Cliff_Hanger

So after a long string of increasingly frequent crashes, I broke out the nuclear option and did the "backup->crash-disc restore" thing today. Since I don't have a CoH disc released since 2005, I opted to just download the Updater and install the entire game that way. Unfortunately, I seem to have hit a snag; it downloaded the first half-gig or so very, very slowly, but when it got to sound.pigg it froze. After ten minutes of no progress I hit the Quit button and opened it again; now it's simply not downloading. It sits at 0 bytes of 3.0 GB, with a time to completion of 903,000 hours. I cannot, for the life of me, figure out what the problem can be here, whether it's something on my end or the server side. Any ideas?

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Way too much of my Freshman year of college was spent on various MUSHes, and before that I had a huge array of Infocom games, so I got a solid laugh out of this.

The question I have is this: Does this version of the game include a superpower called "Guess the Verb"?

I'm curious about the jetpack. How does it function? Is it similar to the Raptor Pack, or the GvE jump-jet with a new skin?

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While the helm is called the Blood Widows, it is frequently seen on the Fortunatas as well as the Blood Widows. They are not exclusive to the BW though.


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Ah, thanks. I didn't really pay enough attention to the in-game mobs, I guess; I just thought that the 'proper' name of the item should be mentioned.

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I know it's too late to edit the original post (I've never understood that mechanic to these forums) but a little bit of information about Arachnos Helmets.

--Gamestop's helm wasn't Fortunata, it's Blood Widow. The male helmet that was added due to complaints is just a Wolf Spider helm painted red (which actually inspired me to put together a not-quite-a-Wolf Spider costume for my Dominator when he signed on with Scorpy.) All the preorder helmets are also unique in having set colors that can't be altered.

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I skipped from page 12 to 22, so this may have been said. But I didn't see it, and it's late and I'm tired.

Last Thursday after the wedding event, Dark Watcher was on the Cape (Virtue's finest radio station) and this question came up. His answer was basically that the wedding dress and lace patterns were thought to be a 'niche' item whose adopters would be so few as to render it a bad use of Dev resources. They liked the idea and knew there were people out there WANTING wedding dresses and such, and so it became a pay item; those who want it badly enough to spend money subsidize a product for themselves.

Given that logic, and assuming it holds for future add-ons, I don't really understand why so many people are having major episodes over it. I don't think it's worth $10, necessarily. But there are a lot of people glad to have it, and DW pretty much said that this stuff would NEVER have happened as part of an Issue or .5 BECAUSE it was perceived as limited-use.

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There's a radio mish where you have to fight an Arachnos Lt. named LoPan. Reference to the baddie in Big Trouble in Little China? (though such a ref would seem more appropriate if the Lt were a Tsoo. :P)

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ALL the Arachnos radio-mission bosses are named for movie villains or anti-heroes, I believe. I've seen Sark (Tron), Whorfin (Buckaroo Banzai), Bickle (the anti-hero of Taxi Driver), Greench (who I assume is supposed to be the Grinch) and a dozen others that didn't stick in my mind.

As for radio missions I ALWAYS take, nothing tops the Wave Motion Generator. As a long-time Matsumoto fan, I just have to do it.

Bah. My power-armored hero desperately needs tech wings. Why? In his own words, "because they're awesome and imposing and stuff." I'm not even sure if I'll take flight.

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I notice that on the drop/build table given for Numina's Convalescence, one recipe is listed as "Missions." Does that indicate that the recipe will only drop as an Arc Reward, or will we maybe see some recipes drop from completed PVP (or paper/whatever) missions, kind of like you're guaranteed a piece of salvage for finishing PVP missions now?

The official announcement makes no mention of MSRP for the box, and it's not showing on walmart.com. How about letting us know what we'll have to shell out, so we can decide whether the box goodies like the map and the DVD-ROM are worth the difference in price between the in-game purchase and the box?

I'm really, REALLY excited about this, and honored to have been 'fang's first customer. Saying I "can't wait" for the inked and colored version would be wrong, though--I'm just thrilled with how it looks now and the final version will be icing on the proverbial cake.

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Does anyone actually use gladiators? I'm a little disapointed that the 'veteran' reward isn't something more useful like a rock temp power or a party hat.

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Well everybody wants a rock temporary power. It'd just be cruel to only give it to the veterans....

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But what would we have to do to get the piece-of-string temporary power to wind around the rock? After all, that's why everybody WANTS a rock.

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What I would like to know then is how much it would cost me to buy back the rights to all my characters.

