Chase_Arcanum
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Quote:BECAUSE neither Marvel nor DC were able to (or bothered to) Trademark the name.Originally Posted by Colonel-Confederate
Isn't Barracuda a Marvel and DC character and also a COH/COV one? How'd they get away with that one I wonder?
You don't just take any 2-bit background character and register the name across all the various fields of the tradmark industry.
1) it takes money.
2) you have to actually show some use of that mark in trade to keep it,
3) sometimes the name is already in use in the industry you want so you can't reserve it, and
4) trademarking names is relatively new in comics (last decade or 2). Before that, you'd trademark titles, mostly... so it wasn't uncommon for comic companies to both use the same name for non-title-bearing characters. When the lawyers got involved and Trademark spree started, the existence of the same name in other publishers' arsenals often made the name too "broadly used" in the industry to trademark.
Not sure which applies to this case, but you get the idea. -
Quote:Yikes. I knew there were players like you out there itching for the next tier, but... man, to see the numbers.... that's impressive.Originally Posted by Wicked_Wendy
I currenty have 16 characters that can slot a hybrid power with a Tier 4 as soon as they earn enough IXP to open the power. All of these 16 characters rurrently have tier 4s in all of the other incarnate powers and each has two additional destiny powers slotted to tier 3... I like to have Clarion, Barrier and reborth available to assist with whatever is needed on a run.
I have another 6 character that can lot a Hybrid power with a Tier 3 as fast as they open Hybrid. Like the ones about all their current powers are tier 4 and thy too have the addition tier 3 destiny powers.
Finaly I have a 23 character that can slot a tier 2 in the hybrid power slot as soon as it opens. That characte also has all teir 4s in each power currently available.. the only difference is that haracter has no added destiny powers .. just the one slotted to t4.
I... umm... have two characters that have their tier 3 unlocked on all powers with virtually nothing left in reserve to build hybrid with. Been playing since the purple patch and have 5 other level 50's... I think I bothered to unlock the alpha on most, but maybe 2 of them have a tier 1. -
Quote:"Sith" is as you noted, a general foreign-language word, but as stated here quite a bit, TRADEMARKS can legitimately be words like that. TRADEMARKS are where the BIG risk is, as noted earlier, and Lucas does, indeed, have a registered mark of trade for "Sith" in quite a few fields, including video games.Originally Posted by Minotaur
Another issue is with foreign language words, 2 examples.
Sith - Obvious Lucas connections, but in fact sith is the Scots gaelic version of the better known Irish sidhe meaning faerie.
Persil - French for parsley, but a trade name elsewhere.
There were some genericings of both of these in the past, my suspicion is that they may have looked at costumes and backgrounds for sith.
Therefore, SITH would be quite legitimately genericed by the devs, regardless of whether you were trying to represent lightsabre-weilding sociopaths or a beautiful seductress fae. -
Quote:That was another argument for why marvel's suit was problematic. Some argued that, if works in game were equitable to marvel's published works, then shouldn't every fan-created costume likeness in-game be off limits to Marvel, as its someone else's creative work?Originally Posted by Cende
Well, ok, yeah, Marvel has Hercules.
Let's make it weird and go with my Cende, then. One day, Cende's running around Paragon City, minding her own business - the next, some dude at Marvel has her decked out in tights-and-trench and fighting next to Wolverine (has to be Wolverine, he's everywhere).
So what happens?
Now add to that, there's a (really damn long) story over in the RP section about her - if parts of her background from that story start showing up as the Marvel background, then what? Do I get involved, because it's my brain work being swiped at that point?
Complicated.
1) Cende is not a registered trademark, so the character and likeness are not protected under trademark law. If someone has drawn said character (say, over at DeviantArt) and Marvel's likeness bore a very strong resemblance to that, then the deviantartist may be able to claim it as an infringement. it would have to be a distinctive enough likeness though that it would be clear that the most likely reference source was that deviantart work, though. Simply making a character clad head to toe in blue spandex doesn't grant you exclusive rights to blue-spandex-clad appearances.
2) If Cende's backstory started appearing in Marvel's work, then there's a copyright issue here. Its unlikely to be a LITERAL word-for-word coyright violation, though... which is the most clearcut version of a violation, but if the backstory is similar enough in distinctive places, along with the name (and likeness) then again, the copyright case takes form. These are tough to prove, though, and expensive to litigate.
