ZacKing

The same does apply to me just as it does to you and everyone else here. I don't get to determine what the HC team does or doesn't work on. None of us do. That's up to HC to set their own priorities. Does that make you feel better? Discussing opinions on the nuances of trademark law via Google search isn't relevant. Whether or not a character created here on these servers is or isn't a trademark violation isn't up to us or our opinion. Can any of us generic another players character? No, we can't. HC can. You could create a character here that were it taken to court would win a trademark violation case brought by Marvel. Who's going to pay for the legal fees for that? What you or I or anyone else feels is a violation or not is irrelevant. It's up to HC to make the call based on what their comfortable with and that fits within their established rules. It is their server and it is their rules. That's fact. It's not my opinion on the process though. GMs have said this is what they do with these kinds of tickets. Are you suggesting that when a ticket comes in for a trademark violation, they don't even bother looking at the character? They just hit the magic generic button and that's it? They don't do any kind of follow up or account flagging to make sure the violating character isn't just recreated? You're right, I don't know how much time is involved with these tickets, but neither do you. Only HC knows that. Based on my experience and what I'm seeing, there's a lot of trademark violations running around lately, most likely with multiple reports coming from multiple players. Seems to me that this is something that might be helped by adding a simple bit of text into the costume editor letting people know copying trademarked characters isn't allowed. It is the correct thing to do. Read what I wrote again. You've missed the point of the thread yet again. If adding a note in the editor can help alleviate the problem and free up some of the time that our GMs are graciously volunteering for us, maybe it's worth it. I'm curious, what makes your experience more valid than mine here? How exactly do you know these people "know better" and aren't deceiving you? This isn't true and you know it. I'm not trying to shut you down or prevent you from sharing your opinion. Shall I go back and re-quote you where you've told me to "drop it"? Who is trying to shut who down again? Fourth time now - I'm not your child or your pet dog. I'll continue to post, thanks. You're more than welcome to continue to do the same.

Folks keep suggesting this and yes, that's the correct thing to do. We all know that. It's not the point of the thread though. With that said, I'm personally seeing more and more people every day with clear copies of trademarked Disney/Lucasfilm and Marvel and DC characters running around. You can bet that they're all getting reported by someone and more than likely, multiple people. That's a lot of reports and a lot of volunteer GM time wasted on having to review each ticket, generic the costume and bio and then follow up to make sure it isn't changed back again. Maybe a short note or tooltip in the costume editor might help cut down on the number of tickets coming in for trademark violations because more people will be aware of the trademark rules due to it being more prominent and visible instead of buried in a lengthy CoC. Again, with very few exceptions, most people I PM about trademark violations respond with a thank you and say they didn't even know this was a rule.

Very good point.

Nobody said anything of the sort. No one said you can't disagree or express your own opinion. No one said anything even remotely close to that and you know it. All I said was you don't get to say what is or isn't worth the effort for HC and you threw a hissy fit over it. Of course you're welcome to disagree and to express a different opinion. That's what these forums are for. If it were your server with you running the show, you'd be more than welcome to definitively say it isn't worth your time. But it isn't your server and you aren't running it, so let other people share ideas and let HC decide what is or isn't a good use of their time. My determination is that it could help and do some good. Others have said the same thing and offered some great ideas. You're the one who can't seem to deal with that, not me. I'm perfectly fine with you disagreeing with me. And again, I'm not your child or your pet dog, so no, you don't get to tell me to deal with anything. Because that's what discussion forums are for. It's not an all or nothing thing. We as the players can make suggestions and maybe the HC folk will take those suggestions into consideration. We as players with differing points of view can discuss an idea and provide our perspectives on whether the idea has merit or not. That can be useful for the HC team. Allowing discussion and getting multiple points of view is important. Trying to shout down others who disagree with you isn't helpful. My opinions aren't wrong, nor is anyone elses opinion wrong. For the third time now, you're more than welcome to have your own thoughts and opinions and share them here just like the rest of us. No one has suggested otherwise. You seem to be the one who has issues with people disagreeing with you, not me.

You're certainly welcome to agree or disagree. I was only pointing out that it's not up to you or me or anyone else to determine what is or isn't a good use of the volunteer time that the HC folk graciously give for us. You'll note that I didn't say expressly say anything about the idea being "worth their time". I'm only making a suggestion and leaving that decision up to HC to decide whether it's a good use of their time. If they feel it is, great. If not, that's fine too. Also, I'm not one of your kids or your pet dog, so no, I won't "drop it". If you want to share your thoughts and opinions, go right ahead. I certainly won't stop you.

