Founding Fathers are "over done"

I'm sorry, but when I read things like the following snippet, I instantly tune people like this out.

Yes, I know what the U.S. Constitution says about copyrights. I focused on how the law encourages "the progress of science and useful arts" in particular. The law does this by giving people a monopoly so that they can profit from their work, which is what "exclusive right" means in today's capitalist society.

To be honest, I was trying to stay away from the "founding fathers" arguments because that's not only U.S.-centric, but also a bit overdone these days. And, although there are examples of people creating things for free, I'd argue that the profit motive is behind a majority of IP creation; remember it doesn't have to be some giant company profiting from IP, it's also small developers like me (and I assume like you) that would like to provide for their families doing what they know best.

Let us examine this quote and take things to the most basic level.

Yes, I know what the U.S. Constitution says about copyrights. I focused on how the law encourages "the progress of science and useful arts" in particular.

At this point, we simply acknowledge what someone else has said. Second, we alter the context of what was said and set up our arguement that the source of information is invalid. Invalidating the original context is accomplished by requoting a piece of it and drawing an extension from the original thought. Here, the "how" allows us to extrapolate something else from the wording.

The law does this by giving people a monopoly so that they can profit from their work, which is what "exclusive right" means in today's capitalist society.

Now, I don't always knee-jerk frown at text that includes the word capitalist, though certain left-ists in our society use the word like a curse. In this case, I begin to have my suspicions because capitalism in this context was qualified with "today's". Yes, the statement is true that "exclusive right" means monopoly in today's capitialist society. That's also what it meant when it was written in the Founding Father's capitalist society. The difference was, back then the entire country was HAPPY to live in the freedom and prosperity of a capitalist society.

To be honest, I was trying to stay away from the "founding fathers" arguments because that's not only U.S.-centric, but also a bit overdone these days.

This is the most alarming and infuriating statement I've ever read in the gaming industry. I'm tempted to add my "Socialist Content" warning to Brian's blog link.

U.S.-centric? Hey dumbass, which country's laws do you think we've been talking about? What a dipshit.

The Founding Father's have been over done? What the hell does that mean? I might not have Brian's scope, but I haven't seen any "founding father arguements" in context of this discussion.

But, this is typical of people disconnected from reality. Immediately after:

And, although there are examples of people creating things for free, I'd argue that the profit motive is behind a majority of IP creation; remember it doesn't have to be some giant company profiting from IP, it's also small developers like me (and I assume like you) that would like to provide for their families doing what they know best

Suddenly, Brian likes capitalism again because it's benefiting him. I think a lot of neo-libs are confused about what they should believe. Thier college proffessors teach them to hate their country, their parents, and themselves for a plethora of reasons, but then faced with the reality of being an adult in the real world, they are torn by the need to drink coffee at Starbucks and own high end computer systems.

What do I do?

Apparently, I'm a theif.

I tried to argue it, but in the face of over-whelming logic, I have to admit the truth. Now, it's time to make a choice.

I could stop. I could pull everything down and go some other direction. There seem to be some other game platforms out there that you can buy and develop.

I could continue as I have, accepting that what I'm doing is morally wrong and knowing that I'm actively working against an ideal I personally hold as sacrosanct (Capitalism).

I was seriously torn for about 5 seconds. That's a long time for me, as I usually know immediately what the right course of action is. But what surprised me most about the answer is that it's the wrong answer.

I'm going to keep going. When EA starts cracking down on people (perhaps even me, since I've made myself a plenty big target), then I'll stop. Until then, I've just got too much invested. Oh yeah, and I want to. I love this game. I love creating this world, and I have no intention of giving it up now.

_______________________________________________________________________________

Oops! Wait a second. I'm not charging any money for what I provide! God, how dumb I am. I got so caught up in arguing a point, I allowed Brian to lead me astray.

That guy is really tricky, so you have to watch him. No, really...he's just passionate, and I got caught up in it.

So, back to where I was before. Not making any money, putting in ass loads of my time and money, and getting damn little thanks for it!

Legend of the Dragoon

Does anyone know how the game ends? What happens to Dart? Is Rose good or evil?

World Crafting 102 - Refurbishing Existing Worlds

Oh my god this is hard. It's the hardest thing I've ever done. This is the longest time I've ever spent on any project, concurrently or total.

I spent the last two days kind of "flipping out on my wife" because she gave me an honest critique of my server. She said, "Don't be mad, but if I was a "real" player on our server, I'd have quit a long time ago."

