to why.)

Thus, they ought to be developed by players alone as aspirational goals rather than by players and publishers as terms of service agreements.  (That's what this thread is doing, I think.)  That way, they're essentially out in the popular culture as "do this, or we'll take our business elsewhere" statements.  That kind of general, economic risk is more or less a standard cost of doing business and thus much more legally palatable to a publisher than being legally bound to operate at someone else's will.

The problem I foresee doing it this way is the percentage of players who don't sign, or stand with the group when stating those goals. Who get tempted into buying into a game that doesn't meet the aspirations we are shooting for. This shouldn't be voluntary stuff, it's all pretty common, do what's right ideas, so why would the game companies blanch at it... I can tell you, cause doing the wrong thing, is profitable in short term gains. Long term, do the right thing and it is far more profitable, but try explaining that to a group of old short sighted men...

No, a hybrid works best. A Union of Gamers, preferably thousands strong to over a million, who WILL stand with the BoR, is enough to get the gaming companies to make it a Term of Service agreement stipulation. Frankly we have always had our right to take our money elsewhere, this is simply an attempt to organize that right into leverage to get game companies heads out of the clouds, and into the fact that they are mass producing what is considered art now. As such they have the responsibility of an artist to do what is right on certain levels.

And if they don't follow the BoR, the Union of Gamers strikes on that game, ceasing to play it if they already own it, and refusing to buy it or any other products of the producing company till the problem is fixed. This is the way you make change. By stating your leverage, stating your goals, and waiting for the other party to realize they need you, not the other way around.

With that said, game companies need to start addressing these player concerns in a manner other then wall o text EULAs. Frankly put, I would wager that more then 75% of the population doesn't even read them. By having a Gamers BoR we could be sure we aren't agreeing to anything unreasonable in those, and not have to have a lawyer along to sign up for a new game.

[Colette]

"The problem I see with any bill of rights as such is that to my lawyerly ear, any time someone mentions the word "right," then that places someone else under a duty."

A valid point, and I think the time to translate all this into lawyerese will come.

More importantly, I think we need to define certain terms. What we are really talking about here... is a kind of guild. What constitutes this guild? A mutual agreement among a significant portion of the server-based gaming population to not support gaming companies who refuse to conform to our expectations.

Such an organization would provide good word of mouth and free advertising to those games that incorporated our terms into their EULA, while denigrating and advising boycotts against games and even entire consortiums (Nexon) who grievously violate those terms.

I think this would be wonderful, entirely legal, and worthwhile thing, that does not require passage of any new laws or the consent of the gaming companies. We have the nucleus of such an organization right here. Even if we fail to save Paragon City, we could fashion a grander triumph from our loss. That is also what heroes do, is it not?

And speaking frankly, if I was the producer of an MMO, I'd be looking over this particular thread very carefully. It is the first clear warning sign of a revolt. By conforming to these terms early, that producer could ride the oncoming wave rather than be crushed by it.

[Rotten Luck]

There more here then just an MMO.

For example games are moving to a format that are always online.  Getting Patch updates, now content.  This isn't just MMOs games like Mass Effect (franchise), Halo Franchise, and others.  What to keep a business from changing major plot points, endings, gear just on a whim.  Or deliver endings that suck (Mass Effect 3 What color boom you want for example).

Point is now we are entering a time when a board of directors can change content in a game on whim MMO or other.  Any game that gets updated via the web falls under this Fahrenheit 457 possibly.  One where if some new CEO (board of directors) don't like something in a game they can change it.

[JaguarX]

I think the hard part might be getting gamers to actually care as a whole and get on board. I mean within this game to save it and sign a petition didnt even get 50% of rumored low number of players or barely 20% of the rumored high number and less than 16% -14% for the peak number of players. And that's with the people that are not a member of the game, people who signed it more than once and etc.

