Arcanaville

This sounds familiar.

On the contrary, I'm pretty sure my point was conveyed with a high degree of precision. The fact that you judge it to not be so is not especially noteworthy.

Hyperbole should only be wielded by competent individuals.


Probably nothing. But that has nothing to do with anything I posted. Again.

I know you have no knowledge of the profitability of City of Heroes, or you wouldn't be saying what you're saying. Its as simple as that.

Traditionally, intellectual property rights were subservient to tangible property rights. A magazine publisher cannot claim to own the content on the magazine, and demand you destroy the actual paper you own because they decide they don't want you reading it anymore. They do own the intellectual property printed upon the paper, but as the owner of the actual paper, you can refuse to honor their request to destroy it, or even attempt to erase the content from it or be barred from looking at it. I own it, I will look at it whenever I want.

As technology has granted intellectual property rights holders more *ability* to control the tangible property, tangible rights have been mostly ignored or discounted in favor of the preeminence of intellectual property rights owners, in defiance of common law tradition. Mostly because IP property rights holders have better legal lobbies.

Common law principles state that when I buy a box, with a CD, with a program on it, I have the right to do anything I want with those things. But the law has been twisted to claim that running a program is copying it (because it has to be copied into memory) so the legal theory is that running a program I purchased can be controlled by the rights holder under their right to control "copying." Which is frankly ludicrous.

Its not automatically obvious that MMO companies have no obligation to either provide for, or at least allow their customers to continue to use the elements of the game they purchased. The legal doctrines that allow MMOs to "license" software and control even the use of the tangible elements of the software packages are very recent in nature. And they are based on interpretations of how technology works that is frankly idiotic.

One day people will have bionic implants for eyes and the current legal doctrine in force today could force such people to close their eyes when attending movies because watching them would be barred as "illegal copying of digital media to an unauthorized medium."

When we subscribe to magazines, we don't buy ownership of the content. But we do buy the right to ownership of the paper, and the use of that paper in basically any way we want, for as long as we want, short of attempting to commercialize the content ourselves. The notion that MMOs can actively prevent people from using the content because "they are owners and owners can do whatever they want" is a legal doctrine that exists primarily for software in the modern age. A content provider that attempted to exercise their rights in that fashion for most other forms of media, like magazines, would theoretically have the same rights, but would be laughed out of court, laughed at in general, and probably draw the ire of the vast majority of consumers.

That legal doctrine only works because it involves very powerful special interests, and the minutia of technological implementations, both beyond the reach of the average consumer.

My point was that was the stupidest thing I've read in weeks. Its stupid because:

1. Pointing out that you can use other content when content access is revoked completely misses not just the point of Rangle's post, it fails to comprehend what the point of viewing content is. Human beings don't generally view content because they have a content viewing minimum they have to maintain, like calories or oxygen. If someone takes away my copy of The Avengers its not a trivial loss if I can just watch Halloween 5 instead. The loss of access to specific content is not replaceable with completely different content because content is not fungible.

2. Pointing out that other forms of games do not have a revocation problem is missing the point of a discussion of what MMOs *should* be as opposed to what they currently are. That's comparable to saying that if you were opposed to Aparteid, rather than complain about it you should simply avoid countries that practice it.

3. Speaking of analogies, analogizing the shutdown of an MMO to capricious and random ways of dying isn't stupid because of its extreme exaggeration, its stupid because it analogizes the shutdown of MMOs to other situations people would oppose and fight to prevent even more strongly. Which is a case of someone shooting themselves in their own foot, and having the bullet ricochet off the ground and blow a hole in their own forehead. Its implying the exact opposite of what was intended, in a manner worthy of ridicule besides.

4. And it ends with an implied statement about the profitability of the game, a subject you have zero knowledge about and are as a result completely wrong about. The game was, in fact, very profitable, and not in any danger of being unprofitable for the foreseeable future. That's the primary reason the developers themselves were surprised by the shutdown; they are simply barred from commenting on the specific circumstances of the shutdown.

Certainty in the face of ignorance, nonsense masquerading as logic, self-annihilating extreme exaggeration without irony, semantics without substance, all with the implication of the exact opposite of its vacuous extent.

"Stupid" seemed to cover it colloquially, but I'm generally open to elucidation upon request.

If you don't need pictures, printable versions apparently allow 500 posts per (web)page even if you are not logged in.

See this for an example:

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/print...=119485&pp=500
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/print...&pp=500&page=2
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/print...&pp=500&page=3
etc.

I'm sure it still exists, but its entirely possible no one outside of NCsoft has access to it anymore. Its probably on computers in cardboard boxes earmarked for that warehouse the Lost Ark is kept in.