Agreed and thank you. For starters, it isn't for you to decide what is or isn't a "waste of resources" here. That's for the HC team to decide what they want to work on. It's also not meant to completely prevent people from making trademark violations. If it helps alleviate some of the workload with regard to GMs getting flooded by tickets over this, then that's a good thing in my opinion. I mean, look at what the GMs have said about the process here. GMs have to spend time taking a look at the violation, sometimes needing to pass it up the chain for others to look at, and then even sometimes going through an appeal process. They also have to monitor that account to make sure the character isn't recreated once its been genericed. That seems like more a waste of GM time that can be lessened by adding a brief note about not copying existing characters into the costume editor. Tooltips on the loading screens aren't intrusive, neither would a brief sentence or two be intrusive in the editor. That isn't my experience at all. The overwhelming majority of players who I've PM'ed to let them know that copying Wolverine or The Hulk or whomever is against the rules here have replied and said thanks and that they genuinely didn't know. I can understand where they're coming from since most games have some sort of skins of Marvel or DC or whatever character freely available, so it's a surprise for players to not be allowed to do that kind of thing here. Like I said, most people I encounter genuinely don't know it's in the rules. Yeah, that's their fault for not reading it fully before agreeing to log in, but I also understand why most people don't take the time to read that kind of stuff. Have you ever read the complete terms and conditions for your phone provider or a warranty for a car or anything like that? There's a big difference between reading through multiple pages of text and a brief sentence or two telling people not to copy trademarked characters. There's people doing this anyway and you've missed the intended targets here. Again, no one is suggesting it's going to stop people from making clones completely, nor do I agree it would make things worse. This is more for the people who genuinely don't know about the rule and providing them a note or tooltip in the editor that reminds them not to copy existing characters by name, bio or costume.

No one is suggesting people should not be held accountable for violating the CoC and ToS they agree to by logging in. Where you're getting that from is beyond me. I agree, the onus is on the player to read the rules, however I can totally understand why most people don't read it. There is specific verbage in the CoC that talks about wasting volunteer time. If adding some instructions/clarification into the costume editor about not violating existing trademarks helps eliminate a good chunk of the trademark violation reports, that's freeing up volunteer time to do other things like helping out players with in-game bugs and issues.

You seem to have missed the part in my post where I specifically pointed out that the names were only part of it. Costumes and character bios were violations too. Again, it's not up to any of us to decide. It's HC's call. Making the parts in the CoC about not violating copyrights/trademarks somehow more prominent is what I was suggesting. I play mostly on Excelsior, Torchbearer and sometimes Everlasting. Mostly Excelsior. I see flagrant violations fairly regularly there. Spend some time in Atlas Park and they're cropping up. Thank you. At least someone got it! I think you might have something there. We do have loading screen tips... maybe it could work in the character creator. Not a bad idea at all.

That's wonderful, thank you. Still seem to be missing the point of the thread though. Insights into trademark law are totally irrelevant as the rules here are the rules here, so whatever armchair legal interpretation any one of us may make, they're ultimately irrelevant as what HC says goes. It's their server. I'm just wondering if there's a way to make this part of the CoC more visible / prominent so more people are aware of it.

Yes, it is there. That wasn't really the point though.

Ok so I didn't start the thread to belittle and bash people over their "lack of creativity and/or imagination." Let's please not turn it into that. If you want to look down your nose at others because their character(s) don't live up to your creativity standards, go right ahead. You do you. For the record, I don't care if people want to play Superman or Spider-Man or Wonder Woman or Batman or Iron Man or Howard the Duck. If playing your favorite character from your childhood brings back fond memories for you and makes you happy, go for it. More power to you. It's not my server though and not my decision to allow it. For better or for worse, we can't do that here and these are the rules we all have to agree to when we log in. I'm just saying I'm seeing a lot of it lately and tossing out the idea that maybe something could be done to make the "no trademarks" part of the CoC more visible to be more obvious. I'm sure there's people who generally don't know about it. It would suck for them to get invested in the game only to log in one day and be disappointed to see GenericSuperDude0034543 where their favorite character once was and quit the game over it.

For clarity as I think you might have misunderstood my post.

Not sure about anyone else, but I've been seeing a whole lot of people using trademarked names, words and costumes of late. For those who don't know, the words Jedi and Sith are trademarked by Lucasfilm/Disney, so no, despite protestations to the contrary, you can't have a character named Jedi Fred or Darth Bob in the game with a costume that's spot on for Obi Wan Kenobi or Darth Maul with a profile that talks about your prowess with the force. You also can't be dressed up like Batman or the Flash or Superman and say your SS/INV tank with a profile that mentions how you're from Krypton is "cosplaying so it's ok". I know hardly anyone reads the CoC or ToS when they agree to create an account and sign in. There's been a lot of this lately. I feel bad for the GMs who must be getting flooded with tickets over it. Maybe the parts about not violating copyrights and trademarks needs to be made more prominent?

Right. Moving toward the WoW model of must have tank/heal/DPS trinity to do anything. This would be sweet, although I suspect its way too much work to implement. Not saying HC couldn't do it, just that its a big project for a volunteer group.