We need a pretty large amount of participation, and if we are talking about the gaming industry as a whole, we would need a whole lot of people and given that WoW is the giant, that probably means many of those players coming from there. And from what I hear, they are not exactly motivated as here about things like this, and just either quit playing and move on or continue to play and accept the way things are. Didnt they lose over 1.1 million players? without even barely flinching due to the massive size. That number would make any game company have a cow but WoW and Blizzard it's buisness as usual. And or also have participation in a particular game. But in the end lets not start off as a group for a good cause only to devolve into more of a strong-arming virtual terrorist organization side of things.

Maybe before leaping head first into it, we should survey the waters first.

[Rotten Luck]

We will lead by example.  If Plan Z goes live it would be with the players rights in mind.  From there the Idea would catch on... perhaps slowly.  Not all are like NCsoft some of the producing businesses out there might just come aboard because they can use it as marketing.  "We (insert company name here) Value our customers so as of today we are adopting the Players bill of rights."

[sabbatha251]

I think there would be a good amount of interest for a players bill of rights. Honestly, I am really tired of buying into things that I don't "own". It's a large chunk of change we are investing into a game to have absolutely no say in it. I really would like to see a mmo blackout day where no one plays on an mmo for one day (highly unlikely, I know )just to show corporate who their bread and butter comes from.

[Rotten Luck]

Mah ha ha ha!  They took our servers down so we take them down!  I love it!  It be hard true to get all the MMO players out there in the game sphere to join the movement.  But even a small % of the gamer do agree it be noticed, double so if we can get the news and media outlets to advertise the drive and report on it.

*Company A turns to look at NCsoft* "This is your fault you know.  You just had to kick the hornets nest."

[sabbatha251]

It's an idea I've been kicking around for a while. You're right though we only need a small precentage to do it. Just really want to be able as a customer to buy something with out the worry of it shutting down a couple months later.

[Colette]

" *Company A turns to look at NCsoft* 'This is your fault you know.'"

Ooohh... now we're talking! That would really put NC Softcore's practices in the limelight.

[JaguarX]

Mah ha ha ha!  They took our servers down so we take them down!  I love it!  It be hard true to get all the MMO players out there in the game sphere to join the movement.  But even a small % of the gamer do agree it be noticed, double so if we can get the news and media outlets to advertise the drive and report on it.

*Company A turns to look at NCsoft* "This is your fault you know.  You just had to kick the hornets nest."

yea, notice by the media would be good. Yet, the pessy side of me say that they may not touch something like this when you still have real life people and jobs where they dont have these kind of rights and boss can come in and hand them a two week notice and tell them to clean out the desk. Would be odd to see a story about how players been jerked around by a company that killed their game and demand rights when some people's lively hood dont even have that protection.

I might be looking waaaay tooooo deep into this and causing me to miss the entire point. If I am, please let me know so I can focus. My mind tends to do that.

[Rotten Luck]

yea, notice by the media would be good. Yet, the pessy side of me say that they may not touch something like this when you still have real life people and jobs where they dont have these kind of rights and boss can come in and hand them a two week notice and tell them to clean out the desk. Would be odd to see a story about how players been jerked around by a company that killed their game and demand rights when some people's lively hood dont even have that protection.

I might be looking waaaay tooooo deep into this and causing me to miss the entire point. If I am, please let me know so I can focus. My mind tends to do that.

That true but also there are people that sue over a Wrongful firing.  It's not a Point and fire kind of thing anymore.  People have taken companies to court over being fired out of the blue.  Face it if NCsoft could have done that the whole FAKE a quitting letter wouldn't been needed.

In another way we lease the use of the game.  Like a Car we pay a monthly payment, but a car lease is contract driven as long as you pay x amount you can use the car for x amount of time.  During this time you don't expect the Car manufacture/owner come and replace the seats or do any major changes to the car. 

In non MMO games we get the same thing you don't expect Ford to come and replace parts of the car you buy.  But now this can happen in games with a Patch that could change how the game operates.