Look into the copyright disputes between "the lion king" and the 1960's "kimba the white lion" for an excellent example on such a dispute.
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Also note that similarities do happen in totally independent work:
While deployed to the Gulf (1990-1991) I'd waste much guard duty thinking up NPC's for a superhero RPG world I hoped to GM when I got back home. After duty, I'd jot down the ideas and mailed many of them back to a friend I was collaborating with. He's still got the letters.
One of them was a white-clad lass with powers of limited intangibility, invisibility, and flight. For some combat prowess she relied on her firearms. Named Ghost. I wanted a scotish surname and couldn't think of any, so I used "Cameron" from a battletech sourcebook I had with me. Lisa Cameron.
Anyone familiar with Dark Horse Comics' Ghost should note the similarities, down to the name (Elisa Cameron). There's always a chance that I somehow saw an early work of their character, but everything I've found online says she first appeared in '93. There's no way anyone else saw my letters, so they obviously didn't use my work, but to this day, I'm ridiculously possessive of the character (now named "fenore" - scot for a "white ghost").
I never did get to play that world. My friend eventually did run it through the later 1990's. It was set in Paragon City (Paragon, NJ- formerly "Atlantic City") and one of the big international-super-agencies there was the "Vanguard Syndicate." -
Quote:Originally Posted by Angelxman81
You got to be kidding.
They added a ton of new 1-20 ways to level.
You still got Praetoria, is not that old and you have that kind of stuff you asking for up to level 20 and then you got FW and NW.
Got 2 new trials for lowbies. DFB and DIB. The first is awesome to level alts.
Got new and not that old arcs added for the lvl 20-30.
New training arcs and missions from new Atlas Park.
I think right now the game is crying for some new morality tips missions, and more level 30-40 stuff. Even 40-50.
I cant wait to see new zone revamp. Shadow shard, maybe?
Apologies for the lack of clarity in my post.
This is not about wanting "low-level content." We've got plenty of that new stuff and the devs have been pretty good at mixing the new stuff around. This is an observation (not a complaint) on the flavor of said content.
This may seem odd when referring to a game that had, from its start, just survived an invasion from an interdimensional threat, but I'm not a fan of most things of the dimension-hopping, space-invading, globally-threatening, time-traveling sort. The fact that CoH managed to capture my attention despite its broad use of all that is a testament to how well they did many things in this game.
I've always appreciated the story arcs that didn't put the aforementioned elements in the front-and-center. Fighting bad guys of various sorts without resorting to globally-threatening aliens, alternate dimensions, reality-altering & the like. Stories that, if they do include these elements, do so tangentially. The original CoH gave you a bit of a blend. I never fully escaped the elements I didn't like, but it was well-paced with other material that I found appealing. Although City of Villains did have the overarching 'destined one' arc that managed to mix time travel and dimension-hopping together into an integral part of the overarching story, you could easily ignore it, as it rarely came to the forefront of the many varied tales of villains you encounter while leveling there.
Praetoria?
Although I appreciated the storytelling there, it was well beyond my preferences. Practically every arc was used to illustrate the situation: a world almost-destroyed, humanity saved only by a messianic cosmically-powered hero holding the threat at bay. Heck, once you finish the arcs there, your character practically has to become a dimension-hopping man-out-of-world (had to become, given recent additions). All those parts that I could once ignore are now much more central to the character.
It may be telling that not a single one of my Praetorian creations ever made it past level 30. As much as I tried, none of the creations I made to fit that world kept my interest enough to keep playing them. They were too far from my zone of interest.
The tutorial revamp? A prelude to the coming storm, a cosmic threat from the first minute you start. Not big deal-- the old tutorial was a recovery from the last cosmic threat, after all. The Atlas Park revamp is less problematic-- the perils of the people relocated after the disaster can be applied to virtually any disaster, but the lower-level trials again bring "cosmic-level threats" brought front-and-center.
Again, to stress, this isn't a "woe is me" complaint or 'the content sucks." I appreciate the devs creatively and usually try their new content at least once as a result, but it has been so central to so much new content lately that I've barely touched the parts that I consider most enjoyable in the game. I've just decided I gotta tune all that out and get back to what I enjoy.
What IS my preference?
