Guild of Writers

Sometimes you gotta get your hands dirty for things to improve, not everything smells of roses.

I wouldn't know, as I have no sense of smell.

Well, I hope improvement does come of this, though I don't believe it will silence those whose beef with Cyan seems to run far deeper than this single issue.

And I hope your and your colleagues' loss of privileges turns out to be a temporary thing.

I'm mostly upset that Veralun's actions seem to defend a known detractor of the community (Dehl) and by his actions one would assume that Cyan agrees with this position. I agree that it shouldn't have been such a big deal for Pelishard.net to host the Teamspeak the for St Patty's Day parade, and my deleted posts complaining of this in no way were intended to discount the hard work the organizers, but it shouldn't have been hard to have seen this coming. Veralun shouldn't be removed as moderator, as he should have already stepped down as a big-time distraction. He won't, so they should remove him. Veralun has demonstrated this kind of behavior for a long time. Nuff said.

Well, if if RAWA had posted one day earlier, I might have believed that RAWA's post was a joke for April Fool's Day. Unfortunately, this seriously is Cyan's response.

No action is taken and explorers are referred to the forum rules instead.

When all the evidence is deleted it is hard to make a case for any position.

After that all you have to do is defend your self against hearsay.

Easy money.

@chucker wrote:We're being served a vapid marketing fluffpiece by Cyan. It's especially insulting coming from someone who used to be close to the fan base.

Chucker has written an excellent review of the situation on his blog.

In summary, Cyan ignores the community and refuses to acknowledge that there is actually a problem.

I found that RAWA's post has done nothing but solidify the notion that this problem will not be fixed in any substantial way and that the problems will continue to escalate on the MOUL forums.

I wonder how far you would have to go to see any real action taken to make the MOUL forums bearable to discuss on?

chucker's post suggests that the forum rules should be regarded by all moderators as only guidelines. This is entirely separate from any issue involving an individual mod's actions, or what happened as a result of them.

Some rules can be guidelines. Some rules are rules. "Do not discuss violations of Cyan's intellectual property (whether they are tacitly tolerated by Cyan or not) on Cyan's own forum" (I paraphrase) has got to be a rule, for reasons which seem obvious to me. Inserting the bit I put in brackets would defeat the object of the rule. I don't understand why everyone doesn't get this, or why some choose to behave as if they don't.

As far as I'm aware, there isn't a single widely-known central forum to discuss exploration of fan Ages (why not?), so referring people who want to do that here seems to me a natural decision until someone comes up with an alternative. The "Fan Ages" section on the MOUL forums was, I thought, intended for the discussion of projected fan Ages in "official" open source Uru, not Ages that people are constructing right now and playing in a reverse engineered version of Uru:CC. I'm amazed that the latter is allowed to be there at all, and concede that that does muddy the rule 7 issue more than somewhat. Cyan is sometimes too generous for its own good. And since even referring to GoW on Cyan's forums could be taken to imply some form of approval of Drizzle and such like, I'm not surprised it took a long time for Cyan to countenance it.

It seems to me obvious that before Cyan will release part of their IP to open source they would want the importance of this issue to be clearly understood by the community at large, which it equally clearly currently is not. I do suggest that failure on the part of the offending section of the community to address this issue might well delay the release of open source. You may think that would be like teachers keeping the whole school in till whoever painted the willy on the staff room wall owns up. Yes, it would. And I would say: Deal with it. What you do here is brilliant, and will be essential to open source if it ever happens, and as has been pointed out, Cyan knows this. Why is it so hard to play nice with Cyan in the meantime and not keep pushing the limits of what they say they want on their own forum?

I also regret that RAWA's post was so vague, but for different reasons. I would have pointed out that the most common rules violations (the above and the rule about trolling, flaming and posts resulting in negativity) have been so frequently repeated, and so often explained, that intelligent people could hardly fail to be aware of what they had done wrong. "Read the rules again" seems to me an overly gentle reminder.

Oh no, RAWA has learned to speak corporate!
Must have taken that from Rand. Resistance is futile, I guess.
There will no longer be any content in RAWA's posts.

What bugs me is that Cyan plays us against each other. They allow us to develop all of these tools for modding Uru yet don't give us any official permission. If we want to completely play along with Cyan, we would have to cease all development of everything we are working on publicly. Cyan has given only a few things what would be considered permission, but even then it wasn't a backing of the technology behind the creation, but the allowance of a fan based story or other contrivance.

Basically Cyan is daring us to push the limits every time they post this vague BS. They must understand the type of people we are and how horribly we clash with others in the Uru community. I almost feel compelled to PM or E-mail RAWA asking him what the hell he thinks he is doing.