[QuantumHero]

I think we are getting a tiny bit derailed with focus on changed to a game versus making the game cease to function at all.  I'm not saying ad hoc changes are good...but every new coh issue was a patch, bug fixes come in patches also...there are also bad patches out there....and patches have been rolled-back.   There are games in which you can take and refuse patches (for example Sims) but any game that involves co-op or competitive play requires everyone to have pretty much the same software to functon properly.  There are a number of games that do have the ability to operate in two modes, one for your personal use and one while teamed with others....and many, many games with very active, and even encouraged,modding communities. (Half life, never winter nights, sims, etc).  There are aso many older games that are designed to and legal opperate on private servers,

MMOs are a new beast and somewhere along the way the concept got twisted by some of these companies.

Half of the game purchased is  stored on servers for two and only two reasons...to make it easier for devs to manage and update the product and so consumers don't need enormous resources/ performance is better....and when a developer is done maintaining or updating that product then their "service add-on for subscription" has ended.

At that point...they have one responsibility and one responsibility only...to leave their players with a functioning product or allow another entity to do so.  Product is a functioning game that we bought with our disks, subscription fees allowed us updates, devs, maintenance. servers, tech support. 

A company can accomplish this goal by selling a server module, they can even sell a devl
 module, for those who have not already purchased disks/digital downloads once they would be reasonable to sell them COH: "Sunrise" for a small and rational fee...let's say 19.99 to put anumber out there which performs the transition to a functioning new format and points all clients to options that will continue functioning.

After that the IP holder may continue to release "sunrise" and tool kits fo a fee, or give it to god old games, or free to the community.

Finally once no longer running the servers or updating they may at any time release additiona paid or free content...which the private servers or client based games can choose whether to aquire.

They can still release a sequal or a console game, or any other use of the IP.

They could technically set *some* limits on further developmnt and/or modding but with nothng being developed by them...they hve effectively abandoned the field and it is effectively fan fic.

[JaguarX]

That true but also there are people that sue over a Wrongful firing.  It's not a Point and fire kind of thing anymore.  People have taken companies to court over being fired out of the blue.  Face it if NCsoft could have done that the whole FAKE a quitting letter wouldn't been needed.

In another way we lease the use of the game.  Like a Car we pay a monthly payment, but a car lease is contract driven as long as you pay x amount you can use the car for x amount of time.  During this time you don't expect the Car manufacture/owner come and replace the seats or do any major changes to the car. 

In non MMO games we get the same thing you don't expect Ford to come and replace parts of the car you buy.  But now this can happen in games with a Patch that could change how the game operates.

yes true. The point I'm getting at is that it might be hard to get media attention about the plight of gamers losing their virtual home because a company wanted to cut back while people lose their jobs everyday for that same reason. Especially with unemployment being a big issue now, some of them laid off because of cutbacks just like this game, according to offical statement from NCSoft, is due to cut backs and streamlining.

Think an actual lease contract like thing would work for online MMOs? That is without making game the game makers turtle shell and stop releasing games and or aim for only sure bets, like more WoW clones? Then when the contract ends, it can be reviewed and decide to whether to continue or leave it alone? That is one way to ensure that games just dont end all of a sudden but then the wrench i nthe gears with my statement is suppose the game tanks in the middle of the contract? Would game makers feel it is worth the risk? If they have to eat the cost of the loss would it damage the company and or hinder the release of new games, updates and stuff?

I cant think of  a way that would theorectically protect the customer while making sure game makers will find the risk worth taking and not turtle shell.

[Rotten Luck]

yes true. The point I'm getting at is that it might be hard to get media attention about the plight of gamers losing their virtual home because a company wanted to cut back while people lose their jobs everyday for that same reason. Especially with unemployment being a big issue now, some of them laid off because of cutbacks just like this game, according to offical statement from NCSoft, is due to cut backs and streamlining.

