Please don't delete your characters

That reminds me. I have to contradict something Zwillinger said during the last twitch broadcast. He said NCSoft "owns" everything. I'm not a lawyer, but I do have some experience working in IP and my understanding of US copyright law is that is incorrect. There's a very specific distinction here.

NCSoft owns all the IP in the game. That includes all the copyrightable art assets in the character creator, and all the copyrightable story elements of the game. You can't write a story about Crey Corporation, including mentioning them in a character bio, outside of the game. You can't specifically use their art assets in another game, or put a screencap of your character on the cover of that new novel you wrote about your character.

But the copyrightable elements of your character that you uniquely made you still own. NCSoft cannot assert ownership of them for the simple reason its legally impossible to do so under US copyright law. Ownership and authorship have very explicit and specific conditions under which they can be transferred from the original creator to some other entity, and signing an agreement that says "anything and everything I make you own" doesn't qualify. Such an agreement is actually illegal except under the specific condition of work-for-hire.

What NCSoft gets within the EULA is a perpetual, non-exclusive license to use and sublicense anything you make in the game. That means they can use our character creations in any way they want. They can sell those rights to other companies. They can do so for as long as they want. The only thing they cannot do is prevent us from using them as well, or selling those rights to others as well. We still own those characters.

BUT, and this is the big catch, NCSoft does not grant us any reciprocal rights to any of their assets outside of the game. Which means my main character, Lady Arcana - I own that character, its concept, and its general appearance. I could write a novel starring that character, and NCSoft would have no legal ground to stop me.

But, I couldn't use screencaps. I couldn't mention City of Heroes itself. I couldn't mention she lived in Paragon City. I couldn't mention she was experimented on by Crey Corporation. I couldn't mention she survived the Rikti War. I would have to change all of those details, because I don't own them and have no right to use them.

She could still be an energy blasting superhero. But I couldn't use the specific details of the energy blast powerset. She could still have a red and purple costume and a cape, but it could not copy the art assets in the game. The specifics of my origin idea about her powers coming from an experiment combining magical and technological portals is something I own and NCSoft does not. To the extent that I mention it in my character bio, however, they can use that idea to whatever extent they want.

Deleting characters from the system doesn't eliminate NCSoft's rights to them. They could, if they wanted to, recover them from backups and still use them in any way they wanted to. So whether you delete them or not, probably doesn't change anything much. Whether you delete them or not, you still own them. Whether you delete them or not, NCSoft still has full rights to use them. So this should not play any factor in whether you keep your characters on the servers until the end or delete them before the end.

I was told that someone would be getting a "snapshot" of the beta server, and to transfer all my characters over to it. No idea if that's actually going to happen, but I was able to transfer characters that are locked.

It's also possible I misunderstood and the "snapshot" is the individual character program being talked about in this thread. Either way, you can transfer locked characters (although I haven't been on the server to see if I can even access it or them).

I haven't heard of the entire server getting snapshotted.

There's also the problem with beta characters being easily able to be stuffed with just about anything you want before exporting them. So if a beta exporter is made it'll probably have a different verification key that flags it as a character exported from beta.

Since the future is still uncertain as to what, if anything, we'll be able to use these for, that may or may not make a difference.

There's no way this game is going to live on in it's current form. We'll either get COH2 or nothing. The game wasn't growing...this is the hard facts. 8+ years is a long time and this was a good run. Even if they should get financing, they'll get do this game right and build it new. Pray that an investor funds the next level of this game.

I'm deleting my characters so NCSOFT won't have them....that's all I care about right now!

Way too late for that. Everything is backed up on a regular basis. When people have deleted toons and regretted it, the GM's have been able to restore them weeks later.

It's a safe bet that NCSoft has the back-up copy from just BEFORE the announcement in a safe place.

I'm kinda amazed how many people posting on the internet believe deleting something deletes anything.