Arcanaville

1. As an attorney, you're held to a higher standard when it comes to legal advice or statements. You know, as a matter of law.

2. What the law says and who would prevail in court are two separate things. Murder is illegal. Murderers go free all the time. That doesn't mean sometimes murder is legal. It means sometimes courtrooms are more about the lawyers than the law.

What copyright law says about what NCSoft can and cannot legally assert is pretty black letter. What a courtroom would decide is another matter, because they could interpret the law in a novel matter or they could attempt to in effect create new law by setting a legal precedent which modifies the interpretation of the law in a way that would be upheld by higher courts.

I could sue you for mental anguish for using too many smileys in your forum post. I'm sure most lawyers would say that was ridiculous. I'm sure almost no lawyer would bet their lives on the result of the suit.

Two more AE confessions:

First: what you're seeing here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RT_fnT_qnaI is the umpteenth time I tried to spawn these guys to fight. The biggest problem is that regardless of what you think you're seeing, the game engine sees Hamidon as a tiny entity at the nucleus' base. So they would often spawn in a place like behind a tiny crate and be unable to shoot at each other due to not having line of sight.

Second: what you're seeing here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q66O0R4H2-4 is pohsyb using a dev-hacked mega-controller attempting to take on my original early beta test version of the Scrapper Challenge mission which involved six chained custom ambushes. The confession: pohsyb thought I was going to help him take on the mission. I thought I was just going to watch him die. One of us turned out to be wrong. I only started attacking after he dropped dead.

I'm probably responsible for half the stuff you *can't* do in the AE. I would set up bizarre missions then tell pohsyb "check this out" and then he'd say "I don't think you should be able to do that" and then pthhthhh next build you couldn't do that.

Like spawning Hami bits in the AE, spawning archvillain escorts, making missions with tons of ambushes - hey, did you know that Hami mitos *aren't* intrinsically immobilized? When you spawned them in the AE you could knock them around.

I also got the mergeable Herc titans removed because they would sometimes merge with the *player*. I can't find any video of it, but if you spawned them as friendly and then got one damaged, 50% of the time they would decide to merge with the player instead of his partner. You'd stop what you were doing, turn, execute the deceive animation, then die and become invisible while the Zeus spawned on top of you.

I think they should have just granted you a Zeus costume effect and allowed you to continue on. For some reason, that suggestion was not adopted.

Its too bad we never did get those NPCs eating doughnuts.


Wait. Did you suggest the architect?

Well, pohsyb's full list is likely to be somewhat longer than mine.

For me the biggest what-the-hell-devs aspect of that was that you could gain energy from it. So, a spammable AoE that builds energy you could use to spam AoEs.

I used to love being a superhero, and then I took an arrow to the Id.

The letter of the law says I can make that game. I own the copyright of anything I create, and that automatic copyright protection by virtue of authorrship cannot be transferred to NCSoft by EULA, for the simple reason that black letter law says ownership of creations cannot be transferred except specifically, and in writing. "Everything you make in the game" is not "specifically" and copyright law was explicitly written to protect against such transfers.

On the other hand, they could also make that game. I did extend to NCSoft a non-exclusive right to use my creations for any purpose they wish. That's *not* prohibited by copyright law. So NCSoft could use my forum handle, my character names, and my characters themselves to market some new game if they wished.

Also, I'm not sure why people think deleting their characters terminates those rights. Once that right to use was granted, deleting the bits on their servers does nothing to amend that right. They could restore your characters from backup if they wished, and still use them. Its only an interesting action to delete your characters if you think NCSoft doesn't back up anything and deleting the characters made them permanently unreachable or unusable by NCSoft. Which I think is unlikely, given they permanently log everything that happens on the servers.


The EULA demands that we not use content for which we cannot follow the EULA. So if we use something we previously created outside the game, we as authors do have the right to extend to NCSoft the rights mentioned above: non-exclusive perpetual right to use. If you had the copyright to your characters *before* using them in the game, you've just extended to NCSoft the right to use them. If you *didn't* own those rights, NCSoft would, in using them, be violating someone else's rights. But I believe they would have a safe harbor there; if the violation wasn't obvious, they could claim they acted in good faith by using something a player was supposed to have the rights to. They could then sue *you*.

I agree its unlikely this would happen, but legally it can happen.


This is the relevant part of the EULA:

I don't think you're wanting to hang your hat on City of Heroes' excellent launch design. Not if its a hat you still like.

Let me know how that turns out.

Sometimes, yes. Everyone has to decide for themselves how much their desire for free expression overrides their desire for some end result that speech may act counter to.

It has nothing to do with rights. Separate from the technicality that the constitutional right to free speech is legally inapplicable here, the right to speak our minds does not compel everyone to exercise it in an unlimited fashion in order to validate it. We still have to decide if our speech acts within our best interests and act accordingly.

Incidentally, there is no right to free speech in the US Constitution. The first amendment stipulates the government itself cannot restrict free expression. It does not say we have a right to free expression, as it does not prevent non-government entities from restricting expression.

Probably two-thirds right.

It seems that way at times. Hmm. This is probably going to seem like bragging. Ah well, who cares now, right?

I'm an information systems consultant, and in that capacity I've specialized in a number of different areas over the years. You might say picking up specialties is my specialty. I've been a network engineer, a security systems integrator, a remote application engineer, a corporate auditor, a PCI advisor, a software designer and programmer, a virtualization specialist, blah blah blah.