Think an actual lease contract like thing would work for online MMOs? That is without making game the game makers turtle shell and stop releasing games and or aim for only sure bets, like more WoW clones? Then when the contract ends, it can be reviewed and decide to whether to continue or leave it alone? That is one way to ensure that games just dont end all of a sudden but then the wrench i nthe gears with my statement is suppose the game tanks in the middle of the contract? Would game makers feel it is worth the risk? If they have to eat the cost of the loss would it damage the company and or hinder the release of new games, updates and stuff?

I cant think of  a way that would theorectically protect the customer while making sure game makers will find the risk worth taking and not turtle shell.

In a lease if you don't pay it's considered your braking the contract.  Then the Item/car/shop can be taken away.  So if a game goes red as in not bring in enough funds to cover cost of operations the company has the right then to pull the plug.  However a lease like system say it's renewed every 5 years, If the company don't want to renew have a clause that they should Publicly try to sell (Announce that it for sale).  This is kin to a Mortgage company selling a Mortgage to another company (yeah that went bad but depending on legal jargon could work.)  Perhaps a section that if no sellers buy said lease it goes open source and could then be ran on private servers.

[JaguarX]

In a lease if you don't pay it's considered your braking the contract.  Then the Item/car/shop can be taken away.  So if a game goes red as in not bring in enough funds to cover cost of operations the company has the right then to pull the plug.  However a lease like system say it's renewed every 5 years, If the company don't want to renew have a clause that they should Publicly try to sell (Announce that it for sale).  This is kin to a Mortgage company selling a Mortgage to another company (yeah that went bad but depending on legal jargon could work.)  Perhaps a section that if no sellers buy said lease it goes open source and could then be ran on private servers.

yeah, that's more like it. But I think the last part may be the part that may scare game builders. They may view it as losing a property because they couldnt sell it, like a house that is up for sale going to the public because it couldnt sell. They may not feel the risk is worth it. Although, maybe the MMO market needs a little thinning out but when it's thinned out, dont want it to die either from there because no game maker feel the risk is worth taking and rather not make new games leaving only giants running the place or giant in this case.

[Rotten Luck]

True the last part could be cut out.  I'm think from terms of someone that had been on the bad end of the housing market bubble bursting.  Now I'm feeling an echo of that trouble in here I'm loosing a second home because of a Companies poor choices... AGAIN!

I was kind of thinking of a cities Blight laws.  Where if a building is left unused it can be taken by the city and sold. 

But the Lease system does seem to fit a MMO's operation.  The player Pays (or uses micro transactions) to pay for the lease if they fail to keep it in a profit (Black) then they are risking game termination.  The company has a right every 5 years or so to reevaluate the game and how to handle the lease.  They should announce selling of the lease publicly if they don't want to handle the game IP any longer.  (One of the issues we have against NCsoft is the tight lip and refusing to speak to anyone even willing to make an offer to buy).  By the public announcement rules they make a Minimal sale price.  Much like selling a House you have the amount you want and negotiate with a buyer the idea other Buyers compete for the property driving the sale price higher.  So a public announcement would be in a Company's best interest.

Again this is a leymans term thinking I'm sure a Legal skilled person could rework this idea.

[JaguarX]

True the last part could be cut out.  I'm think from terms of someone that had been on the bad end of the housing market bubble bursting.  Now I'm feeling an echo of that trouble in here I'm loosing a second home because of a Companies poor choices... AGAIN!

I was kind of thinking of a cities Blight laws.  Where if a building is left unused it can be taken by the city and sold. 

But the Lease system does seem to fit a MMO's operation.  The player Pays (or uses micro transactions) to pay for the lease if they fail to keep it in a profit (Black) then they are risking game termination.  The company has a right every 5 years or so to reevaluate the game and how to handle the lease.  They should announce selling of the lease publicly if they don't want to handle the game IP any longer.  (One of the issues we have against NCsoft is the tight lip and refusing to speak to anyone even willing to make an offer to buy).  By the public announcement rules they make a Minimal sale price.  Much like selling a House you have the amount you want and negotiate with a buyer the idea other Buyers compete for the property driving the sale price higher.  So a public announcement would be in a Company's best interest.

