Chase_Arcanum

Come, now.
Nothing can match the master, but we don't deride those that pay home.

Agreed.

...and if they do, can we then spread the rumor that they intentionally delayed everything by an issue just to spite Arcanaville?

Yeah, I don't treat most of my characters as if YEARS have gone by. Penny's aging means that Shandora Ward's been in college for 5 years! I mean, I know that's somewhat common for undergrads nowadays, but she's still a FRESHMAN! Chase just looks at Penny Yin and... well, he feels very OLD all of a sudden.

Dammit, GG. I already used my "look" pic on you once today. Don't make me wear it out.

Not too different from comics, though.

Kids seem to grow up fast, then stay young adults forever... well, when it suits the story. Some teens stay teens for decades. Heck, some teams have teens stay teens for decades while their teammates have grown up. I don't know of any where a teen teamed with a teammate that has a kid that grows up to team with the still-teen original character, but I wouldn't be surprised if it existed.

We're playing a game set in a genre that always treated time rather... fluidly... changing with the author's whim. I consider all CoH inconsistencies as just the devs being true to the genre.

Does his dialogue actually seem to be like an immigrant in-game? I can't check and found no examples in paragonwiki.

Wu Yin's a native of Hong Kong, which would have been under the British rule at that time. English would have been commonly spoken, but back in the 1960's the social stratification between the natives and those of tai-pans would have been more pronounced, so its possible...

I say keep the current look. On these boards, there can never be too much of it.

I'm half expecting GG to whip one up with her poser comic model.

They probably had to do extra work to even make it nonmoveable, actually.

The question was probably "when you have a piece of the UI that's normally there suddenly appear, where do we place it on the screen to be the least likely to +&^%^* up users?"

Imagine the tray popping up in annoying places- over chat, under toolbars, under that little unclickable transparent area where the exclamation point appears. Perhaps this was intended to be the "least likely to be intrusive" spot.

Why go through the extra effort to make it unmobable? it may have to do with future design plans for the tray. If you move it, change it to a 3x4 box, etc, it may not fit the future design plans. Maybe they don't know all the possible design plans concretely yet so they just decided that "lock it down" would be better than limit future plans.

razzin frazzin.

I swear, I think someone in the break room switched the coffee to decaf.

thought that may be the case, but wasn't 100% sure.

I've been tinkering with the CoH forum skins for years. Besides my "tech support" one, I used to have one to replace my characters emulating the pose of the mail characters in the background. (my sig banner, which you probably don't see was from back when the pre-freedom background was up).

I always intended to make more sigs images with my characters standing, but the Statescrotch shot made that idea come to an abrupt end.

I'd usually consider this unnecessary, as the devs do say that time is represented differently through the game- those starting in Praetoria tomorrow are still under Tyrant's thumb despite his fall this issue, after all. However, Faultline zone is level 15-25. Penelope Yin Task Force is level 20-25.

That's quite the quick transformation.

I just hand wave the disconnect away with the most obvious explanation:

Before Ms. Yin made the PsychoChronoMetron broken, she made a "big" wish.

Problem solved.

That's my major complaint, too

I disagree.

From what I've seen & heard from others, people only take a select few of their characters through the Incarnate tiers. As these few get higher and higher in the tiers, they're not going to necessarily be replaced at the Incarnate entry level trials enough to replace those lost to the upper-tier trials.

Not only that- but think of the potential.

They can effectively award any character with any set of powers they want for any mission. They could transform you into a critter with critter attack powers, give you "powers" that are noncombat actions for novel stories and events... mix things up a little.

It may not be ideal for how some people use the power trays, but it certainly opens up interesting possibilities....

Hmm, that could tie in nicely with my plan for bringing statesman/woman back...

Beautiful.
That just made my day in some weird and twisted way, thanks.

Careful not to slip into the "satire vs parody" issue there. Parody is considered "fair use." Satire is not. While volumes can be written trying to specify the difference between the two, the simplest (over)generalization I can think of is this:

Parody pokes fun at the original subject matter. It is protected fair use.
Satire targets larger social issues. It is not.
Often the two overlap.

Mortimer Mouse would often lambast political figures and ridicule social issues. Berkeley Breathed also created Mortimer's backstory to stress the parody of the character and the Disney conglomerate, so he tried to blend "parody" and "satire" together.

Disney threatened to sue, then acknowledged that it may be fair use, but "they would be watching." If Mortimer's content strayed from the "parody" too much, then they'd pounce.

I never heard of an actual suit for this. A quick google search just turns up the threats and bluster. I was a big Breathed fan and I always assumed Mortimer's departure was more of "not worth the risk" of a lawsuit than an actual "lost a lawsuit." This is how much of this muscling gets around-- not because of an actual wrong, but because of the COST that defending your actions will bring you. I never dug into it far. Do you have a reference? I'd love the read.

Not anywhere near as clearcut as your thinking is.

I'll concede that Marvel's complaint was not invalid... meaning that there were enough questions of law that this wasn't a frivolous lawsuit with no merit, but it was hardly a guaranteed win. Generally, though, that's enough to file a lawsuit and get the other party to settle, and in many IP cases, that's good enough.

