Old Complaints ~or~ 'A More Perfect Superhero Simulator'

Hrm. Well, if I recall copyright laws correctly, the instant you make something, it's copyrighted to you automatically--if you made the character or character concept long before playing CoH, I wonder how that would play out.

Trying to make your own IP out of a character you made in City of X first, though, yeah--I could see a lawsuit coming out of that.

I counter this... I love them. I wish I could put them in AE arcs. I wish we had a "/e chickenrun" for sprint.

"How do you like me now?" is a good, general thing to scream at people you're beating up.

I think any puzzles like that would have to be only on TFs - putting missions that require teams in the middle of arcs that people solo might not be such a good idea

If you're talking about maps, could you tell us if GR will have some new ones or not?

I'm sure it woudn't enrage marketing - it's not any real info - it's like saying Praetoria has "several zones" - totally vague, but still interesting to know - so if you just said "yes, GR will have some new mission maps", we'd be very happy

So I guess it would be a bad idea to offer you cookies in hopes that you one day implement performance options such as

Hide other players: Capes, auras, wings.
Hide other teams:Capes, auras, and wings.
Hide other players: Buff effects
Hide other teams: Buff effects
Hide player pet: buff effects
Hide player pet: aura effects
Hide NPC: Capes, auras, and wings.
Hide NPC: Buff effects

Maybe you could someday do this, then you could remove costume restrictions. So if someone wants a trenchcoat, cape and wings... (hmm that would look very silly.) They could do it.

This is a frequently debated question on the forums. However, there are a few things that are essentially fact, and not subject to interpretation (although people argue them anyway):

1. Copyright protection is granted to the author of a creation, at the moment of creation. This fact cannot be altered by contract or other legal agreement, except in the specific case of work for hire. Therefore, if player characters are artistic creations at all, the player owns the copyright to them, at least initially.

2. The artistic components that are in the game itself and the character creator specifically, such as the costume designs and body elements, are still owned by NCSoft regardless of whether players incorporate them into their creations, and ownership of the whole does not mean ownership of the parts under copyright law. So even if you own the artistic creation of your character, you don't own the individual visual elements of the character as they exist in the character creator. So you can't arbitrarily use the visual appearance of your character as it exists in the game. You could use a drawing of your character based solely on your own artwork.

3. NCSoft requires you to grant them (at the very least) a non-exclusive license to use anything you make in the game. This is entirely legal for them to ask for, and it grants them the right to use your creations in virtually any way they see fit, even if you are the owner of them. However, they do not grant you a similar license, so you do not have the same right to use their stuff. Its highly problematic to use a character in the game when you are not allowed to use its visual appearance (without recreation from scratch) or any of the backstory elements of the game (no mentioning the Crey or Lord Nemesis in your backstory, for example).


What's at least somewhat debatable are the following:

1. Is the EULA sufficiently specific that it meets the requirements under copyright law for a copyright transfer? In my opinion, it does not. But if a court were to rule that it did, then theoretically speaking we could be the authors of our characters under copyright law, and then we transfered those copyrights to NCSoft as part of agreeing to the EULA.

2. Are player characters even "creations" under copyright law? I think this is bogus myself, but there are some people who contend that players do not put enough work into their characters to constitute an artistic contribution, and therefore characters are really just trivial assemblages of NCSoft's intellectual property. The amicus briefs that any court hearing this argument would be flooded with staggers the mind, but its at least a theoretically non-frivolous legal challenge.

3. Can players be considered "employees" for the purposes of work-for-hire statutory requirements, and therefore NCSoft considered the author of anything the players create? I mention it only because some people have in the past, but I think this is *so* out there that it falls just outside the boundaries of being frivolous. I think it wouldn't be considered literally frivolous only because while its probably stupid, its legally interesting to rule on this theory and set a precedent, so I think a judge would consider it sufficiently intellectually interesting to maybe hear the case out.


Bottom line: in a legal sense you almost certainly own your characters. However, "your character" may not mean what you think it does, and in particular if you want to use your character in another setting, you'll have to figure out a way to do so without using the direct visual elements of the game, without using the protected elements of the game's story, and without using any other element of the game that is protected by copyright that you didn't create yourself without permission (this includes other players' characters).

Conversely, whether NCSoft owns your characters or not, they do have the legal right to use them in just about any way they want.