The net result is that I find myself working for a wide range of customers, and I'm forced to learn what they do. Banks, hospitals, airlines, nuclear power plants, the military, property management, retail. I also have a very strong background in science, engineering, math, technology, and enough trivial pursuit wedges to make it easy to talk to clients regardless of their field of industry. If you take the time to sit down and listen to your customers, not only will you be better able to support them, you can end up picking up a lot of information about their business that can help you when you tackle another one like it.

If you want to know the truth, the truth is that I'm the person that when someone says "we need someone to do X, and we can't find anyone willing to try" I'm not smart enough to say no, and just smart enough to figure out a way to do X every single time. Which means people keep handing me ridiculous things to do. For example, early in my career I was asked to figure out a way to export data from a computer system I had never seen before, into a system I would have no direct access to, using a method that didn't involve connecting the two systems together, before the first system was scheduled to be shut off in eight days.

In retrospect, had I deliberately failed, I would have gotten so much more sleep these past 19 years. There are days I wish people didn't think I was quite that safe of a bet.

Oh yeah, and I can add "junior space cadet game designer" because I was asked to design a game system for City of Heroes. A whole system, from its (high level) implementation to its original data to the methodology by which other devs would be able to support and extend the system. I'm definitely adding that to the resume (if I ever find myself writing one again), because I'm not so jaded that I think that's not frickin' cool.

Even in my forties, I'm still padding my (non-existent) resume.

There are consultants out there with careers (kinda) like mine. Consultants can go anywhere and do anything in theory, and some of us live very interesting professional lives. BUT, there's a catch. Most consultants that attempt to have the trajectory I've had eventually fail, spectacularly. One day, they just go too far, like tell the lead designer for a top tier MMO that you can design a complex system for him in a week. And then you're screwed, because you can't deliver, and when you screw up enough times, no one trusts you anymore.

That's what makes us rare. Not that there aren't people who try, but that its very dangerous to keep pushing the envelope like that. Most people smarter than me eventually cash out of the game and get rich and start driving Ferrari sports cars around. I'm apparently not that smart: I keep doubling down. I can't help it. For me, "the action is the juice."

And here's where I'm going to bring this back to City of Heroes. The truth is I loved talking to BaB and Castle and pohsyb and Hawkward and all the rest of the devs because I just loved learning what they did. Even if I knew in advance they were never going to use a single idea of mine, I would *still* love to talk to them about what they did. I loved learning it, and then putting it into practice, and seeing what they thought. I loved getting (in my opinion and hopefully theirs) good at it.

And even if I never get a chance to work with game developers again, my experience with City of Heroes is going to make me a better consultant. I have skills I didn't originally have, I have knowledge I didn't originally have. That's always useful. Never stop learning.


They are upgrading to RAV4 EVs next year, because they are just so quiet when pulling up to your driveway at night. Tell them "Passphrase: Jericho Landing" and they'll give you the comfy hoods when they take you away.

Which, by the way, is a very roundabout and tangential Origin of Powers problem, my favorite backstory problem. How and why powers work in City of Heroes is something I've always felt should be fully thought out and consistent, whereas its always been treated as eh, whatever.

If Numina's condition is fundamentally non-magical, its potentially scientifically resolvable. If War Witch's condition is fundamentally magically induced, it would be completely outside Positron's expertise. The question is whether we can say that Numina's astral projection, which can be achieved through non-magical means, is thus produced by magic, but not fundamentally magical. City of Heroes' lore is extremely hazy on how to resolve a question like that, except to say "whatever you want it to be."

One of these days, if we had more time, when I felt I could finally take a break from being involved with the powers team**, I would have switched to trying to work with the writing team, because I do love to write (can you tell) and I love the idea of writing stories, and building a consistent lore. I would have loved to be able to sit down, across from the writers, with the lore bible in my hands ...

... and beat them senseless with it until they made a consistent origin of power backstory.


** As a rule, I tended to focus on powers and not the stories in things like testing because if I got involved with tested both the powers and the story content with the devs, there would be no game left for me to play like a regular player. I had to keep something back for me to just sit back and play and enjoy, and the scripted content of the game was that for me. Which, for the most part, I did in fact enjoy.

When someone first told me about this "feature" I assumed they simply misunderstood. Because no one could possibly be dumb enough to put this sort of feature into the game.

I was wrong.

For those unaware, in CO there's an auto chat banning system where if you are petitioned more than X number of times by other players, the game will auto silence you from chat. I think from *all* chat. For a long time. It was meant to allow players to self-police RMT sellers.

Which in and of itself is prone to abuse, but that abuse can lead to your own account being banned if you do it too much.

And then they went F2P.

Remember all the debates we had here about how important it was to be careful about what free players could do, what premium players (who didn't sub but bought something at least once) could do, and what VIP subs could do? In CO, F2P players can petition towards auto-banning.

The rest is left as an exercise for the reader. PS: I have eight F2P City of Heroes accounts.

Its also possible this was preprogrammed to become available at a particular time and does not require dev intervention. I think the WSTs are working in a similar fashion.

In the 80s, you would have been essentially saying that the people who terminated Paragon Studios were totally bitchin'. You'd be buggin'. I'm not down with that. Them's hozers.

Have you considered finding financial backers to make Zombieland Online?

That depends. Do you think getting Akiva Goldsman to write, and Michael Bay to direct, the Pixar-produced sequel to Megashark vs Giant Octopus for the Cinemax network would be too much to ask?

Volunteer to do public speaking engagements. After the first forty, I started to get better.

Trying to find a game for Sam is like trying to find a game for Stephen Hawking: he's smart, knows what he wants, can't always communicate it clearly, and has a really specific set of non-negotiable gameplay requirements.

Oh my god. I'm not worthy.