Well, for recently-added examples, we have Laura Lockhart & Graham Easton. (I'm assuming villainside's 2 additional arcs are similar... haven't had a villain level through that range since they came out.) both are notable heroic tales that manage to happen within the city without overwhelming the city. I'd love to see more of that, but as my first post implied, if the devs don't make more of that, though, that's fine. If they just patch some of AE's shortcomings, I can make my own experiences there. -
Eh, it seems clear that the world's gonna have one epic incarnate-level world-shattering clash after another. That's fine. Seems that it's what most people like.
I'm just hoping AE gets some attention in one of the future issues. From the looks of it, that'll be the only way to experience new mid-level "city" threats that I enjoy- mobsters, smugglers, gangs, intrigue, and enemy supergroups whose goals are less "world domination/destruction" and more "making a good score off the next heist."
Personal preference.
After playing through the last issue and getting 1 character up to tier 3's on all the incarnate slots just so I can keep up with the advancement of the world's story, I can't see myself doing that much longer. I'd much rather enjoy my style of story on my alts and just read up on things via paragonwiki. -
Quote:Another factor: While we can send an item's "state" (the mailbox here is in 'broken' state. show random letters in the wind), most of those pieces are renedered client-side and don't match what others see on their screen. This is rather common in online games (and noticeable when you team with someone in the same room). This is because otherwise you'd have to track and communicate the positioning of all these random pieces to everyone.Originally Posted by Schismatrix
They're called mayhem missions.
Seriously, if you have several hundred players frequently passing through a zone with destructible environments the odds are that unless you have structures repairing/respawning themselves at an absurdly high rate the zone will resemble Boomtown on a nearly permanent basis. The same principle applies to any sort of environmental changes that can be caused by players.
It really isn't a big deal for little things like broken debris, but when you start thinking about the BIG things, some debris-tracking will be essential.
---
But like others have said, affecting the "world" on a permanent basis isn't a limitation on the engine, but one of design.
As early as Ultima Online, developers were toying around with ecology models you could tamper with. There are some great written accounts of the mess beta testers could make for each other in such systems. Some of the earlier games were very much experiments in giving players different ways to impact the world, and largely they found that players impacted the world in ways that generally made it unfun for others. Its essentially one of those "what everone wants until they see what everyone else does with it once they get it."
It became easier (and a better user experience) to minimize how badly a player can f^&% up the world, which is why the MMOSpace has gravitated to the controlled-experiences we see today. -
Quote:Well, in this case, Marvel has trademarked a specific appearance for a character, separate from the name "Thor" but this, IMHO, is where Marvel's biggest problem with their Lawsuit could have rested:Originally Posted by Scythus
You are aware that the original, mythical Thor also had a hammer and was the god of thunder, right? Right?
They trademarked a specific likeness for many of their characters (and even used that trademark in the upper corner of the comic)... but then they started adding specific artists' variations of the characters, their costumes, their color schemes, etc, that NCSoft could have taken the "nuclear option" against them- arguing that since Marvel varied the "likenesses" so much, they destroyed any distinctiveness in the process... something trademarks required.
--
Anyway, again here, we get confused when we talk about powers. Trademark is about likeness. It doesn't matter if your big overmuscled shirtless green giant wearing purple pants is a superstrength brute or a mind controller. He's still a trademark violation. -
Quote:Read again. Its "The big expense." Not "the biggest." it was also listed as "bandwidth and hosting." not just bandwith. hosting includes the servers, server space, infrastructure, and the pay for the guys that maintain those servers. I should have probably said "the big expense that scales with the number of users" but i thought every paragraph after that would make it clear what I was focusing on.Originally Posted by Blood Red Arachnid
I believe the term was "biggest cost". I would content that 3.8% of quarterly expenditure is not "biggest cost".
Personnel costs do not scale with player population. Many an MMO has scaled back continuing development teams to "Just the guy sitting under the stairs" but left the game running. It really doesn't matter how many people are playing your game- if you want to control this cost by scaling down the team from a full-production staff, you really can.
