Oedipus_Tex

It might be helpful for me to provide some actual examples. I'm going to pick on some popular CoH players to help illustrate. I realize some of this is still untested by law, but this is the gist of it as I understand it.


Scenario: Golden Girlis an artist in real life who has created a "Golden Girl" character, who she renders in 3-D comics. Some of these comics feature City of Heroes characters (e.g. Miss Liberty). Does the fact that she has created a "Golden Girl" City of Heroes character and forum ID give NCSoft a credible claim to the "Golden Girl" character itself if a Golden Girl comic book is published next year?

Answer: Most courts would probably say no and NCSoft would be very unlikely to persue this claim anyway. The only thing that CoH can really claim is ownership of elements borrowed directly from CoH. For example, Golden Girl cannot promote her character as a resident of Paragon City or best friend of Miss Liberty. She can probably claim that her powers are "Regeneration" and "Martial Arts," but should be cautious about, say, providing a list of powers that mimics CoH exactly (a couple of cheeky references probably are fine--but firmly maintaining that her powers consist of Fast Healing, Reconstruction, Quick Recovery, Dull Pain, and Integration is probably not. Note that this would be true even if she had not existed as a CoH character.)



Scenario: Arcanaville is a popular CoH forum poster. She decides to design a new video game that competes with NCSoft, and names it "Arcanaville" in order to trade on her popularity. Can NCSoft stop her by claiming that it owns the name "Arcanaville" on the grounds that it was her forum ID and/or character name?

Answer: Almost certainly not. The most they could likely do is take away her forum ID or character name, if she was still using them. They own the "Arcanaville" name exclusively in terms of their own servers and the CoH world.

A bit of a greyer area would be if they had created their own game named "Arcanaville." That would be getting into an issue I'm not sure has ever been tested. How much ownership, for example, does WoW have over "Leeroy Jenkins?" I don't know that anyone has an answer. Regardless, unless you are Arcanaville or Leeroy I doubt you have much reason to worry.



Scenario: Trickshooter is a long-term fan of the game who creates very detailed characters with awesome bios and costumes. Another CoH player, who is a comic book artist, decides to steal several of his ideas, and modifies the character just enough that it avoids violating CoH's IP. What defense does Trickshooter have?

Answer: This is actually the most likely situation to occur. The answer is basically that if you don't want it potentially cloned/stolen, do not put it in the game. It is true that you have limited copyright of the character, but 1) ideas cannot be copyrighted or trademarked, and 2) because of the nature of the EULA it would be very hard to prove IP theft. What protects you also leaves you vulnerable. While NCSoft itself would be unlikely to file a claim against you to stop you from using a particular character you played here, they could easily create something very like your character. And with other players (or even non-players who just visit our boards looking for ideas) there is a very thin line of defense. In general, if you plan on publishing a work containing your characters at some point it is NOT a good idea to showcase them in a MMO. This isn't because the parent company could file a trademark/copyright claim against you, but because defending your IP with the MMO as proof of your ownership is hard if not impossible.

EDIT: I should add something to the last item here. The reason NCSoft probably would not risk directly cloning any individual character is that there is some possibility the creator either had a trademark/copyright on the character outside of the game, or even that the character was a ripoff of a trademark the player never owned. Because of this I'm not sure if there has ever been a case of a MMO deliberately thefting a player's character. What probably has happened is MMOs creating new characters who are very similar to at least some of the player characters, but this is not a violation (in fact it's part of why they make you sign a EULA, so you can't claim Desdemona is a clone of your character, "Hotpants Demon.")

Copyright and trademark law are kind of all over the place when it comes to player's rights.

However, I think it would be extremely unlikely for NCSoft to come after someone who turned their player character into a property. The main risk to the creator would be if the likeness of the character drew too obviously on CoH costumes or powers.

NCSoft does own the character data, although it's unclear what they could actually do about you using it somehow. What they don't really own is a the "idea" of your character, except in the portion of it that exists in their databases. If this weren't true, MMO providers could potentially scan their playerbases for the coolest characters and market them without consent of the player who created them.

I don't personally feel it's my place to tell any individual customer whether they should or should not persue legal action against NCSoft. It's not my money.

I do think it reflects extremely poorly on a company to cancel a service and have no prepared message for handling the fallout. I would not accept a "when we get around to it" message from a cable company, Netflix, pay-per view, concert promoter, or any other entertainment provider had I paid them ahead of time and they decide to cancel services. I think people just tend to think these things should be allowed to slide just because it's a game company, which is weird to me, because its often the same people who keep insisting on the cold business logic behind cancelling the service. If the game can be cancelled on a 12 week window and all strings cut because this is a business, lets let that apply across the board, not just when it's convenient.

The reasons people play a game can be complicated.

Back Alley Brawler said in a recent post that recolorable powers didn't do much for the game financially. But it was that specific feature that caused me reconsider cancelling, and kept me hooked to the game ever since. Such a "minor" thing, but it is still IMO one of CoHs most appealing features.