Well no, there's no bad faith comparison being made. There's nothing wrong in pointing out the fact that your "you didn't try it, so you can't comment on it and your opinion doesn't matter" just doesn't work.

I'm not underestimating anything. I'm speaking from personal experience. It's not worth re-hashing in this thread, but you do have a lot of people here who throw hissy fit temper tantrums when someone questions them, questions numbers they provide or offers an opposing point of view that runs counter to their world view. I'm happy to send you specifics via PM.

Yeah, a lot of that in the Suggestions forum is noise, but I don't think that's what was meant. As far as the beta feedback, I've definitely seen well presented feedback that wasn't "you suck! this change sucks!" type feedback against changes that get hidden or shouted down or both. There's definitely a white knight brigade ready to pounce on anyone who disagrees with a particular change. More often than not and more and more recently, you're not able to even question other people. Honestly, it's like watching a cult sometimes, at least to me. It's HC's server so they can run it however they want, and I totally agree HC has done some fantastic stuff and very much appreciate all the time and effort they put into this game.

The recent CoT and Council revamps. The "early pain" comes from the lack of tools to counter their debuffs and status effects. Fighting Concil and CoT at lower levels in Perez or the Hollows or ToTing is a lot different than fighting them at level 45+ when you've got most of your powers and slots.

Telling someone you don't know and have no experience in dealing with that you don't believe what they're saying isn't necessarily a personal insult or character assassination, which is what an ad hominem is. It's being prudent in not taking the word of a stranger as fact. "Trust, but verify."

I very much agree with this, especially the first sentence. The direction of content being driven by a very select few seems to be inching more and more toward the WoW model where every team is a must-have tank/heal/support/damage teams to do anything. Not every player is following the latest meta to build purple IOed out to the gills characters with every last drop of resist/defense/DPS squeezed out of it. I can confidently say this because I team with a lot of random folks on PUGs and can see the lack of set bonuses on their characters. I'll also echo the sentiment that feedback is taken into consideration, but it does seem very, very, very heavily slanted toward feedback that's praising changes. More often than not, feedback that runs counter are shouted down and/or hidden from view. It's HC's server so they can do whatever they want, just providing an honest opinion on that.

As an option I don't see a problem with this. It's not a necessity, more like a nice to have.

Not sure that's the case. I don't think that the name thing was even a major driver behind developing the new engine. There were quite a lot of substantial technology upgrades made to the Cryptic engine, how names were handled was just one among them. As for social blowback, I can't really say what the result would be. I imagine there's some who will complain about it, but there's always someone complaining about something. People can already copy costumes and biographies from other players they like and I don't see anyone mentioning that. Personally, if someone has the same name as my characters, go for it. It doesn't take anything away from my enjoyment of the game. Others I'm sure will feel differently and that's fine. I very well could be wrong as its been a long while since I've read the HC folk posts on the topic, but as I remember it, there's not a great link between the tables for account info and character info on the individual shards. There would need to be all new tables built to accommodate that and to make it so that inactivity could be based on account activity instead of at the character level. It sounded to me like HC folk understand what would be required to do the kind of work to make names non-unique and are fully capable of doing it, but its more than they want to take on in their spare time given this is a volunteer effort. I don't blame them that at all as I get that this is a passion project for them. I'd rather they focus on what's fun for them to do so they don't get burned out.

It is kind of interesting to see how there's people here complaining that people with sub-level 50s doing the exact same thing are "name campers", but you doing this is ok and no one blinks and eye. I mean, the arguments being made in these threads is that you really aren't using your characters whereas someone else wanting the name might play it much more frequently, so why not release the names? Not saying you're doing anything wrong at all as I don't think you are, just commenting that the arguments being made for what is or isn't camping seems highly dependent on the person. It does seem like its always the other guy who's wrong.

Well I can only speak for myself, but you're in no danger of me ever naming a character "Bionic Flea". And even if every player in the game created a character named Bionic Flea, you'd still be you and there's still only one of you. Certainly not you, that's for sure. You'll also note I wasn't making demands that anything should or shouldn't get done, or trying to dictate what HC should be working on. So relax, I was commenting on a statement that didn't make sense in that a database wipe wouldn't be necessary. I understand this is a volunteer group working on a passion project and it's up to HC to decide what they want to work on. Feel free to dismount your high horse now.

I'm not sure that you'd need to wipe the database to do this? I get that the code is whacky, but this doesn't sound right. I don't think I've ever come across a situation where I had to wipe out all the data in a database to start over from scratch with something. I'm not a professional DBA, but I do know a thing or two about about SQL and databases. There's no way to run an update statement to prepend the global@ to the beginning of character names? You wouldn't be in the chat, unless you specifically wanted to see global names. In chat, your name would still be Bionic Flea. That's how it works in CO and STO. You wouldn't see the global in the name floating above your character either.