Again this is a leymans term thinking I'm sure a Legal skilled person could rework this idea.

yeah, I thought real estate laws were complicated but corporate law make real estate law look like a coloring book.

[dwturducken]

Back up a few posts.  Maybe that MMO black out deserves its own thread.  We have just under six weeks. Do we think we can get enough support from the greater MMO community to convince a noticeable percentage of our fellow gamers to play no MMOs on Saturday, December 1st?

[Rotten Luck]

To get multiple MMO force I don't think so.  Plus the black out is more for the MMO Bill of rights and not saving City of Heroes.  It's more to keep it happening to someone else.

To organize a Multi game protest going to take a tad more organization with in our own order.  Most of that now focused on Plan Z.  I believe that we will be using the Players Bill of Rights as our Policy.  Let that be our decoration of independence of the established order.

[Colette]

I'm sure there are several game companies that would agree these rules are in their enlightened self-interest. Firaxis, for example, I understand have a pretty good record.

"...how about us fighting to improve the rights of those in the industry themselves, where at a moments notice they can find themselves axed and out of a job rather fast."

I've actually worked in the Computer Game industry. What you're talking about is a Union. My current employment is heavily unionized, and why such a heavily educated, specialized and highly-paid profession as computer programmers do not have a union baffles me. Unionizing programmers and related professions would, I think, be worthwhile. It's also something they would need to do, with the full understanding that their initial organizers would likely find themselves blacklisted by the business owners.

(This is not an invitation for pro and anti union activists to launch a huge off-topic debate. Thanks.)

[Segev]

I hope everyone here has read Olantern's post on why a "Player's Bill of Rights" sort of thing is not a healthy thing for a company to make as any sort of official statement, let alone promise. Some of the clauses in this one look like things that could get any effort to make a spiritual successor to CoH shut down forever within weeks of going live. All it would take is, say, Somebody with a desire to see it shut down, who maliciously buys in at a VIP level, and then just starts making unreasonable demands/claims based on said Bill. Twisting its words around and violating its spirit to bring plausible suit with mysteriously large bags of money for their lawyers. It would be enough to bury a fledgling little studio without the studio even having enough money to last long enough for the trial date to be set.

[Rotten Luck]

Wanting A bill of rights is not the same as wanting THIS bill of rights.

In other words we need some rewriting and beta testing of the ideas before we put it out, there are flaws in the proposed rights yes.  Does this mean the basic idea is flawed no.

[Ponderer]

I hope everyone here has read Olantern's post on why a "Player's Bill of Rights" sort of thing is not a healthy thing for a company to make as any sort of official statement, let alone promise. Some of the clauses in this one look like things that could get any effort to make a spiritual successor to CoH shut down forever within weeks of going live. All it would take is, say, Somebody with a desire to see it shut down, who maliciously buys in at a VIP level, and then just starts making unreasonable demands/claims based on said Bill. Twisting its words around and violating its spirit to bring plausible suit with mysteriously large bags of money for their lawyers. It would be enough to bury a fledgling little studio without the studio even having enough money to last long enough for the trial date to be set.

I think this misses the point of crafting this.  A player's bill of rights should be something that players assert.  It's not about having a company sign on a dotted line, these aren't hard and fast rules that can be quantified moment to moment.  "Good customer service" is subjective, for instance, and what is fine for some may be unacceptable for others.

Someone buying at the VIP level and making unreasonable demands isn't relevant.  They won't be taken seriously because they aren't reasonable.  If we have general ideas that we all agree upon, then we can act in defense of those ideas.  Let's take an example, 'providing good content'.  Let's say everyone generally agrees that providing reasonable and meaningful updates is important.  Then, with the company seeming to make large profits, they cut their development staff in half.