It's just funny how little things can be a big turn off... GW has a thing where it asks you your characters history: are you searching for a lost sister, never found the identity of your parents, or regret never having joined the circus. I actually LOLed when I saw it. That's a lot of orphans, lost sisters, and would-be circus performers running around the world.

The simplicity of CoH's text box and its insistence (barring a few missions) on staying away from defining the nature of your character really did wonders for me.

Anyway, this is the CoH forum. It shouldn't be surprising that people here tend to like things about CoH. There isn't going to be 100% transfer rate of players from Game A to Game B, even if Game B is a sequel to Game A.

Having recolorable APPs show up in the beta for the issue before the game gets cancelled.

Torchlight 2 music, since that's what I'll likely be playing. Composed by Matt Uelmen, the dude who did Diablo 1 and Diablo 2's themes (and definitely did NOT do Diablo 3's).


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w15AmVuNCuo

My dad had one. I think it was the Amiga 2000. I think this was sometime in the late 80s or early 90s.

I used to play the Bard's Tale. It's unbelievable how much harder puzzles in RPGs were back then. There was also some game where you went around raiding castles.

It's weird to think back on a time when a 4096 color picture was a big deal.

I bought GW2 before the CoH news. I'm not particularly impressed with it so far. I mean, yes, it's an MMO. And the character creation tool is very nice.

But so far I don't see much about it that makes it significantly better than Rift, WoW, or that Star Wars game. The quests are somewhat better than those games, but only marginally. It's still basically "Help Farmer Jill Save Her Chickens" type of stuff where you and the 20 other people nearby are each tasked with killing 15 velicoraptors.

The "events" do work better than Rift's rift events, IMO, but I also think they will suffer the same low participation problem Rift did once everyone levels up and moves out of the newbie areas.

I didn't meet a lover here but I did have a bf who played with me.

One day, he was slogging through the old Positron task force. Hours went by and he was obviously really bored. I kept advising him to fake a disconnect and quit, but he played it through for like three hours, looking like he was going to slit his wrists. I told him sometimes you just need to get out of a situation if its not working for you.

He broke up with me the next day.

I have a couple of different feelings about this.

First of all, I think the technical or legal aspects of what consitutes a corporation, while interesting, are not really relevant to this discussion. I don't think anyone here who has expressed disastisfaction with the company is doing so on legalistic grounds. What they are expressing is frustration with the nature of a service bundled under a brand name. The corporation may legally be a way to organize work efforts for the purposes of taxes, but it is not "just" (my paraphrase) that. If distrust of NCSoft is impossible, then so is distrust of Exxon, the Psychic Friends Network, Monsanto, or Fox/NBC News. It is possible for a company to have good public image too, like Blizzard did for many years. It does not require animosity (or good feelings) toward any particular individual within a business/brand to maintain an opinion on that brand's reliability or quality of service.

Secondly, I think it has to be recognized that player investment in an MMO is more than just financial. In creating an MMO, a developer or publisher is also asking players to invest trust. Part of that is related to how assets shared between the company and the public are managed. I think too many companies (and a few posters here as well) mistake legal ownership of the MMO's electronic assets (hardware, intellectual property, etc) with the community sense of ownership, which includes such things as history, time, relationships, number of times the game frustrated you but you kept on in order to support it, and so on.

In a pure legal sense, NCSoft can take away its game world at any time. It owns "everything" that could be objected to in a court of law. But expecting players to accept that at face value in the marketing sense is engaging in science fiction. People do not think that way--especially not people who've developed (moreover, been encouraged to develop) strong emotional relationships with the service.

Long story short, no MMO is just selling access to the game. That is not sufficient to keep players around. Emotional attachment and trust are the real products. To sell your MMO, you must convince players that bits and bytes have real world values.

A lot of players are quite suddenly realizing that what trust they thought they had invested in NCSoft is now gone. That's what they are mainly annoyed about. And talk of boycotts is more than financial; in most cases on these message boards it's a personal vow to stay emotionally uninvested (or in a few cases, hostile to) the brand under which these changes are being directed.

David Myer's blog is still available. You can read about him in his own words here:

http://dmyersloyola.wordpress.com/20...rthy-of-wrath/

Personally, I still don't know if he really believed in his own POV, which might be paraphrased as something like: "Game mechanics establish rules that must be followed to the point of sociopathy." Specifically, he seemed to believe that MMOs are a set of determinable, boxed, and mostly immutable rules derived from the current state of game mechanics--in other words, if the game technically allows you to grief other players, then not doing so on a PVP map is failing to play the game "correctly." Or to put it other terms, he seemed to be surprised that players who act like jerks are not well liked, because in his view game mechanics that allow players to get away with that behavior dictate how the game should be played, not social contracts enacted between players themselves.

If that sounds like bull, that's because IMO it largely is. He basically wrote a paper about the fact that MMO players dislike trolls, in a manner that was essentially just taking trolling to new and incredibly embaressing levels (the paper basically reads like a screed against his in-game enemies).