And of course, as some people do rightly point out:

1. Tort is expensive. It is very likely to cost you more to defend against a suit filed by NCSoft than the character is worth, unless your name happens to be Stan Lee.

2. Since you can't use any of the CoX elements in your character if you attempt to use it elsewhere, its far simpler to make a similar character that lacks those entanglements than it is to try to "purify" an existing CoX character. This dodges the whole issue of character ownership to the best extent possible.

i mostly agree with this, but would be fine with the invulnerable locked/wallpaper doors blocking off some areas as long as the overall layout made some sort of sense. Currently the majority of building maps resemble strange caves with office decor and paneling.

Twisty, meandering passages work for underground complexes mostly built into existing cave systems and tunnels, but not so much in office buildings.

Hrm, I see.

For what it's worth, I wasn't talking about taking a character made in City of Heroes that the person then tried to use in their own works or IP, though it was helpful to know.

I was thinking more along the lines of a person who made their own character or IP before playing City of Heroes, then tried to make a facsimile of their character in the game, just for the fun of playing as their own creations in a superhero game.

Like, if Howard Tayler (the author of Schlock Mercenary) tried to make a version of one of his webcomic's characters (let's say Kevyn Andreysan, Tagon's Toughs chief engineer and mad scientist) in City of Heroes, just so he could run around Paragon City as Kevyn Andreysan. I was wondering if and how the IP protection rules would affect him, since in a case like that, he'd be playing with a character modeled after his own IP.

I'm not so sure that'd be so good - the costume creator is a big feature of the game, and having options that mean your creations mightn't have all the parts shown to other players would take away from it a bit, I think.

While we are at it:

Hide other players: Uniforms, make everyone but me look like a phantom illusion (minus FX)
Hide other players: I don't want to see them at all.
Hide world: I just want to see mobs and flat untextured ground for them to fall dead on.

Sounds more like a much needed option for CO

Yes, and no.

No, puzzles with fixed responses don't work "well": this is how the midnight thing works (not that there's anything wrong with that) and so it's just a "click on a list of items." If you want to just get it done, then you can do so. (Note that for those who enjoy reading (I, personally, LOVE the text parts of CoX) you still might end up reading everything anyways

Yes, puzzles in online games work. How about this for a puzzle (knowing full well that you can't do this with architect, but that I always wanted a mission that WOULD do something like this) :

There are 8 options (switch to pull, button to push, door to open, whatever.) When you read a clue(*) you obtain information about which option to choose (maybe "it's a odd number" or "it's on the left, not on the right!") The option changes each time, though, so the clue won't be the same for two runs through the same puzzle. If you pick the WRONG option, then there is a negative consequence. If you pick the RIGHT option, you can complete the puzzle.

I wish there was more of this kind of thing in MMOs: I wish there was more thought required than "find glowie, click glowie, kill everything in sight". Yes, it's much harder to do this kind of thing WELL, and yes it's much harder to debug, to write new stories, etc. but I'm just saying that it CAN be done and I definitely WOULD enjoy it (though I don't really expect it.)

It does lead to an interesting point of MMO contention, though:

Other than top level raiding (hammi, lord recluse SF, etc. or any of the bazillion things in WoW, or....) MMOs are generally, well, REALLY easy. I enjoy playing CoX, don't get me wrong, but it's SOOOOO easy. I don't mean "I can kill anything at any time" easy, I mean "I don't feel ANY source of challenge-based frustration" when playing CoX. I RARELY feel like "damn, that made me really think about how to do it!" because, at a certain point, you have your character well defined, you have your power set built out, and you know what you can and cannot do. Once you identify, say, "hey, it's an EB longbow ballista" you know right away "yes I can beat that" or "no, I can't do that on my own" without any real "puzzle solving". Then, when you get the right people on your team (i.e. add a brute to help your corruptor) you go in and run right through with no hesitation. There's no real "difficulty", it's just "got enough DPS/defence? yes? no problemmo then".

Wouldn't it be cool if you could find a clue that would say "you can avoid the EB ballista in door number 1 and complete the mission directly in door number 2" that took some effort to find out, and then could use your brain to work through things?

I'm not demanding this for GR or anything, just thinking out loud

I think what the second person was actually taking issue with is that the floors in an office building are all over the place. The vast majority of buildings I have been in are the same SIZE on each floor and have the elevators in standard locations.