Why? because (gross oversimplification here) it was legitimate enough that it wouldn't risk the judge ordering them to pay the other side's legal fees. (note, the criteria for what justifies rewarding "attorney's fees" and what doesn't requires its own forum, not just forum post. Just accept that "sometimes its x, sometimes its not" and that lawyers are careful not to tread into those riskier cases where their client can get stuck with both sides' bills). You can be "valid enough" to not get stuck with legal fees but still not have a very good chance of winning. It's good enough to force the other side to look at the legal fees they'll soon be forking out and possibly make some concessions, though.

That's also probably why Disney tried pressure and intimidation before going against Breathed (still can't find an actual suit filing). Had the case been a "clear parody" they'd not only risk losing, but possibly risk paying both sides' lawyers in the loss. If the case was less textbook-clear, they could still end up losing, but not having to pay the other party's costs, and the risk of those excessive costs may be enough to get the other side to agree to some concessions....

Shoot, knew I overglossed something there.

Still, though, since it is NOT a registered trademark, in Cendre's case, it would have to be proven that the character not only existed, but the name/likeness was used prior to a date x to identify "goods or service originating from a specific source." Unlike copyright, which is inherent, for an unregistered trademark it isn't enough to say "it existed before point x." It has to exist and meet the criteria of what trademarks are intended for.

Granted, I've read articles of fashion designers claiming trademark a particular color or style that they claim is uniquely theirs, so this may be rather broad. I always took those cases as a "no, it probably won't hold up under judicial scrutiny, but do you want to spend the money to find out" but I am not a lawyer....

--

Except none of the elements you listed are unique to those characters. Even Wolverine's claws appear in other (less notable) characters of other characters. (ok, I used to think the retractable claw part was a stretch, but some comic fan pointed out even THOSE in other characters. If they had something that was distinctively and uniquely belonging to one character (or many characters from one shop) this would have been an issue.)

So, it can be argued that while none of the indivudual pieces you see as "iconic" actually are, they can be assembled into an appearance that IS iconic. Cryptic/NC argued that the character creator was akin to Crayola being sued for pictures people made using their crayons, and if Marvel was hellbent on stopping the infringement, they should target the actual person putting it together.

That sounds *somewhat* weak because, let's face it-- they'd at LEAST still be facilitating infringement to some degree. It shouldn't get them off the hook. Except-- how do you prove someone is facilitating someone else's infringement without first proving that someone else WAS actually infringing? This was actually a big hangup for Marvel. You'd have to essentially include the original infringer in the suit. Imagine the bad press if Marvel had taken this route- suing fans for making homages to their favorite characters in CoH. It was NOT something they wanted to do. In fact, to give you an idea of Marvel's lawyers' competency, this IS one reason they had several negative rulings before the settlement. Rather than use screenshots of other player' infringements ingame as examples (and risk having to bring them in as parties) Marvel had its own investigators make the as-close-as-possible replicas of their characters in CoH. NCSoft pointed out that, since marvel authorized these agents, they weren't actually infringements- they were authorized reproductions. That evidence was dismissed.).

This wasn't the entirety of Marvel's argument (there were also claims that Statesman's likeness was too close to the Captain America trademark, for example) and NCSoft wasn't in a totally-safe position, but a sizable chunk of Marvel's complaint had proven to have issues in just the preliminaries. It was far from a clear and easy win for either party.

Prepare to be disappointed with the result, though. A trademark issue really doesn't make a whit of difference for "meaning."

If a company has a word registered as a trademark in the field of computer/video games (and they do) then they could make things painful for NCSoft regardless of your use of the word. The mark of trade is all that matters, and the mark of trade is "Sith."


Now, it *could* be that, if Marvel's lawsuit on NCSoft had gone all the way to a judgement, the judge could have ruled that players using trademarks as monikers in-game doesn't constitute "potential confusion in the market" and it would be perfectly valid to use those names... but the sides settled, so we never got an official ruling.

Nobody really knows if this situation is an actual violation, they just know that they don't want to spend hundreds of thousands in legal fees (and a potentially damaging ruling if they lose) to find out.

(Heck, the judge could have decided that "players creating homage characters is akin to people cosplaying their characters at a convention, and not a trademark/copyright violation, allowing even that." ... or he could have decided that anything that could be assembled into a Marvel character had to be blocked by the devs. Seeing how damaging either of these would be to the respective parties, is it any wonder they agreed to a closed settlement?)

1) we're piping in, and the devs are not, because this has been so over-addressed over the years. This is not a new discussion.

Asking for an official dev remark is a trap. The moment a dev tries to give a simple statement- something less complex than the policy that's more easily understood, some idiot starts using that simplified rule as if it was the real rule. Simple summaries rounds corners. the rules don't. The devs have the official policy, which can be read and reviewed. they'll refer to that and leave the debate.

2) If this leaves you with a bad taste in your mouth, say "goodbye" to MMO's in general. There's nothing particularly special about the policy here that you won't find in virtually every MMO out there. Anything that's generic'ed here for a trademark violation will be generic'ed elsewhere.