Felis Noctu

And to add on to that, for people who may not understand the different categories, trademark is different from copyright is different from patent. (Disclaimer: Not a lawyer, but have had to personally deal with these topics before. These are all being described in relation to how they apply to Homecoming.) ----- * A trademark is a word, phrase, symbol, and/or design that identifies and distinguishes goods, services, or the source of such, must be deliberately registered, and must be actively defended as it represents an identity. Names will open HC up for legal action through trademark, as with enough similarity they could be misconstrued as being used in an official manner. TL;DR: Trademark protects identity. If you don't defend the identity, you lose it to someone else who will. * A copyright is a set of rights granted to you immediately once you have created an original work. It lasts for a certain period of time after creation, and is protected through clear publishing that documents a rough date and time as well as the creating entity. A copyright is generally lost only if someone else can successfully prove they came up with it first. Copyright is also a legal mess of loopholes ripe for abuse by any party, as well as protections regarding fair-use and derivative works, many of which can't be 100% guaranteed until precedent has been set in court. Visual representations will open HC up for legal action through copyright. TL;DR: Copyright protects a specific work. You don't HAVE to specifically defend a copyright, but companies often do because it in part represents their image. If something harmful is mistaken for a first party official version of something, it can hurt the company itself. * A patent is a set of rights granted by registration of an idea, that allows the owner to maintain certain rights of the original while opening up the general concept to others to develop on. It's not something we'd be particularly worried about here, as anything that could fall under patent is going to be more easily enforced through trademark or copyright. TL;DR: Patent doesn't really apply to Homecoming, as the concept of superheroes is generic and wide.

I sure hope so. Disney's a huge fish that likes to throw down over frivolous things just because they can. Just gotta play it safe and cross our fingers!

That's exactly what I mean too. You would hope that covering the big names in a filter would be enough, but there are hundreds of potential mines in this field that we could end up tripping over, even one-shots, any of which could potentially be used to give HC a hard time. We just have to hope it doesn't come to that and covering the big names is enough.

You might think so, but what we're doing here is in rough legal waters, and US-based companies in particular love their legal action. 😛

This right here. They can toss the big names in the filter and call it a day. My main concern voiced above is that there are hundreds of comic book character names out there, and while it's unreasonable to assume every single one should be monitored, there's always the possibility that X company tries to make it hard on HC deliberately.

This is the main thing I'm concerned about. Staying away from copy-written content is always the best decision (maybe light references at best), but having a similar name should be irrelevant if the player subject has nothing to do with whatever associated copy-written subject. There were some cases back on live of people's characters or names being shot down due to similarity only, not to mention AE levels like what Kistulot is mentioning. As someone mentioned, DC and Marvel can be extremely litigious. The issue there is, especially in our situation, they can also (and may very well) try to bully. Hopefully the HC team won't need to bring the hammer down hard!

I disagree honestly. The problem with the gold sellers is that while it does show popularity, it's then up to the company running the game to deal with it. It causes inflation for the in-game economy, which in turn results in shrinking player counts due to frustration, thus being a profit loss. Not to mention they'd honestly care more about the whales willing to dump massive amounts of money into the game than the gold sellers. Keeping the whales spending however requires active development of new features to entice them, which I very much doubt NCSoft is interested in doing. They also can't use the new Homecoming content as that falls under the creator's copyright. Yes, even if it's produced in a technically illegal environment, as it's still their intellectual property. From a business perspective this doesn't mean much for Homecoming's status other than stronger community support due to their efforts. It's only if Homecoming started profiting from the situation somehow that it might cause any significant damage.