If the players got together and said 'hey, there's no reason to fire these guys, it will slow down our updates and give us less value for our money.  We are asking people to email them and tell them that because of this action we're having a blackout on this day.  If we want to be taken seriously, make sure you observe the blackout.  Letters matter more if you can mail them physically.  If they haven't rehired, we'll discuss letting subscriptions lapse or other possibilities."

The way I see it, the idea here isn't some kind of binding contract, the idea is to have an active community movement to defend the growth and longevity of your gaming experience.

Edit - Just peeked over there, and Olantern seems to agree with me.

So, if there's a bottom line here, it's that I think things like bills of rights are fine, as long as they remain a player-generated endeavor.  (I might take issue with some terms of some that I've seen, but the principle is sound.)

[Segev]

Exactly, Ponderer. I was writing in response to the tone of "this is how Plan Z should operate and should adopt something like this" that I saw arising.

[Ponderer]

Yeah, to try to turn these concepts into something of a binding legal agreement would be a hot mess with a side of eugh.  I hope everyone comes to agree on that!  Though I do think finding a set of principles to agree upon and defend collectively is one hell of a good idea!  If workers can unionize, why can't gamers unite?

[Segev]

If workers can unionize, why can't gamers unite?

Somebody keeps asking the gamers what they want on their pizza. The battles are bloody.

[Rotten Luck]

or in other terms.

This is our Declaration of independence.  Our Declaration of Gamer rights and among those right but not limited to them is the "Right to have quality, Right to have honest answers, and the right to enjoy a product we pay for!"

[Victoria Victrix]

What I think should be reasonable is a "creator's bill of rights."  One that incorporates the same "use it or lose it" language as book contracts.

In a book contract, the publisher is obligated to keep the book in print.  If the publisher does not do so in some form, in X years (varies by publisher, author, and how aggressive the author's agent it), the rights go back to the author to be resold or redistributed as the author sees fit.  The only one of my books to ever go out of print has recently reverted, and the Marion Zimmer Bradley Trust is putting it back in print in e-format.

This would prevent firms like NCSoft from squatting forever on an IP, which I think is only fair.  Given how fast things move in the game industry, I think a 1 or 2 year limit on IP squatting is reasonable.  This would also give firms the incentive to sell while they still can.

[JaguarX]

Back up a few posts.  Maybe that MMO black out deserves its own thread.  We have just under six weeks. Do we think we can get enough support from the greater MMO community to convince a noticeable percentage of our fellow gamers to play no MMOs on Saturday, December 1st?

I doubt it.

To many out there, gaming is like a drug, a habit, they are hooked and some cant function without a day of playing. Many more probably just like playing a game and is meh either way it goes with the corporate side of the house as long as the game they are playing is up and running. Then you have some that like the idea but may feel like it wont make a difference because not enough people (the first hour of the party rule.). Then you have some that like the idea but dont want to bother. Then you have a few spread out that will do it, but one day wont make a notice especially those that pay monthly fees and F2p models that is used to seeing people come and go.

[DrakeGrimm]

or in other terms.

This is our Declaration of independence.  Our Declaration of Gamer rights and among those right but not limited to them is the "Right to have quality, Right to have honest answers, and the right to enjoy a product we pay for!"

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all gamers are spawned equal, that they are endowed by their developers with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Wakies, Breakies, and the Pursuit of Experience.


<.<

[JaguarX]

I think this misses the point of crafting this.  A player's bill of rights should be something that players assert.  It's not about having a company sign on a dotted line, these aren't hard and fast rules that can be quantified moment to moment.  "Good customer service" is subjective, for instance, and what is fine for some may be unacceptable for others.

Someone buying at the VIP level and making unreasonable demands isn't relevant.  They won't be taken seriously because they aren't reasonable.  If we have general ideas that we all agree upon, then we can act in defense of those ideas.  Let's take an example, 'providing good content'.  Let's say everyone generally agrees that providing reasonable and meaningful updates is important.  Then, with the company seeming to make large profits, they cut their development staff in half.