Well, look at it this way: In the example you've give, the 2d cheap-to-develop, cheap-to-host MMO manages to reduce the per-user costs further by having advertisers. Advertisers like high-traffic "popular" sites, so you really REALLY want to make the broadest market possible aware of your existence. If your costs are low enough, It doesn't matter if they never "convert" over to actually paying customers-- you make money on them by serving them ads and may even be able to use their metrics to bolster their argument on why they can charge more for ads. Hence a "scattershot" approach designed to raise visibility as far as possible.Quote:That evil back button... I do think that it might be a little more complicated than just bandwidth and cost-per-customer being low from a subscription/microtransaction point of view. Something I noticed alongside of many "free" mmos is extremely rampant advertisements from related/unrelated companies. Worst cases I have seen games that reward you in-game for signing up to mailing lists of various sponsors for the game. Now, those advertisements work by giving a percentage of their profits and sales as well as a sponsorship bonus to the game in exchange for ad space on that game. A televised advertisement for the "free" MMO therefore becomes by proxy and extended and continuous audience to be advertised to, and thus a televised advert can attract indiscriminate attention to be proxy advertisements buried within the website. Hell, advertisements are whats keeping phone books afloat in modern times, so the sponsors have to be more than just a minor influence on the marketing strategy of these games.
That is just a theory, however. It could be many other things, such as a target audience (I notice many of these free MMOs appeal to younger demographics with large cartoony appearances), or a bad marketing department in case the former isn't true. Most of my job experience has been in banking and education so I don't have first hand knowledge, but wouldn't the marketing department attempt to go for better and more frequent focused adds with a larger budget than a scattershot one?
A game that has higher costs per-user and doesn't offset those costs with advertisements needs to make sure that the people they reach out to with advertising have a reasonable chance of being converted to paying customers. Hence, a more targeted approach trying to reach the market that's receptive to their needs.
Sorry, I've got several friends in the industry and keep in touch with several dozen colleagues that I met while working in a field that overlapped with it. Their personal stories (and their LinkedIn profiles) paint a different picture.Quote:Workers are relocated to other projects more than they are hired/fired (With the ending of Tabula Rasa, CoH received a surge of reinvestment in the form of a larger team for awhile), since firing and hiring new programmers requires going through the whole hiring process. Interviewing, reading, testing (if applicable. Had to be tested for every job I got, but again; banking and education), assessing, training, inducting, and paying for their mistakes. The whole process is quite expensive, and doing so would require nearly every project to start from scratch with the new team. I know the job is fickle, being transferred from one project to another into different buildings and teams, but unless the programming field has been keeping it on the down low, I never hear about mass layoffs unless a company is losing money.
What you're describing, though, is the LOGICAL IDEAL that I think the studios should follow. It just makes sense to take the guys that researched and assessed all the various engines and assets purchased for GW2 or Wildstar and have them apply that knowledge to CoH2. Hopefully, they've moved closer to that- it would be nice to see some benefits come with the decline of indie studios and rise of publisher-owned studios but the gaming industry remains a rather volatile field of work.
And again, were talking in the context of the game budgets. Even if we do assume that people are transferred between studios, rather than laid off, it doesn't change the argument in the slightest:
-We're seeing NCSoft's total personnel costs and total bandwidth costs.
-Studios with games under development would still have proportionally higher personnel costs than studios that are in "post launch" phase with modest updates.
- Studios in the "post launch" phase would represent the lions' share of the bandwidth costs because... well, people are playing their game.
- If we wanted to see a game's true impact on budget, we'd have to compare it to the expenses on a per-studio level. -
Quote:Others have covered many other parts rather well, so I just wanted to touch on this: MMO's have been moving away from their own custom engines since... well, since about the time of CoH.Originally Posted by SuperOz
Hi all. This is part wish list, part thoughts on what I loosely term 'game engines'. I really don't pretend to know what a 'game engine' is, other than that I know that console games that I own have them and that MMO's often make their own custom ones that let them do....well...stuff.
When you think about it, if you can use someone else's library of code to handle fundamentals like display, animation calls, network communication, etc, you're free to focus more time on the aspects that distinguish your product from the others. You just have to make sure that the engine you choose will fit your design goals. IIRC, before Cryptic decided to make their own engines, they surveyed quite a few out there and were impressed by some, but at the time, none of them could give the "mapspace" size they thought was necessary to make a city zone that really felt large. Newer engine licenses have since overcome that limitation, so its entirely feasible that any successor to CoH would jettison the CoH engine entirely.