Her biggest complaint was the fact that I forced all starting skills to 0.1, which is the lowest you can rate short of 0.0. What's worse, there's practically nothing you can do with that much skill. So unless there's a "free skill award" for failing to perform a skill, you'll never advance to the point where you can do anything useful. Even if there is a skill award for failure at low levels, it's a long time to spend not getting any other reward than a small skill gain.

The fact is, we're in beta. I knew before I did anything on the server at all, I'd eventually have to re-adjust the skill requirements for crafting, combat, etc. Little did I know when I started working on my server, just how many more important and fundamental systems required re-writing and tuning up.

Urilia used to be the DarkenWood scripts. DarkenWood was originally a Sanctuary clone. For those who don't know, Sanctuary has what many would call "a totally custom script set". Mithril took the POL095 distrobution scripts and completely re-wrote or wrote from scratch his own script set. What's more, he exported many core functions from the POL Core and re-wrote those functions.

What does all of this mean? First, it means I was able to get a serious jump start on creating my server. I knew for a long time that I'd have to export some core functions to do what I wanted to do. Mithril had already done what I needed.

It also meant that I have a third-hand set of scripts. Mithril was brilliant, and really knows what he's doing when it comes to programming, but the guy makes some really HORRIBLE deicisions when it comes to game design and implementation.

Everything in this script set was designed to push the Player Character's skills as high as possible, as quickly as possible. In combat, the scripts would award skill gain before it even calculated whether you had a chance to hit or not. Your character started with 50K gold and was permitted to "buy training" in any number of skills from NPC vendors. Characters were maxing out skills in under a week.

The server was cut up into classes (a DarkenWood feature, I think). All classes could perform the skills of any other class, at almost the same level of ability. Non-crafting classes were able to create their own Master Crafted items.

Players Characters could hire "henchmen". Henchmen are AI NPCs that follow the main character around and can heal the Player Character and his friends, carry extra loot for them, and fight for them using any of the weapons and armor available on the server.

Player Characters could earn gold by selling raw resources, crafted items, and adventure loot to NPC vendors. NPC monsters dropped a lot of "loot". Gold could also be earned by asking NPC vendors for a "job". A job consisted of standing still while your character auto-looped a crafting skill. None of your own material or tools were used, everything was provided by the NPC vendor. When the "job" was completed, the vendor would pay more gold. The higher a Player Character's skill, the more gold they earned for the job.

Some people might be surprised to hear this was a strictly PvP- server. PvP was only allowed under "role-played" circumstances...whatever that means. The incredible skill gain was supposed to help Players role-play their characters better. How you can role-play a powerful character without actually experiencing anything to gain your power is beyond me. At one point, I was told that the reason for the skill gain was so "Player Characters don't have to power game to get to the top". Apparently, doing things that gain skill is "bad".

The out of control influx of gold into the game created MUD-flation much as it does on other servers. Players were selling incredible spells and powerful magic weaponry on their vendors for very little gold. This made the admin mad on a regular basis, but I couldn't understand his anger when he had control of everything.

Tinker characters could make "magic jewelry". What do you expect to happen?

The henchmen made sure that adventurer players never had to mix with other players. They could not only pay for training for themselves, but they could set their henchmen to train for days straight on "training dummies" at no cost. This meant that even though you were restricted to 2 henchmen following you at a time, you could walk into almost any dungeon and wipe everything out "by yourself". As a Game Master for a short time on that server, I always saw groups of 3 fighting in dungeons; the player and his henchmen.

How do these things encourage role-play again?

That only scratches the surface, unfortunately. I've spent about 9 months killing myself to re-write major systems, create new systems, and tweak things that work but don't quite work the way they should. In the last couple of months, we decided we needed play-testers to come on and help us figure out what needed tweaking most, first. It's been good for us, players find broken stuff like no programmer can.

The negative side of things is, players also expect things that might not be reasonable, and they have no idea what doing the work is actually like. It's not their fault, and everything they complain about is my fault. That doesn't change anything. It's a thankless, brutal job. But it's still an awesome job to have. Little by little, we're creating our own little world. It's going to work the way I've always wanted a world to work. Someday.

Why Damion and Brian can kiss my ass.

Recently, I commented on a post by Damion Schubert regarding White Wolf's misguided attempt to punish their customers. The result was a scathing replay by Brian Green.

I post the pertinent part of the article here, because I'm going to take Brian apart piece by piece. I don't think the ommission of the first 3 paragraphs changes the context of what Brian has to say, but for the full article and comments, follow this link: http://www.zenofdesign.com/?p=379#comments .