If the players got together and said 'hey, there's no reason to fire these guys, it will slow down our updates and give us less value for our money.  We are asking people to email them and tell them that because of this action we're having a blackout on this day.  If we want to be taken seriously, make sure you observe the blackout.  Letters matter more if you can mail them physically.  If they haven't rehired, we'll discuss letting subscriptions lapse or other possibilities."

The way I see it, the idea here isn't some kind of binding contract, the idea is to have an active community movement to defend the growth and longevity of your gaming experience.

Edit - Just peeked over there, and Olantern seems to agree with me.

Now if we was succeed in say, a black out in a game. What's stop them from firing off a nuke instead? Aka, seeing that they let people go and dont want to rehire, but if they dont rehire, they lose killer money from the blackout so they release official notice of drop in revenue and player base and just kill the game? And are we prepared for that again or a risk willing to take? Me personally, sure, especially if the firing was going to cause me to leave anyways due to stale content because there are not many devs. At the same time I wouldnt want those left over to have to suffer for it. I

And also good content is a little hard to define on a person to person basis. I assume that it will be voted on, like if say 51% say it's good then it's considered good content? Compared to only 49% of the player base disliking it.


I love this idea though. As long as it is not goign to be used to try to strongarm people who choose to not partake in it. I know some people here are passionate about their ideas and acting as one and come off as little strong sometimes in trying to convince. Which is fine with me, I like passion, but some people may be put off and feel like they are being talked down to.

LoL. So how are we going to start this thing?

"We the gamers..."

[Altoholic Monkey]

I just wanted to interject that when crafting a document that seeks to apply to Gamers as a whole, let us remember that Gamers are international.  Sometimes us Americans tend to think in terms of our own country and not the country of others.  We are all united as Gamers,  but it let's make sure the Players Rights' document is not  branded with a title that can be applicable only to American history.

The more Gamers you get to back this document/manifesto/statement  the better and stronger it becomes. To do that we need the help of all Gamers across the globe.  It would be wonderful if the closing of City of Heroes was the beginning of Gamers saying 'NO MORE' and drafting a statement that demands change.

[dwturducken]

I doubt it.

To many out there, gaming is like a drug, a habit, they are hooked and some cant function without a day of playing. Many more probably just like playing a game and is meh either way it goes with the corporate side of the house as long as the game they are playing is up and running. Then you have some that like the idea but may feel like it wont make a difference because not enough people (the first hour of the party rule.). Then you have some that like the idea but dont want to bother. Then you have a few spread out that will do it, but one day wont make a notice especially those that pay monthly fees and F2p models that is used to seeing people come and go.

I don't know about anyone else, here, but I have plenty of things to "get my fix," but we've been very careful not to couch this as an addiction, since they take that sort of thing very seriously in Korea.

What about calling December 1st "Play Your Old Games" day? I have an old P2 Dell laptop that I keep alive, running only Windows 95 and early Microprose games, as well as the old Gold Box AD&D games.

[JaguarX]

I don't know about anyone else, here, but I have plenty of things to "get my fix," but we've been very careful not to couch this as an addiction, since they take that sort of thing very seriously in Korea.

Oops.

What about calling December 1st "Play Your Old Games" day? I have an old P2 Dell laptop that I keep alive, running only Windows 95 and early Microprose games, as well as the old Gold Box AD&D games.

hmmm, I like the sound of that. I bet many people have old laying around that they have missed or went to the dust bin because other things in life came up.

Might pull out the first Mortal Kombat game for PC again. The pesky one where to play you had to type some random generated word out the book. Pity anyone who lost that book.

[Rotten Luck]

I have a lot of games on my Stream.  Hmm Maybe load in Black and White 2 on this system and let my inner Villain torment a population.