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Having no experience with litigation and not being a lawyer, I couldn't begin to tell you. But it probably wouldn't be cheap, since you're going to need to retain someone to negotiate for you. There'd be research and due diligence to prove you in fact created the character and assorted other legal maneuvers to cover their butts. (The really scary thing is, it'd be even MORE expensive if the claim on rights is invalid, since instead of having to draw up a contract you'd have to go to court for several months or years) You'd also almost certainly have to agree to remove all characters from the game.

However, I wouldn't be surprised if they'd flat out refuse to negotiate or sell, barring special cases. After all, doing it once would open the floodgates to more, with legal fees for them every time someone wanted to buy out their characters. They're under no obligation, and it'd probably end up costing both sides more than the objective value of the characters.

(NOTE: Once again, IANAL. I am a know-it-all who took two classes and reads lawyer blogs for fun. If anything I've said is inaccurate, then all fault lies with YOU for believing me.)

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To refine a bit, there has never been a court that ruled that EULAS as a contractual presentation and assent are illegal. That is, merely because an agreement or a contract is instantiated in an electronic presentation form requiring an active button press/electronic acknowledgement is not automatically considered as invalid.

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Thanks for the clarification. I remember some people slinging questions around somewhere (Ars Technica or slashdot, maybe) asking another question, though. Since you are not presented with the terms of the EULA before opening (and in some cases installing) the software, thus voiding its returnability, can the publisher be accused of misrepresenting goods for sale? Pretty sure that most software packages don't say anything about ownership of user content on the box, and if I hadn't expected this kind of claim going in I probably would've uninstalled CoH and called Gamestop and/or NCSoft to try to get a refund when I read the EULA for the first time. (I don't think it would've bothered me in FFXI. Let's face it, the average fantasy game player-char has far less chance of becoming an exploitable piece of IP than even the lamest CoH character)

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However, the contents of a EULA can be invalidated and ruled unenforceable. It's just basic contract law. There have been many cases where a specific passage in a EULA has been invalidated or changed because of certain legal rights between the parties.

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Well, yeah--I thought this went without saying. I just wasn't aware that the courts had upheld the EULA as a valid form of contract. Regardless, I was proceeding from the assumption that every provision in the EULA was valid. After all, that's the only way the rest of the discussion matters much beyond "Anyone know a good IP and contract guy?"

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I would say MMO EULAs are pushing the very extreme edge of validity and maybe have gone overboard in some areas.

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Again, it goes back to the shareholder issue. I suspect that a company like NCSoft would rather claim, litigate and lose on a licensing issue than tell their shareholders in Korea they had a hand in the creation of that movie that just made $100M at the box office, but were afraid to assert any rights. But until such time as someone challenges this sort of agreement in court, validity is just hypothetical, right? If there were a precedent set in this kind of thing one way or the other, we'd all know it by now.[ QUOTE ]
This is just a stupid opinion of course and is not legal advice in any way shape or form and is merely for the sake of providing certain general information.

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Of course. Your stupid opinions appear more informed than most of us, though. I was just exercising my reading comprehension, and I'm still not sure how right I wasn't.

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Also, if we deleted our char from your servers, would you still hold rights to them, since they were still made on your servers? Or would you hold them temporarily, or would your rights to them be gone, or what?

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This is the most interesting part, to me. What constitutes Cryptic's ownership? If I created and deleted a Wolverine clone named Woolverine, am I still liable for breaking the EULA? If Cryptic does a backup and I delete my character, effectively trying to reassert my ownership of that concept, who "owns" it?

Law is funny.

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The relevant section of the EULA, boldification mine:

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Member Content. Members can upload to and create content on our servers in various forms, such as in selections you make and characters and items you create for the Game(s), and in bulletin boards and similar user-to-user areas (“Member Content”). By submitting Member Content to or creating Member Content on any area of the Service, you acknowledge and agree that such Member Content is the sole property of NC Interactive. To the extent that NC Interactive cannot claim exclusive rights in Member Content by operation of law, you hereby grant (or you warrant that the owner of such Member Content has expressly granted) to NC Interactive and its related Game Content Providers a non-exclusive, universal, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, sublicenseable right to exercise all rights of any kind or nature associated with such Member Content, and all ancillary and subsidiary rights thereto, in any languages and media now known or not currently known. You shall indemnify and hold NC Interactive and its affiliates harmless from and against any claims by third parties that your Member Content infringes upon, violates or misappropriates any of their intellectual property or proprietary rights.