After the shutdown announcement, anyone notice the ustreams were being done on laptops? Anyone wonder why?

I'm not specifically advocating such laws, but I'm specifically stating that laws are created all of the time which in effect create specific rights that are deemed to be reasonable or fair, for not other reason than they are reasonable and fair and for no other deeper legal reasoning. And its worth noting corporate interests attempt to create laws all of the time creating new rights for no other reason but that it is in their best interests as well. Consider what was legally patentable in 1980 vs 2012. Consider the logic behind extending copyright protection indefinitely. The DMCA criminalizes what is effectively a contractual dispute. There is no legal justification for that law besides what the people who drafted and supported it felt was fair.

To the extent that First Sale and other similar laws can be seen to be in the public good, there's no question that a hypothetical law that required MMO service provides to provide for a means to continue to use the content after shutdown provides for a comparable level of public good. It is to the benefit of all parties in the general sense that consumers have reasonable faith in the long-term integrity of the entertainment they purchase.

To give a specific example, on December 1 a strict interpretation of the EULA for the game requires I delete the game client from my computer, as I will no longer have a license to use it. However, its the only way to view demorecords I have preserved. So I won't. I'm aware I'm in violation of the EULA, which is still binding after the game terminates. I believe I have an ethical reason to do so which may not stand up in court, but I believe the rationale is entirely fair even in the legal sense and is worth following.

The question is: *should* I have that right? At the moment, its unclear that I do. But it definitely appears to be a situation that has public good ramifications in the general sense, if not in the strictly legal sense. It is a case where there is an unambiguous consumer benefit to limit the ability for EULAs to curtail this behavior, that is entirely analogous to the Sony timeshifting precedent.

I'll give you another example. Very long ago, I was involved in a project that involved a company managing large amounts of critical data for its customers. In their contract with those customers they claimed that if the customer cancelled the contract, they would make "ever effort" to return that data in a useable format.

The problem was that they deliberately made no attempt to document, analyze, or design a way to actually do that for any customer. They literally did not know how. This was on purpose. If a customer attempted to cancel service, they could truthfully claim that it would take an enormous amount of time to return the customer's data, and the information necessary to do so in a structured way might no longer exist by then.

All perfectly legal. The question is: should the law allow a service provider to take data they do not own, and essentially hold it for ransom from its customers? At the moment, it is entirely legal, and it happens all the time.

I ultimately walked away from that one, and never really looked back.

Before anyone points out the obvious, this situation is different in that NCsoft owns the data as well as the service. But the example illustrates the principle that the current legal rights of service providers is not obviously congruent to the public interest, and the rationale that a service provider should be allowed to do whatever they want with their service is not automatically obviously true. Service providers can easily escape the legal consequences of withholding customer data by not withholding it, and simply returning it in a proprietary format that is virtually useless to the customer.

I'm not sure if this is a new level of stupid, or just an uncharted part of the deepest level of stupid, but I do not believe you get a reward for clearing the fog of war from every map of stupid.

It would be hard to blame "Disney" for that, since John Lasseter is the head of Disney Animation.

Both Marvel and Pixar seem to be evidence of Disney not so much *doing* the right thing as *not doing* the wrong thing, which is mucking with them too much.

Both the doctrine of right of first sale (which is itself being challenged recently) and the time-shifting and limited backup exceptions to copyright protection are rights given to consumers, in effect, for the sole reason that they want them, and it seems fair, and for no other "public good" reason. The 35 year copyright reversion option exists solely because it was seen as fair over and above any contractual agreement that exists. See also: Rule Against Perpetuities.

Setting aside the question of whether a law similar to the one being discussed would be a good idea, you'd probably lose that bet. Two reasons: first, CoH predates WoW, so it could never have been a reskined WoW-like game. We have a lot of public information regarding the design evolution of City of Heroes, and such predictions about how the Cryptic developers would have responded to any outside force are ludicrous on their face: the launch-version of City of Heroes was itself partially a risk-management design iteration of the original alpha concept. What we got at launch *was* what Jack thought was the safe version of City of Heroes.

Second, it would have taken zero effort for Cryptic to make a stand alone version of the game to satisfy the law because such things existed for the developers before launch. Not every MMO has such things, but I have first hand knowledge that City of Heroes did, at least from alpha to significantly past launch. I'm not just randomly guessing here: I'm not the only person outside of Paragon that is aware of their existence. I don't know they were kept up to date into the NCsoft era, but I don't know they weren't either.

I don't even know what the specific risk is to an MMO company that has a contingency plan to allow players to keep stand alone versions of the game if it sunsets. If I were running an MMO company, I'd make that a mandatory design requirement. For business reasons, it might never see the light of day so long as the game continued to operate commercially, but there would be zero business impact of having such a thing released to players when the business itself was no longer going to exist.