Let's not even bring up the fact that these buildings seem to have elevators that only connect 2 consecutive floors and are at random locations throughout the building.

Weak sauce, BABs. In point of fact, the two points are entirely orthogonal to each other and complementary in that they're both valid reasons that the current maps blow chunks. They're old and tired AND they don't make sense. Both points I've raised in the past myself, though separately.

I mean, seriously, I often think that the Paragon University School of Architecture must have been founded by Ivo Shandor with the intent of summoning ancient gods to destroy the world. Buildings in Paragon already have a Lovecraftian relationship with Euclidian geometry. And let's not get started on the city planners and civil engineers who designed the public works and roads...

I never noticed any non-Euclidian geometry in most City of Heroes zones. Care to point out some examples? (Faultline, The Hollows, and other ruined excluded of course.)

In the defense of Paragon City's design, though, I'm pretty sure that plenty of real world cities have mind-bendingly illogical layouts.

It's a part of Paragon City's exercise program. They discovered office workers weren't getting enough cardio-vascular exercise so by placing the elevators at each end of a floor workers have to walk the entire length of every floor to get to the next one.

In terms of the law, fundamentally speaking, there really isn't any difference between the two situations. In *both* cases his creation is protected by copyright.

Where the practical difference comes up is that in both cases, to use the character outside of the game you'd have to recreate elements of the character which use NCSoft IP you have no right to use outside of the game. So for example, in both cases you'd (probably) need a visual representation of the character that was different than the game's visual representation of the character.

However, in the case where the character already existed prior to the author playing the game and recreating the character, the author would almost certainly have a visual representation that predated the game, and would not need to invent one. In the case where the character is created in the game initially, one would have to be invented. In the latter case, its potentially tricky to prove that your new visual representation is not too derivative of the game's graphics to be a unique creation of yours. In the former case where the character predates the game, its a lot easier to prove that.

But that's a question of proving the elements are non-derivative creations. In both cases the author's rights are identical if he or she can prove it.


In terms of the game rules its probable that an author could overturn a genericed character if he or she could prove they were the actual copyright holder. But that's not trivially easy to prove to a game publisher, and they could still bar someone from playing such a character if they felt it would cause too much disruption in the game to do so: players could keep petitioning the character because they did not know the player was the copyright owner, and NCSoft could simply decide it wasn't worth it. Since they can pretty much prevent you from playing anything for any reason, they do not have to produce a legal justification for genericing a character. Convenience alone could be sufficient justification to act.

I'd be happy with just a picture of the the crew/guys/people/things working on the game.
Really, the silence is deafening. I know you've got the first round of testers working and secretes are everything but give us a little something.
The only way I know that they are doing anything is that I get major lag when ever they are loading things up on the back end.

Perhaps this will suffice: Clickies

eh... I'm not wanting something to hide my costume details, I'm saying it would be a nice to be able to disable displaying of other players costume auras etc. I don't need this myself but it would help the people with really old computers and possibly solve the problem with not being allowed to have multiple auras.

So if you dont want to see capes, etc because they make your machine lag then you can disable them.

Then you might also disagree with a couple of other changes I'd like to see, that I was reminded of when I logged in earlier today:

1) STSNPCU - Shut The Speical NPCs Up. You know, the Ship Information Officer in the Vanguard Base in the RWZ, or the receptionists at the Vaults, or the Vanguard guys outside the Vuanguard Depots in the zones that connect to the RWZ, who ALWAYS talk when you get near them. They say the same every time, and it's annoying. They should say it once, and then be silent.

2) Tutorial Mission Doors - For Outbreak, the mission should always be at the set of doors at the building behind Coyote. It sucks to have to run to the far side of the zone, because by the time you make it back to Coyote, and pick your starting zone, your Level Up Buffs have pretty much worn off. For Breakout, the door that's to the left of the Arachnos Pilot should be the mission door. Granted, you don't have to run nearly as far, but it's far enough.

3) This is for Heroes only: Starting Zone Equality. Galaxy City is treated like a red-headed step child. And I don't like it. Galaxy is far superior to Atlas. It has Badd *** Brawler to train you, instead of wussy Ms. Liberty. But I digress. Galaxy needs to have an Auction House added, and an NPC added inside the Freedom Corp. building to hand out the Cape and Aura missions. Atlas needs to have an Arena added, and an NPC added inside City Hall to do Resepcs.