Another advantage of using a common licensed engine is that nobody's going to know your proprietary engine until they start working for you. That's another thing they gotta learn on the job, whereas, you can essentially list "unreal 3" or "gamebryo" or "hero engine" on your job listing and expect users with experience in them right off the bat. This is partially offset when a publisher maintains their own engine and uses it across several studios' games (like Funcom's Dreamworld engine).
Finally, note that game engines are increasingly modular. An engine license may not come with the physics engine you like, so you add that license and ignore the built-in one. Some packages may include "speedtree" license discounts in the package, some may not. Some may have an "ai package" and some may just let you pick any middleware AI you want to drop in there. There's an "engine" out there that animates lips somewhat-realistically based on the accompanying logfile, saving potentially thousands of hours of animator time if they tried to do it by hand. There are ones specializing in managing auctionhouses, chat, ingame mail, bug reporting and tracking, crowd behavior, and managing RMT stores.
Realistically, while we still discuss this as one large "engine," and many modern "engine" licenses are very vast packages, a good part of developing a modern online PC game is gathering several dozen different engines together, licensing them, writing the code that gets them all communicating nicely, then building the game mechanics and world within them that you want the players to experience. -
Quote:You seem remarkably calm for the approaching deadline. Does this mean you're taking a break from making trailers, or have the caffeine jitters not kicked in yet?Originally Posted by Dark_Respite
Pretty safe bet... it's a Tuesday, after all.
Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite -
Quote:When you see Felicia, tell her I'm disappointed that she never calls.Originally Posted by Ad Astra
Not to hijack the thread - but did you know that there will be a City of Heroes Meet 'n' Greet at BD's Mongolian Grill on Saturday at the con?
Details & Discussion
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showt...18#post4248018
...not that she has my number.
...or even knows me
...or has any reason to know I exist.
...but I'm still disappointed that she never calls. -
Quote:I've seen CoH ads on gaming sites and even a mainstream news site once. For the most part, they seem to target the places that have people that are familiar with PC games & MMO's specifically. Targeted marketing like this is generally cheaper and more likely to get a player familiar enough with the genre to not have high customer support costs while being easier to convert to a paying customer than the general population.Originally Posted by Nalrok_AthZim
PStudios Marketing does nothing outside of promo emails that only go to players.
They also send out the promo emails to ALL former players that haven't opt-outed. If you think of the sheer numbers that have tried this game and churned away, thats a sizable population. Given how cheap email marketing is, if even 1% of these people come back to check out whatever's being announced, it probably reliably pays more than the time it takes preparing the message.... -
Quote:I'll have to find the article, but it listed the $$ paid to the company that did the CGI videos that preceded the um... recently-released-laser-sword-y-mmo-with-hairy-humanoids-that-rhyme-with-nookie. According to that source, the total expenditure for those videos was around the ballpark of the total reported initial development costs for CoH.Originally Posted by Acemace
The game could use a CGI web-mercial for each issue release to build enthusiasm, but that costs money and with a product this old with it's quarterly numbers that's not likely.
And that wasn't even paying for airtime... -
Quote:That dodges the whole argument, though:Originally Posted by DMystic
Actually the reason WoW can have orcs, is because Blizzard had already used Orcs in their Warcraft series.
Blizzard's Orcs are different from Games Workshop's Orks (Warhammer,W40K)
which are different from Tolkiens Orcs
I think the only overlap is between Tolkiens and D&D's, either way because Orcs have a usage that predates Tolkien's writings it's all good.
IF Tolkien had made up the word "orc"
(... if, for example, he'd called their race "Ortutag" -- a word created and was thus exclusive to his work)
THEN others may find Tolkien's estate knocking on their door.
Because the word existed beforehand, the name itself is not copyright protected. he was not the creator of the word. he was a user of it. Had he created the word, he could reasonably claim some creative control over it. These other users of "orc" still had to make their fictional race vary somewhat from the Tolkien lore- relying on the "generic" elements common to the mythos, not using any orcish cities, town, or language specific to Tolkien, etc. Those elements would still fall under copyright.
