Category: General

A comment at The Volokh Conspiracy, pointed me to “Infringement Nation,” a paper discussing the gap between copyright law and our social norms. The part you should go read is IV.A. “Infringement Nation,” which starts on page 8. Due to extensive footnotes, the 1000 words are spread across six pages.

The shorter version is that common activities are technically illegal, and the only things stopping billion of dollars of lawsuits (per person, per year) are good will and the difficulty of enforcement. If you include the text of an e-mail in a reply, that is an illegal reproduction of someone’s original work. If your game or music volume is too loud, that could be an illegal public performance of a copyrighted work.

On one hand, hey, can we track down those jerks who copy others’ blogs to generate faux content around a bunch of ads? Every single post on there is a potential $150,000 offense. How about those jerks who play their car radios loudly enough to rattle your windows? Illegal public performance, clear infringement.

On another hand, how many gaming blogs are posting their sixth screenshots? Did you contact the publisher for permission to reproduce artwork from their game? You are also making a derivative work, and your chat box may show infringement of other players’ copyright in their (short) textual creations. You are also distributing said illegal works, and engaging in contributory infringement by linking to other infringing blogs. Given the web of sites participating, there may be grounds for conspiracy or racketeering charges. That the developers want your free publicity right now does not mean that they have granted you legal permission to violate their copyrights.

Many people take the high ground on not stealing music or engaging in file sharing. Have you considered how you might be “a little pregnant” on violating copyright law?

: Zubon

If you read this post aloud, you created an unapproved derivative work. If someone else was around, you also conducted a public exhibition. Where is my royalties check?

He has a good point here. It’s a text-based web browser with free wireless; the ability to use electronic documents is a bonus. Because I have a librarian spouse and attend library conferences, I buy perhaps 1% of the books that I read, but I could still get a lot of use from a Kindle.

: Zubon

For the first time in an MMO, I feel I am on the cusp for forthcoming content. I am no longer catching up to the masses. I have always been a more casual gamer in MMOs. The aged Bartle Test would classify me as an EAKS. In Lord of the Rings Online, I am finally max level, nearing the end of the current epic quest line, and finishing up the current zones. Being on the cusp does not mean I have nothing to do; rather, the anticipation to forthcoming content is a bigger deal. It’s a bittersweet place to be.

Continue reading On the Cusp

Marc Nottke at Massively writes his last column on “phasing” for MMOgology, a column that had a very good run.  Phasing is a mechanic in a persistent MMO world where prior to some event horizon players are all in phase alpha of a zone.  After the world-changing event, players belong to the phase beta club.  A town that players once loved is burnt to the ground, there may be new mobs, new quest-givers, etc. in the beta phase.

The problem with the big MMOs current use of phasing (namely World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings Online to a much lesser extent) is that the community is partitioned.  The door goes one way, folks.  When you raised the ire of the enemy and your city was burned, well you can’t go back in time to see the city unburned.  That would be silly.  Now it’s time to eke the new world order out of the ashes.

Guild Wars phased the world between the starting area and the rest of the game with the first offering, Prophecies.  Players refused to leave.  They stayed in phase alpha, and to some degree – as much as is possible in Guild Wars – built a community there.  This is an extreme, but it does highlight the dangers of phasing.  People are not happy when people in the beta phase club cannot come back and group up with the slower alpha phase club.  Developers therefore have to be careful to limit the scope of the alpha phase in width and depth.  Areas unaffected by the event should not be partitioned, and players should not have to spend inordinate amounts of time trying to pass through to beta phase.  More thoughts after the break.

Continue reading Photon Phasing

“Montana Sucks! Now go home and tell all your friends!”

Recent discussion of WoW tourists brings to mind the problem of all tourists: “let’s go somewhere different and whine about how things are not like they were back home. The food here is funny. The toilets are weird. They act like they don’t even speak English.”

The tourists go looking for virgin wilderness, something pristine and untouched. Then they leave tire tracks, litter, and poo; they call for modern conveniences, ideally heated cabins with indoor plumbing and room service; they mock the locals as yokels and wonder why they are not friendlier.

Continue reading Locusts and Lemmings

1. Favorite Zone: For rockin’ times, I must go with Perez Park. It was a horror when you got the “Defeat 10 Circle of Thorns in Perez Park” back in the day, but the Park is a great place for low-level group fun. Get four to eight friends together and rampage, hitting Blood Brothers and Skulls in the street or, at later levels, all the slime monsters in the lake. Great smashing fun, plus the occasional Giant Monster to play with.
2. Favorite Origin: Race doesn’t mean much in CoH, does it? I used to make everyone a mutant, because there were the most mutant-origin enemies in game, so you had a better chance of getting free enhancements. Then they re-arranged those one fine day. Technology gets the nod: it gives you a damage bonus on the Nemesis Staff, and its level 1 bonus power has a chance to hold, which lets low-level Controllers start using Containment early.
3. Favorite Archetype: Defender. On paper, I like Controllers more (full control + 80% of support beats full support + 80% of damage), but revealed preferences (3 level-capped Defenders) suggest that I am a Defender at heart. I thought I would like Corruptors more, but I seem to have a preference for playing blue-side, where there are more support powers in play.
4. Favorite Feature: The costume designer. No one does it better. Good luck to Cryptic in topping it in their next games. Second place: scaling instances, which adjust the number of difficulty of opponents based on how many people you bring. The same mission is solo, small group, and full group content. Third place: sidekicks and exemplars, which let you play with your friends even if your levels are very different. Wow, CoH has a lot of great features that too many games have failed to copy, even though the game is more than four years old.
5. Favorite Power: Fulcrum Shift. It is an area-effect damage debuff, and every enemy that is debuffed gives off an area-effect damage buff, and the caster gives off an area-affect double damage buff. If people are not spread out, it means that everyone is at the power cap. It stacks with itself, in case everyone is spread out. The debuff stacks, so if you have any other sort of damage debuff (and Kinetics comes with one), you can keep an archvillain at the damage floor.
6. Favorite Task Force/Story Arc: “The MegaMech Cometh,” Ernesto Hess’s task force. A little of the logic was broken with the release of CoV, but its gameplay is top-tier. It caps a set of story arcs that led you across the zone, starting at the docks with the task force completing in the mouth of a volcano. It is usually around two hours, so a good evening’s activity that does not drag. It has some very fast missions, one-room big fights, and it actually has a reason why you do not start with the contact’s phone number. The Council is a fun villain group with variety in its members. You can see the end coming as you fight in the Council base, with windows facing inside the volcano where the final fight happens. And then you have the last scene, fighting your way up scaffolding inside a volcano to keep the pilot from entering a mech. Second place: Lady Grey, with the added bonus of being able to team with your villainous friends.
7. Favorite Issue: I feel boring going with Issue 3, since I picked its Task Force as my favorite, but it had a lot of good stuff. Striga was the first themed zone that walked you through it via contacts; the TF is awesome; the story arc provides interesting temporary powers; oh wait, there is a second Task Force, one that starts with caves full of vampires and werewolves; we missed the Fifth Column, but the even that ushered them out was a lot of fun, as well as the first time enemies actually fought each other instead of pantomiming; Kheldian and epic power pools; and the short-lived Calvin Scott Task Force (3!), which was enjoyable. Some of the other Issues brought more important features, but I could not pick one that finished what was missing at release (adding levels 40-50 (twice!), giving heroes the villain content, maybe revamping zones).

: Zubon