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IANAL (though I did take six hours of Media Law, with heavy emphasis on intellectual property, as part of my radio/TV/film degree). However, the clear and obvious (IMO) statement is that the act of submission (clicking the "Enter" button, as someone noted) is in and of itself a surrender of rights. Pretty much the same language was included in Final Fantasy XI's EULA and I would suspect that it's pretty much boilerplate for MMOs, though I haven't played any others. Regardless, it's not just a Cryptic policy. The basic idea is this: media corporations basically exist to accrue and exploit intellectual property. If a TV producer were to play the game one day and see a character he thought would make a great TV show, NCSoft (or Square or whomever) want to make sure they aren't left in the cold. By their logic, the character was spotted BECAUSE of CoH and in most cases exists partly or wholly because they provided tools and resources. Whether they have a moral right to profit because Stan Schmenge, Head of Development for Hip New Network, saw the Azure Attorney and liked his bio is irrelevant. If they do not at least claim that right, they are not doing right by their shareholders and risk corporate mutiny.

As for characters already registered and copyrighted, there are two possibilities here.

1) NCSoft could argue that you knowingly or unknowingly misrepresented the character by creating it on the server, delete/generic it and reprimand or ban you.

2) NCSoft could argue that this falls under the category of "a non-exclusive, universal, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, sublicenseable right to exercise all rights of any kind or nature associated with such Member Content, and all ancillary and subsidiary rights thereto, in any languages and media now known or not currently known." In that case, you haven't gifted your character, but you've given NCSoft full permission to exploit it in direct competition to you. And neither side can sign anything involving "exclusive rights" without acting in bad faith. (And if you already signed exclusive rights over to anyone, even if it's just for the naked street pantomime rights, NCSoft can claim your in-game manifestation of the character is an act of bad faith--you promised them a license you were legally unable to grant).

As for the "What if I create-and-delete a character" question, seems pretty open and shut to me. The act of submitting the content (i.e., character) is the time at which you yield rights, permanently. Assuming that Cryptic keeps records of characters after they're deleted, which wouldn't surprise me, NCSoft owns the character even after you're gone and the database is wiped. If they don't keep those records? They still own the character, but can't prove it without help.

All this, of course, assumes that the click-through EULA is a valid and binding contract. The last I'd heard, there'd never been a legal decision saying it is or is not, but the industry currently operates under the impression that it is. It doesn't matter if you didn't read it or made assumptions--it was there, and you said "I Agree" every single time you logged in. If not, then that's a whole can of worms and you can expect all MMOs to shut down while paper contracts are sent out to players before they open up again.

Regardless, unless clickthrough EULAs are ruled invalid in court, about the best you can do is hire a lawyer to negotiate with NCSoft and try to buy the rights to your creation that you surrendered. They probably will want more than you think it's worth, though.

As to Phaeton's comments, again, the act of "submitting" your character to the DBservers is described as transferring the rights. Whether they have a "backup" or not is irrelevant--you already agreed the character was theirs before deleting it. Also, even if they don't keep "backups" of character data proper, they may keep enough 'on file' to assert ownership if need be. (Even if they don't, the EULA still states the rights are theirs--it'd just be hell to prove it.)

(And again, IANAL--this could all be bullcrap. I just know what I learned in class, and what the EULA says plain-as-day.)

EDITed to fix a broken Bold tag and add in the last bit

Any fellow Houstonians up for a road trip? I can't drive but I can pay for gas!

"About the same amount of time?" If you're herding, sure. But if you do all the Rikti arcs in groups and some door missions, I don't think it's unrealistic to expect to get 1000 monkey kills in the time it takes you to get 50. I know that my 50, who has never herded monkeys or gone out of his way to hunt them in Crey's Folly or whereever, instantly got the badge when the limit was changed on Test. So I think you'e grossly exaggerating, unless the number of monkeys in a spawn has also been reduced.

Peace,
ZQA

EDIT: Oops, just realized I invoked the "I Have a Fifty!" fallacy. I feel so...so LAME! But regardless, I think that 1000 monkeys is something that can realistically be done without herding or farming them.

I'm surprised that no one's picked this one out yet:

The Science/Tech DO for Intangibility Duration is the Oscillator Overthruster. The OscillatION Overthruster was used in the movie and novel THE ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI to allow for passage through solid objects, by accessing the "8th Dimension", made up of all the empty space in matter.

Peace,
ZQA (who bought one despite not having Phase Shift, just because)