Guild of Writers

Thank you, Trylon and diafero. I was not being sarcastic. When I am, it tends to be obvious. (EDIT: and thanks, Simone, for understanding.)

diafero, I take all your points, but I still think there's a misconception here. If people had not done the hacks, Cyan...would simply have moved on. Uru was a useless asset to them, a game that failed. The fact that they didn't simply do a Disney, pursue the hackers with cease and desist notices or whatever, may indicate that they recognised that and saw no harm in simply reestablishing their ownership by making UU available, rather than that they hoped to make any profit on it. They could perhaps have served themselves better, in some ways, by simply killing Alcugs with legal action and leaving it at that, but they chose to reward the fans, including the hackers, by letting us continue to play with their blessing, and with the possibility of something more maybe later.

Then came Gametap, and I must admit I am boggled as to how the relatively tiny number of people still playing UU by that time got parlayed into enough interest to attract the attention of a huge company like Turner, but it happened, and the hackers who prompted them to make UU deserve some credit for that from us...but then it failed to gain the numbers again, all the time and effort was for no profit, and again Cyan had the opportunity to move on, possibly dissolve the company and get better paying jobs elsewhere, and chose not to. Again we had the hacking, and again we have a limited form of Uru online available to us, and again the possibility of something more maybe later. It's a response to the hacking, certainly, as UU was.

But the hackers who kept Uru alive were not necessarily doing Cyan any favours. Who knows what they might be doing now if they hadn't spent so much time and effort maintaining this elderly game for the benefit of a few fans, and (let's not forget) to protect their IP from people who, however much they may love it, have shown scant respect for its owners? I don't see much reason for Cyan, as opposed to the player community, to be grateful. What I see is them accepting something they can't change, as a sort of back-handed compliment, and trying to be nice about something that many other and more successful companies would have shot down with extreme prejudice. It seems clear that they have a fondness for Uru and for its fans, perhaps at the expense of their own best interests.

And it seems to me that not talking about the hacking in their own metaphorical living room is a comparatively small thing to ask. There is no revision of history going on on Cyan's side. They have not told anyone not to do it. They just want it not to be talked about in that one place.

And it may not have been a plan, but I do firmly remember Rand saying something at the very beginning about players making their own Ages--it was one of the main things that drew me to Uru in the first place. So that was always on the agenda from what I could see at the time. Open source is only one way to that, and probably not the best way from Cyan's point of view, but if it's that or see their IP hacked anyway, I can see why they decided to do it. They could have done otherwise.

As Kaelis pointed out, I haven't researched this, so I may well be off beam, especially about what Cyan thinks or feels, but I'm basing that on how I would react if I'd created and commercially published a game and someone was futzing about with it without permission. I'd want to be as nice about it as I could be, because obviously they like it and that's good, but gratitude would be a bit of a stretch at the best of times.

Thanks again for talking to me reasonably. I hope I've done likewise. I'll go away and have a bit of a think now.

If Cyan could not accept EULA violation, they could not have open-source. They couldn't have this whole story we are talking about. They accepted parts of the violation the first time when they put hackers' code into UU. They approved Dustin's UAM back then. They supported GoW contests. They say they support fan ages. They support Paradox and others to write a Pidgin MOUL plugin. All this was and is only possible due to a bunch of people giving nothing about the EULA (which, as kaelis said, is NOT illegal). So, they can either decide to accept EULA violation - or this whole open-source and a lot of things they did is nothing more than hypocrisy.

I kind of see your point, and I see this is a fine line to draw for Cyan. But the line they drew now is all wrong.

EDIT: Wow, a long reply from Zander...
First of all, Cyan could not really have killed Alcugs with legal action. Alcugs is legal. Many other hacks are, too. So the only "blessing" we got from Cyan was the game itself. All of the old hacking was a lot of hard work, no blessing, no support from Cyan.
I agree that maybe they didn't react on all the hacking because they simply did not care about the game. Right after MOUL shut down, if they had said they didn't care and we could do what we want, you would have at least 5 Shards offering their service in public - within 24 hours. The only reason why we stayed below the radar was that Cyan stayed around and said they had some plans (MORE, open-source, whatever), so most of us accepted that and, in public, everything was about the offline game. I can't speak for others, but one of the reasons why I did that is respect for Cyan. But in the mean time, Cyan stepped up and wants to base Uru's future on our work - which at least some of us are happy to support. But at the same time, they don't want to accept what we did and how we did it. This is not what I would call respect, and it's not justified to hide many people's hard work (again, with no support or blessing from Cyan, quite the opposite - "The Great Cyan Clampdown" for example, as Dustin calls it) while at the same time using it.

Just a few small points:

A "EULA" is not an agreement. I certainly did not agree to any of it. Clicking a button is not an agreement in either the legal sense or practical sense. EULAs are used more as a warning, like a sign in a store. If a store has a sign saying 'No shoes, no service", then you can't successfully sue them when they kick you out for not wearing shoes. EULAs protect a company in a similar way. Just because it is worded otherwise does not mean anything. Lots of actually signed legal agreements have clauses that are not even legally enforceable, and those are even the *real* agreements.

Rand did not say that about the fan Ages early on. There was a much more recent interview, in which he said something like "Yeah, we always wanted the fans to be able to make stuff and <other corporate buzzword BS>". That was just him daydreaming again.

I thought EULA stood for End User License Agreement for a reason. And I always thought that pressing the button "I agree" every time I install software really means that I agree. But I apologize for not being an expert on U.S. legalese.