If Tolkien had published his book in today's legal-literary environment
... A legal team would have scoured his work for distinctive elements. If there was a chance that the author may want to expand on that element further, perhaps a book detailing the world's orcish culture, they may have registered the trademark for "orc"-- essentially saying "No, we didn't create the word, but we plan on using it as a distinctive mark of trade in print publications." If that mark of trade wasn't put "in use" within a set amount of time, the trademark would cease, but until then, if granted, they'd have had exclusive right to it in that field.
I've got a friend that published a story that had, among other things, a dozen fictionally-named military registrants. The legal team advised all of them be submitted as registered trademarks, for just this purpose. -
Quote:1) You and I just have huge differences in opinion on what "large portion" is. When you look at this cost on just the few games that NCSoft has active compared to the amount it has working on other projects, it IS huge.Originally Posted by Blood Red Arachnid
In the past when MMOs were new, bandwidth costs might have been quite large, but with how much data is maximized nowadays the actual cost of hosting an MMO is no longer a large portion of the costs of an MMO.
2) As you suggested, newer games manage data better, but CoH isn't a new game. Its 8 years old, and its always very challenging to change the underlying systems without damaging something. They go unchanged unless absolutely essential.
3) The context of that post was demonstrating that there are costs associated with customers (support & bandwidth being the two hilighted), some kinds of customers are more expensive than others, and some kinds of platforms are better at managing these than others. Those that aren't built to minimize these risks need to target their marketing differently to mitigate them.
The are you disputed was the statement that bandwidth plays a role.
In essence, a game with a lighter bandwidth (and related) load can afford a rather scattershot advertising campaign, because if his costs for all the 'free' players that won't buy ANYTHING is low. A game with higher costs needs to try for more targeted advertising, going after the market segment with a greater likelihood of paying out.
I stuck with bandwidth because it IS directly scalable with the users (and user activity) so it can be more directly applied to the costs of attracting new players. (and... well, half my post was eaten by hitting the 'back' button.)
You mention labor costs, and yes, they're huge. They also differ dramatically between the game types. A 2D browser based game can simply produce more, faster, with fewer people, so it'll have this at much lower costs as well. This cost doesn't scale well, though, and there's not a direct-consumption-cost to it, so it didn't contribute to the section on "targeted advertising."
It IS a huge portion of the cost, agreed, but since it isn't directly scalable to the playerbase-- more free players doesn't suddenly mean more payroll expenses, so it didn't contribute to the conversation.
Note, though, that you are kinda wrong in "There is no point where the company goes to it's programmers and writers and says "O.K. you're done. You can go home now"." There very much is, as many that work in the industry will tell you. The months leading up to a launch will often see a surge in payroll expenditures as the production team scales into the hundreds, while maintaining a title may take a few dozen. Historically, even a 2-team system (1 working on expansions, 1 working on maintenance) has been dwarfed by a full-production team. NCNC's "reinvestment" in CoH after it was acquired is more the happy exception, rather than the norm. -
Quote:It took me 10 minutes to get the shots, 20 minutes to splice them together into that look, and 4 hours of cursing and tinkering with the hands before I yelled at myself, "ya know, its SUPPOSED TO look like an in-game screenshot. Stop trying to fix it!" and reverted back to the original.Originally Posted by Creole Ned
That is a great take on the classic Tommy Lee Jones pic but it also makes me sad because it reminds me of how hands in the game look like big fleshy mitts.
This has happened before, too.
The final time I tried to make a screenshot comic, I spent days learning to reasonably manipulate faces in photoshop to give them some reasonable fascimile of articulation (I have too many "conversation" scenes to keep showing the same unchanging face over and over before going insane).
I finally got it done *good enough* that it didn't grate on me, and I realized I had a shot that needed a pointing finger.
It was just too much. -
Eesh. Sorry I missed the fun elsewhere Captain. With that insight, I almost regret trying to be informative and constructive with the OP in this thread.
Ok, If I could, some specifics regarding your Hercules.
1) Copyright isn't the real issue here.
As I said before, this is 95% Trademark related.
2) Public domain is almost as irrelevant.
Public Domain is related to copyright. Being able to show that the original work is in public domain, and the current publishers (marvel and DC) derived their work off of it, as did you, just really helps you with that 5% that's copyright-related.
3) Marvel matters here.