As for freeshards, let’s not fool anyone here. You’re not curing multiple sclerosis (we can always use more volunteers), you’re not feeding third-world children, you’re setting yourself up as god in your own little playground. Dave Rickey said long ago that online RPG developers have to have a bit of ego in order to get into these things; we’re setting ourselves up as gods of these worlds, in effect, and that takes at least some ego. The difference is that some of us create our worlds legitimately (or, hey, buy them from other companies), and some of us steal from others and claim to be doing things “right” this time.

Of course, we know from history how doing things “right” goes. Yep, you get all the corruption, favoritism, and mismanagement (and more!) without any guarantee that your account is going to be maintained. Once you set yourself up as god and then see what a pain in the ass it is to deal with other people that sure they could do a better job than your overworked ass, you’ll start feeling a kinship with Milo. Of course, that $10/month (which is really $15/month for almost every game these days) keeps the professionals a bit more honest. I’m a lot less likely to “help my friends” when it’s my income on the line.

And don’t pretend you’re anything other than the large company’s puppet. They can close you down at any time they want. It’s a simple thing with the current laws, it barely even takes a lawyer anymore. But, the freeshards serve a useful purpose so they keep them around. Consider this: it only takes one moderate length CS call to wipe out the profit the company would make from a player. Raph once said it would have been more cost-effective to ban people that needed CS help than it would be to help them in many cases. Guess what kind of people often leave the game and play on freeshards! And you don’t even have the subscription income to offset the costs of dealing with them.

But, let’s talk turkey now. Do you want to change things? Do you really want to stick it to the man? Then take all that self-righteous energy and work on your own damn game. Stop pretending you’re doing anything else than stealing (even if it is stealing from a large company, it’s still stealing). Go out there and find out what it’s like to really have to make one of these things. Set up whatever little utopia you want. Make a real game to compete with the games you hate instead of taking the lazy road to success.

I couldn’t be more serious about this point, either. Making your own game is the best way to stick it to the larger companies. The more people we have working on new games and coming up with new things, the more options players will have. Of course, the more likely outcome is that the project will collapse in on itself because making a game like this is a lot harder than you think. It takes more than downloading someone else’s work a few times, copying and pasting in a few scripts, then setting the game up on your cable connection.

Some things to think about.

Comment by Brian 'Psychochild' Green — 7/17/2005 @ 4:47 am

Brian, buddy... I never said anything about curing disease, laying on hands, or raising the dead. Let's try to maintain the slightest perspective on the matter.

I'll try to take your points roughly in order.

We pay for the client. Everyone I know does. If other people pirate it, there's nothing I can do about that except to discourage them verbally. We do not steal code from anyone. Our emulator is a custom data base manager written by a disgruntled player. The graphics, animations, sounds, etc are all on the client, which my players already bought, so we didn't steal a dime. The fact that the players are using the product in a way that you didn't forsee, does not mean it's stealing.

I'm definately not out to stick anything to "the man". I want the man to make money, and the people who work for the man to make money, and the places those people frequent to make money. I'm a capitalist. Go capitalism! Yay!

Apparently, OSI/Origins has done very well for themselves NOT catering to the consumers who play on the free shards. We are capitalizing on that, but only in terms of status. Is that what pisses you off the most? Not only are you unable to win back those dollars, but we aren't even getting the dollars you don't get? Wow, what a "tear it all down" attitude.

You developers are so blind to your own collosal failures, Brian. Your comments regarding Raph Koster's quote are disheartening. Yes, players who got ROTTEN CUSTOMER SERVICE (is that what C.S. stands for?) come to free shards. So what? I wasn't getting paid for the work I'm doing anyway, thus the word FREE!

Players who tried Customer Service in your business model were sick of the crap they got from the rotten players who pay to play BECAUSE it gives them the "right" to do whatever they want. You won't enforce behaviors on your servers, so you drive the people who would have logged in for years away and keep the punk kids who bounce from game to game, looking for the next thrill that puts them at the center of the "content". Christ man, can't you see the developers are their own worst enemies? When you have a "nightmare problem", that should be an immediate red flag that YOU, the company, are not doing something right; you haven't explained the new feature well enough, you didn't make it intuitive enough, you came up with a bad idea, players don't like doing that in a game.

I know about the favoritism and corruption. I've been on enough servers to see it happen. The difference here? I am directly involved in everything. I won't walk away from my work and let someone else flub it up. Yes, that means I've created a benificent dictatorship and when I'm gone, everything will go to hell. So what.

As for working on my own damn game, that's what I'm doing. If you had actually read my posts on MUD-Dev, you'd know that I see things from a radically different perspective. What's funny is, the perspective is yours, or people like you. I took what I thought to be good ideas, then read everything I could find on sites like yours, Raph's, Damion's, hell... look at my list on this blog. I honed and refined and threw away parts of everything I thought I knew. Yeah, I have the dream of "doing it right", but I'm not a programmer. I'm not some kid with too much time and not enough parental supervision.