[Ponderer]

As for 'firing a nuke', I think it's firstly unlikely.  After all, we have a blackout, they see dead servers.  If they then say 'okay then, fork it we'd rather just take our toys and go home', then they would be abandoning their own business wholesale, because they would have rather kept slightly more of their profit margin.  It simply isn't sensible that they would do so.  Of course I could imagine them claiming they would very clearly and in very unified fashion.  "We're sorry but there's just no money to do that, we realize we may lose some of our beloved players but there's nothing more that can be done about it."

However, after that clear statement, they're going to be watching player activity very carefully.  If the population stays low, they're going to rehire.  Businesses are in this to make money, and the nuclear option would hit them where they live.  With that said, people must be willing to go through with these actions.  If these types of player groups get popular, SOMEONE, somewhere, sometime, is going to risk their game to see if they can't wear down the players conglomeration and retake the kind of unilateral control that it is (occasionally) considered common wisdom that they 'should' have.

As to the how?  I think we should agree on simple bullet points of what we expect, and then agreed upon avenues of action.  (Blackout days, mail campaigns, email campaigns, subscription lapse, etc).  When we have that all in place, we'd need to structure it, we don't need a particular head of an organization, but we do need a way to vote on what's important so that the organization has cohesion and only acts to larger issues.  I.e. pushing to reinvest is good, but organized blackouts in the name of the "Unified Gamers" that are demanding the inclusion of magical ponies will not have the full weight of the group even though that's where it started, and thus will not be taken seriously.

More than that, establishing a community outside of the game can be quite important, so, if we ever are forced to leave a game (or are taking a break from it for a short time to let our voices be heard) we can still find people to play with in other games, as well as finding suggestions for other games, when we can't play the one we'd like.  I think the first step (and pardon being away) would be refining our expectations and establishing a potential set of protest actions.

[Moonfyire101]

Everyone from Youmacon was very interested in this. How do we actually do this? Should we have a lawyer draw it up and then submit it to game companies and ask them if they would like to be registered  with us and follow these guidelines? Then they will get even more subscribers because their money will be safe with the company.

Basically everyone agrees that we paid for the game. We own it. We pay for service for the game. When service is no longer provided by the company we have the right to play the game we paid for. So, if they don't want to sell it to another company who wishes to provide service for it we should have the right to make our own private servers. WE PAID FOR IT DAMMIT!

[Moonfyire101]

i would think so. we'll have to find a way to have that on their too.Most games even if they are free to play still require you to purchase the game its self. So those would definately qualify. Not sure how to word the other one...the ones like shaiya whereit's free to download and play. Maybe make it a seperate bill that the comapnies can advertise they are a part of also?

[Colette]

I concur, Gangrel. While not everyone invested in this game (though I did, more heavily than I ever planned,) everyone is worthy of consideration and respectful treatment.

[Moonfyire101]

[johnrobey]

 I'm late to the table and this thread but I like the OP.  Great idea!!

[Ponderer]

Hey all!  A bit of thread necro here, for Gangrel:  Free To Play models for games still exist to make money.  For the sake of my proposal I don't see a need for a shift in focus, only because this is not about what companies give players, it's about the standards that players intend to hold companies accountable to.

As to your question, at what point do these rights kick in, it's when we hold a company accountable for behavior that is not in the best interests of the game.  As to changing the wording of our expectations, I disagree in whole.  A company should be expected to act in its own interests, and this player action should recognize that.  However, the point of this isn't that those who spend more are more valuable, or that those who spend nothing are not valuable.  Those who play without paying are investing time, and given a reason will also invest money.  Whether or not they have done so at any given time is not relevant to this action.

This is the same thought I have regarding a lack of legal standing.  In my idea, it isn't about trying to make companies sign a contract, it's about unified player action.  If they behave against players will and wishes (firing good employees, forcing fundamental game shifts to try to strong arm money, etc), they will face a strong, unified player base that will organize to respond to their behavior.  You don't need a legal standing to carry out player actions.

[Rotten Luck]