Another point to keep in mind is that it would be dangerous for Cyan to simply approve *all* the hacking that's been going on all these years. And if their approval needs to be selective, where do you draw the line? Do they have to consider each single hack and say what was admissible and what was not? That Alcugs was OK but Pelishard was not OK (just a random example)? Again, it would be a mess, until they figure out how to formally proceed with open source and they hear the reaction of the community. At the moment everything is informal and up in the air, and yet we are all arguing already, both about every kind of small formal detail, and the large-scale vision of the future.

Once they open the code, however they want to do it, it will be allowed to talk about PyPRP or whatever on the MOUL forums - probably, without saying that people have been using it for ages (ha!). kaelisebonrai, I do not see where you are losing. I'd say that people like me, who stopped playing each version of Uru when Cyan failed, and waited patiently for the next incarnation of the canon story, should be even more frustrated and impatient for new content than you Writers are... ;-)

P.S.

ddb174 wrote:That was just him daydreaming again.

This kind of a priori lack of trust in anything that Cyan says certainly does not help.

I'm sure there are plenty of ways to define how the pelishard issue is not ok, compared to other things, compared to other shards, compared to alcugs. =)

Though, I'm not certain the existance of the shard itself is the true issue. Other things went on there, that damned the pelishard. =P But, that's another story.

I said I don't see how /anyone/ is winning. Because as I see it, no one is, at present. Writers can keep doing what we've been doing for a long time, but people who disappeared, for a long time, and left us the hell alone, are now bothering us again.

In MOULagain, I've heard of fellow writers being attacked just because they wear the shirt. And this is before the whole bahro hax issue, etc. This was early on. I've never seen any of this, myself, but, I've heard of it.

We were content, to go about our business, then shit happened. First, someone screwed with the Memorial Imager, then CrisGer called for the cleansing, among other things, and since then, things have randomly gone nuts.

Regardless of either side's innocence, or guilt, there /have/ been people who don't know what the pants they're talking about, saying unkind things about the GoW. Regardless of the nature of events, there HAVE been people making spurious claims, or making comments about things they don't understand, or things they don't know the full details on.

That security patch? From what I understand of it, it wasn't much of one.

Now, me, I've since decided to do something useful.

I've since PM'd RAWA and offered them the textures, for this shirt, in the hopes of getting it into moul, just one tiny little bit of content.

Since they can't do fan Ages, right now, why not try something smaller.

http://guildofartisans.org/moulagain/Ur ... -34-59.png

http://guildofartisans.org/moulagain/Ur ... -17-23.png

Its their choice, and I've politely, and humbly offered.

The ball is in their court, now.

Note: This screenshot is taken with the textures in UCC, however, I have offered textures, specifically, so this does not break their rules, not really, anyways. (The screenshots were taken in 2009, before the rules existed, etc.)

EDIT: This post needs major, major, sweet zombie jesus, major formatting fixes. I'm not joking. If you get the intended flow, you did well. But hey, lets call it a puzzle, and be done with it.

I think I get your point, kaelisebonrai. If I say we're winning is because things are moving in the right direction, and we have the freedom to do as we please anyway, as long as we don't go talk about things that are forbidden (understandably IMO) on the MOUL forums.

kaelisebonrai wrote:Regardless of either side's innocence, or guilt, there /have/ been people who don't know what the pants they're talking about, saying unkind things about the GoW.

You are right; but, as many have said before, for a lot of peope it's a matter of attitude more than of substance... just like Cyan's attitude annoys some of the Writers.

Regardless of the nature of events, there HAVE been people making spurious claims, or making comments about things they don't understand, or things they don't know the full details on.

In my opinion, this also applies to some statements made by Writers about either Cyan, or the "paranoid dinosaurs" among the explorers.

Anyway, I only wanted to say, from a non-GoW point of view, that the point of the "Message Redacted" has been made clear, that it seems more about a formality than about substance, and that it's unlikely to change what cannot be changed by either the fans or Cyan itself.

(edited for spelling)

They call it an agreement, because they want you to *think* it's an agreement. There's no penalty for them doing so, so why on earth wouldn't they? It's not just US law; you simply don't know much about law in general. And that's fine, most don't. But law isn't intuitive, so one shouldn't just take what they feel the law *sounds* like, and imagine that is how it is. And it's fortunate for you that it's that way, because:

"By responding to this post, you agree to be indebted to Dustin in the amount of $200."

See? It's an *agreement* because it says so :P

Zomg, I'm indebted to dustin, say it ain't so! *GASP*!

EDIT: Just in case... Yes, I /am/ making a joke. =P

EDIT2: Clarification: the just in case is with reference to misinterpretation.

I like this idea that those who are into creating mods are entitled, impatient jerks who hate Cyan. Especially by those who admit they do not fully understand the issues.

However, Dustin, you CAN make an agreement by just clicking a button. The whole online shopping is based on this. It's a legal contract, albeit not being signed. And when you play an online game, and you acknowledge the agreement before buying, it's part of the buy contract (or however that is called in English). But in case of POTS, the EULA was presented to me after I already payed and the contract was done, so it's invalid.

On the topic: Cyan allowed discussion about MOUL hacking on their forums. ALL MOUL hacking. So they same would have been possible for CC, POTS, UU, whatever. But since MOUL is much more under their control, they want to restrict the "official" hacking to it, and hide our hacking on the old Plasma engine, which left their control completely when they shut down the UU auth server.