As you illustrated in your posts, Marvel's lawsuit has made NCSoft a bit trigger-happy when dealing with their properties. While the details of the settlement have never been disclosed, NCSoft is usually very sensitive about the appearance of Marvel's trademarked properties appearing in-game, so we have to assume that they agreed to a degree of due diligence in protecting Marvel's registered marks of trade. Its also clear that they move against other marks of trade, probably so they don't have to waste tens (hundreds) of thousands in similar litigation.
NOTE: Marvel didn't "win" against City of Heroes. Marvel had several of its biggest arguments dismissed before they settled (with the agreement sealed). Marvel essentially claimed that if CoH allowed players to use their trademarks in-game, CoH was in violation. It was a shaky argument, but
NCSoft's sensitivity to the issue show that, even if they'd eventually win, they really don't want to waste tens of thousands of more dollars defending every single similar suit that comes along.[/b]
As it relates to Marvel is in the practice of registering the trademark for any notable character they create... when they can. Their list is quite extensive. Further, they try to register them across several industries, from clothing to comics to movies to video games. its really only the "video games" ones they can have issue with. If they think there's a chance a character will be on a t-shirt or be a titular character in a video game, it just makes sense to register them before someone else does, after all.
Sometimes they're not the first to register the name in that particular field ("Wolverine" boots, for example). Sometimes a character is too fleeting and inconsequential to register it across all the different media types. Sometimes they just goof. For the most part, we can just assume that if they registered the trademark for comics, then they probably did so for the related media, including games.
For that reason, you can usually assume a kneejerk reaction to genericing easily-recognizable marks of trade for the major publishing houses.
4) Hercules is a fortunate exception
So, you'd think that since Marvel has a Hercules character and they have a habit of trademarking their characters across many business fields, that your Herc would be generic'ed terribly fast.
But Marvel didn't register the name "Hercules" by itself-- not because of its historic roots (see "Nike" ) but because by the time he was created in the 60's, others had already printed tales of Hercules in comic format, he'd appeared as a character in a Wonder Woman comic in the 40's, and there had been a whole series of pulp movies based on the characters. The name "Hercules" by itself just wasn't distinctive enough in the field for them to get it regitered as a mark of trade.
In this case, since the name was too ambiguous, they registered trademarks for "hercules" combined with a likeness of their version and they registered partuclar text combinations that appear in Hercules titles ("the INCREDIBLE Hercules" being one of the most recent, so be careful on what title you choose ingame.).
You'd only be at risk of violating the trademark if you used the ENTIRE mark of trade. In this case, that's name+likeness or "name+other words" (like above).
5) Your adherence to mythology may not matter here.
As cool as it sounds-- and I'd love to interact with you online with it. It REALLY doesn't matter. A trademark is a trademark, and they're the most expensive thing for NCSoft to let pass. You're good fortune is that the name alone is not a registered trademark by them. In many other cases, it IS. -
Quote:Heh.Originally Posted by StratoNexus
Is it wrong for other people to use this?
...If I had more time, i'd offer to make it for anyone that sent me a /demorecord of their character... but all I can muster together now is a "use it as much as you want."
...at least until I get my other projects done. -
Quote:Pretending to be a pizza deliveryman didn't work?Originally Posted by Texas Justice
What other reason do you think they would have for not allowing players to tour their offices.
They won't even let you past the lobby if you show up there.
Time for phase 2:
-sneak in,
-pull the fire alarm near the entrance. it can be found on the lefthand side, about 3 feet from the perimeter alarm panel.
-slip into one of the crowds gathering outside.
-follow them back inside as if you belong there.
-if confronted, pretend to be a fire marshall.
-if they don't buy it, congratulate them for their vigilance, explain you're an NCSoft facility security auditor, and ask to meet with the studio leads in the conference room for a debriefing.
-if all else fails, initiate "Phase 3"
Phase 3:
- operative A enters the front of the building appearing completely unhinged, red-faced, covered in sweat, some large package strapped to his chest, screaming, "YOU NERFED MY REGEN SCRAPPER."
- this phrase always initiates the Paragon Studios emergency evacuation procedures because, let's face it, anyone that believes that regen scrappers weren't in dire need of a nerf is a truly unhinged individual.
- as the evacuation proceeds, operative B follows the team to the emergency assembly area, trying "phase 2" tactics above.
- operatives C, D, & E infiltrate the evacuated building with full 360 degree tactical camera gear and GPS systems. The data will let us recreate Paragon Studios in a 3d virtual reality room for later analysis.