What I think is interesting is that they consider Homecoming profitable for their time. As annoying as it is, that's a compliment! 😛

I'd second this, and it's unfortunate. Evolution and change is the foundation for improvement. Hasten is so incredibly powerful that it's considered to be required in practically every build that's considered to be "competitive" in the end-game. In any other situation, that would indicate it's a problem, not a good thing. However, re-balance doesn't necessarily have to be a hard nerf, or a removal in drastic cases. For instance: I like the idea of that first one for Hasten, but not the second for the fitness passives. Removing the necessity to select Hasten as a power means one additional pool available to builds, which can increase diversity. Removing slotting on the fitness powers (and by implication Hasten as well) would reduce diversity, impacting what those powers represent. It's a cliche example, but look what over-simplification and homogenization did to World of Warcraft: It feels soulless now. Providing everyone with those benefits in some form I think is an excellent move, but re-balancing Hasten it due to it now not requiring a pool selection (thus 100% a buff to everyone), and keeping the slots across the board for all of those passives, is essential to allow people to set themselves and their builds apart. Having and being able to make those tough decisions (do I want a faster recharge or faster endurance recovery?) is the spice of life!

Both of these strike a cord for me. From a hopeful, realistic side of things, seeing the game's future safe and in the community's hands is the most important thing. The original sunsetting was extremely emotional for me. I felt like I lost a family. One of the biggest reasons I've been hesitating to devote much time to playing here is because I don't want to deal with that loss again. ----- As for a development future, as others have mentioned, new powersets would be awesome, as well as implementing the pool powers that never made it originally. New archetypes are OK, and I do like the concept behind the Sentinel, but I'd rather see more powers and additional proliferation for the current ones. New appearance customization options would also be awesome. If I were to narrow down my hopes and dreams to something specific, there are two in particular that cross my mind. The first is something that I'm unsure is even possible, but we're desperately missing a muscular "amazonian" female option. Males can range anywhere from skinny nerdy types to massive beefcakes, and that's not including the alternate "huge" body. On the other side of the fence, there's no good way to make female characters in CoH actually appear like anything other than some variation on runway model. The number of examples of bulky females in comics is sadly lacking, yes, but it would still be nice to have the variation. Something slimmer than "huge", with a feminine angle on it. You know, to be able to make characters like this. Though, without knowing how current costume parts are designed, I have to imagine the worst and believe that it would require a new version of every item shaped to the new body type, which is no bueno... The second, which I'm sure people will think "typical" given my namesake and icon, are improved beast parts, primarily the heads. Let's be real here, the "Monstrous - Beast" heads are hideous, and not in what I'd call the "intended" way. Good lord that lower jaw! Not to mention the sizing difference between regular and monstrous heads: they're too small. Yes, including the lizard head, though it's better. The separate beast heads outside of the "monstrous" category are a little better, but feel like they're missing a proper neck and the head is jammed into the shoulders. It's a bit better on males, but I'd still call it iffy. Minotaur is the closest it gets to almost-right size. Actual beastly hand options such as avian talons would be cool, but I imagine that could be a rigging nightmare. The tails are decent, not really any complaints there, other than a non-flaming avian feather option. I think the monstrous legs are pretty much covered as well, though maybe a "monstrous" model for feet similar to what's available for the hands (claws and such) would be cool. On the not strictly beast related side of things, I've noticed some costume options are missing from sections they have no logical reason to be missing from. I'd assume they were just forgotten. At some point I'll probably make a list to post. ----- Really though, you guys are doing an absolutely fantastic job! Honestly if you just keep doing what you're doing we can rest assured knowing Paragon City is in good hands. 💕

Honestly, unless your character has a reason to be directly tied to the in-universe timeline, you don't really need to force it. There's definitely an advantage of having an overarching concept of what happened of course, but it doesn't necessarily need to be directly referenced in every case. Most of the "main characters" in my collection have seen casual RP outside of CoH since everything went kaput, so my interpretation and personal approach so far has just been that the time happened, but nothing else was set in stone. WHEN that time happened is a somewhat sliding case. Basically, 6 years or so of semi-canon side stories happened that filled them out a bit more, and then I'm just going with the flow from there. I never really based my characters around actual in-universe as a hard foundation: they were always just "there" and would react as necessary, but generally had their own thing going on. A large part of that is because I rarely chose to actually care what was going on unless it was a HUGE event of some kind. I'll probably continue that habit now and, even if some consensus is reached amongst the community as to how everything's gone down (time-skip, no time-skip, alternate reality shards, whatever), it's unlikely to really affect my characters all that much. The advantages of playing outside of a hard timeline. :P