Checking the logs, you called for Lore at about 310s into the fight (309762 on the graph). The next lightning burst took place at 321199, or about 321s. That jump upward just past 330s is probably the pause in damage from players casting Lore pets after the lightning storms expired.

And at the highest quality I can reasonably upload to youtube, here's the video of that run: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txZg2B_oomI

I zone through the portal at 1:05 and Tyrant goes down at about 19:45 - just over 18 minutes 30 seconds from beginning to end. Your call for Lore happens at about 16:33 if you want to see what happens from that moment to the end.

Also, the main IDF spawn in at 1:34 and Black Swan goes down at just about 10:00, which means we defeated Black Swan eight minutes twenty six seconds into the trial, just twenty six seconds short of getting Ready to Rumble on that run without actually trying.

Paragraphs are an organized set of sentences generally addressing a single topic: paragraph boundaries often mark either the demarcation of one topic to another or one perspective/aspect of a topic to another. They are generally noted in English by a line spacing.

My best estimates and best information converge on it costing about a million dollars a quarter to operate the game and maintain the CoH development team, plus or minus about 25%. This does not include the costs of maintaining the Paragon dev team working on Project 2, although that's not trivial to arbitrarily disentangle.

I should also point out that Matt's off-handed statement seems to imply that Paragon Studios was most definitely burning through more than half a million a quarter ($2M/yr) but probably not burning through more than half a million every month** ($6M). That entire range of values would make City of Heroes profitable, and my best estimate lands approximately in the center of that range.


** That number isn't arbitrary. You can certainly do a deal in a month, but not likely one of this scale in a week. Matt's comment implies $500k will therefore last more than a week, but it could last only a month. And most people doing rough guestimates in their head round off to simple time windows, as opposed to thinking about how much three weeks would cost, say.

A million dollars would probably have bought you about one major Issue.

I would love to see the version of the battle of Endor where the elite stormtroopers are defeated by Gonzo, boomerang fish, and Sweetums.

They shouldn't be forced to legally, but the presumption is that consumers have the ability to reward and punish desirable and undesirable behavior. So people saying its childish to "bad-mouth" NCsoft or boycott their products are denigrating the only feedback paths consumers have in this situation to exercise the rights the free market presumes them to have.

Many people believe consumers are only supposed to have positive reinforcement rights: they can buy a company's products, or they can choose not to, but that's all they are entitled to do. Those people are wrong.

Unfortunately, I believe its extremely unlikely any outsider is going to logic their way to the truth.

When you buy a four billion dollar company, you don't value the pencils. The Star Wars franchise had obvious value due to licensing and merchandising opportunities, but some articles specifically mention that Lucas sold treatments for the future movies to Disney, and Disney makes clear their intent to make those movies which means both parties believed there was huge value in both the franchise and those future movie properties.

I'm sure Indiana Jones makes money in terms of residuals and minor merchandising, but probably not enough for it to be anything but a round-off error in a four billion dollar deal. My guess was that the value of the deal was based on placing a dollar value on Skywalker sound, ILM, Lucasarts, the Star Wars franchise explicitly, and the rest is pencils. I believe that's why they said no value was ascribed to the Indy franchise.

Indeed.

Granted, WoW's forums delivered on this promise better than ours did.

They could not have done that. I'm pretty certain the developers did not have the explicit ability to publish code. The devs could have been given the ability to continue to work on data, to finalize I24 and to give them an opportunity to create an appropriate send-off to the game, while disallowing requests for code publishes.


Edit: the notion that the way Paragon Studios was shutdown would be considered reasonable in the corporate world is something that's just not true. The fact that NCsoft had no *contractual* obligation to its customers to gracefully sunset the game has no bearing on whether or not the way they are going about it would be considered reasonable. I could legally liquidate my company tomorrow and walk away from all of my customers, and that would be legal. It would also severely impact their operations. I would also probably never work in this field again, because while "Corporate 101" says you can do whatever you can legally get away with, "Corporate 401" says forgive and forget is for greeting cards.

NCsoft is shutting down Paragon Studios and City of Heroes in a manner not consistent with caring what the people of the studio and the people who are the game's customers attitudes and perceptions are. And maybe that won't hurt them in the long run in a material way, but that's irrelevant to the fact they don't in fact believe any of those people are worth any real consideration beyond pro-forma.

After the disaster that was their original relationship with Pixar, Disney seems to have straighted up a lot. The idea that Marvel Studios, Pixar, and Lucasfilms will all be under the same umbrella is an intriguing idea.