- They are to retrieve whatever they find. Points will be awarded based on the attached ParagonStudiosScavengerHunt.xml file.
Phase 4: classified. -
Quote:It is a common concern with any transition to F2P model, recognizable both by researching the forums of other games that make the transition and by looking at the discussions we had here on these forums, when the topic came up.Originally Posted by Forbin_Project
Could you explain how the community somehow managed to get together and ask for a VIP server before they even knew the game was going to be switching to F2P?
Cuz the devs announced the addition of the VIP server the same day they broke the news about switching to Freedom. The VIP server announcement was in the FAQ posted by Avetea, and also on the website.
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showp...30&postcount=1
Specifically here.
We also know that they had a kind of 'alpha' group of select community members before this announcement was made, so the topic may have come up there as well. -
Quote:yes, and the "in MN" just means its measured in millions.Originally Posted by Hyperstrike
Correct.
-
Quote:ugh that's actually a pet peeve of mine and here I did it in several locations. I blame old age & bad spellcheckers.Originally Posted by Coyote_Seven
*copyright
*copyrighted
As in having the right to copy something. Because, you know, that actually makes sense.
"Copy writing" is something else entirely. -
Quote:Originally Posted by Johnny_Butane
This I can answer. Yes, having to maintain Bruising does sacrifice your personal DPS. The Tanker himself gets less of out of Bruising than anyone else attacking that same target because they don't have to modify their attack chain to use their T1 every 10 seconds.
Bruising is still a net gain for the Tanker in most cases, but it's three steps forward, one step back.
Bruising is currently never "resisted". It is uniformly a 20% increase to damage the affected target takes regardless of level, con or powers.
For the purposes of discussion, I treat Bruising as 20% straight damage addition to a Tanker. Despite the fact it requires maintaining and disrupts attack chains, and doesn't do a thing for the Tanker's AoE. It has advantages that offset those drawbacks. Like helping the rest of the team, and buffing any pets the Tanker may be packing solo. That's specifically why I let the AoE discrepancy with Brutes slide when I was figuring where I think the Tanker damage cap should be, relative to Brutes.
I'd like to point out that as of Going Rogue, there's no such thing as a "heroic" or "villainous" AT anymore. Save perhaps the HEATs and VEATs.
Brutes are not automatically evil or savage, nor are Tankers automatically selfless or the team's Big Daddy.
.
Thanks for the answers, Johnny. that clears up a lot.
Now question #2:
Rather than make tanks more brute-like by increasing damage, would it be better to improve them by increasing their role as group protector?
I know we can't boost the resists or defenses beyond what they are, but what about adding more/better crowd control procs to their attacks? More stuns from the heavy hits, maybe the axe-wielding giant that just sliced into my teammate has an aoe fear effect, etc. Crowd control is, essentially, a form of aggro management, so would giving more melee crowd control make them more valuable?
Or is the problem NOT team performance, but solo/small group, where the low damage output makes leveling a slog (though would the "damage cap" increase really help in groups that aren't buffing the tank to the cap?) -
Quote:What about OTHER bonus damage that bruising can bring to a team?Originally Posted by Johnny_Butane
I am. I've suggested increasing a Tanker's damage cap to 545%. That would, if my math is correct, put their single target damage (after Bruising) at the cap around 90% of Brute damage at their cap. Tanker AoE damage would still lag behind, but shy of adding Bruising to all attacks, or removing it altogether, there's nothing that can fix that.
I think that this is fair, considering only 10% max HP separates a Brute from a Tanker defensively at the caps.
.
... Assume an 8-man team with a tank leading, applying 'bruising liberally. The debuff means that all other teammates hitting his targets are also taking advantage of that debuff. Total damage output for the team as a whole should benefit from the tank's debuff. (barring too much debuff resistance).
... A brute in that same role has more individual dps, but doesn't give any debuff bonus for his teammates to capitalize on.
How do they compare?
Is the team-wide bonus that a targeted debuff applies taken into account when weighing the overall effectiveness of the Tank? Should it? Does the constant use of the lowest-damage tanker attack (the one that applies bruising) mean that he sacrifices dps by breaking the cycle of his heavier-hitters? Is it too heavily resisted, so the effect is moot when dealing with the high-level large-group foes?