I'm just a dumb, knuckle-dragging breeder who lives in a red, fly-over state; eeking out what meager existance is available to someone of my low breeding and stature. I have a family of 5 and a full time job that requires me to travel. I spend what little spare time I have working on this game to create solutions even the best developers in my list can't seem to figure out.

I don't have the time, skills, or wherewithal to create my own game from scratch. However, I do have time to slowly customize this existing game. It's not even about building a game, it's about proving there are answers to these problems. It's about proving that players on a virtual world can create a community with religions, working economies, and political structures. For me, this is my chance to move beyond the group of 8 players I've been running and playing with for 17 years. This is my chance to play with hundreds of players at once, to try all the large-scale ideas I've had pinging around in my head since 2001, when I sat down on a work-break and just started scribbling notes for an idea that just clicked into place.

Making a good game is not that hard, Brian. You just have to be willing to do what has to be done. You can't let yourself become a victim of inertia. And you probably can't be tethered to someone else's idea of a "safe idea" for a game.

Good luck dude.

Urilia

Urilia is a small world floating in the etheral mists of the Internet. This world is currently under construction, please observe all posted work zone speed limits.

I started playing Ultima Online in 1999, after my wife had been turned on to this "cool online game that's just like Dungeons & Dragons" by a friend at work. I was appalled, at first; internet games were a pale bastardization of the "pure" form of role-playing that my friends and I enjoyed.

The first time I allowed my wife to convince me to try the game out, I loved and hated it at the same time. This thing was graphically just like you'd imagine the towns and characters in AD&D. The number crunching and die rolling seemed to be fairly handled by this invisible Dungeon Master called "the server". Still, the emulator the shard ran on was so unstable, there were times I could count 20 seconds between taking a step with my character.

See, this Ultima Online shard was running on a free server. If you paid the money for the installation CD, you could put the standard client on your hard drive. Go make a few file changes and instead of paying $10.00 U.S. a month to play on the corporate servers, you paid only your ISP fees to connect and play on a free server.

Apparently, some internet geek with too much time and brains on his hands got sick of dealing with jerk players on the pay-for-play servers and reverse engineered the code in order to create his own server-emulator. Within 6 months, we had moved on to a more stable emulator running a similar set of scripts as our first server and were hooking back up with old friends on the new server, Mytharria.

3 months later, my wife and I were making names for ourselves on Mytharria. She was friendly and fun and would help anyone at any time. She went out of her way to welcome new players and help show them "the ropes". We were careful to maintain the context of the game and encourage others to stay in character and make our virtual world a better place for all. I was known for killing player characters who were rule breakers. At the time, I caught flak from the staff because most of the people I was killing were flagged PvP-, but the fact that they were breaking the rules often let me slide by. I was also the kind of guy who would open a gate to a remote part of the map, run through, let my persuer come through after me, kill them and then leave their ghost trapped on the remote island. It was cool to be helpful to Game Masters. They often gave you Runes to locations that were only accessible to a GM, but then they'd forget to ask for them back:-)

Mytharria was a pretty cool server run by a guy who went by the Internet chat handle, DreamWeaver. Mytharria ran on the POL (Pen-Ultima Online) emulator and E-script scripting language. The creator of this most stable and customizable of server emulators was Eric Swanson. Eric was a Canadian who had moved to St. Louis with his wife. His day job was a programming gig for a place that did slide-card readers.

Eric was going through an ugly divorce with his wife when we first heard of him, and later started hanging out with our group of Pen & Paper gaming buddies for a couple years. Eric went on to bigger and better things, no doubt, and has since handed over maintenance and developement to a group of guys.

Anyway, my wife, Stacey, was asked to become a GM for Mytharria. At the time, DreamWeaver was busy making preparations for a huge wedding to his new fiance. Many of his Game Masters had stopped logging in (people just get busy with real life). By default, Stacey became the only GM to log any real time in-game. At that time, Mytharria sported an active account base of 300 players, with a peak player count of 21 players on big nights.

Stacey was the Lone GM for about 3 months before she convinced the 1 or 2 guys who did occasionally log in to make me a Game Master as well. Inside the next month, we brought the peak online player count to 50+ on an almost nightly basis.

In the months before I came on board, Stacey and I found we made the perfect GM couple. Every idea I proposed, she would hone and vice-versa. We'd be breathless with excitement building idea upon idea and then jumping on-line to make things happen in-game. We both learned a great deal about what it meant to be a Game Master and what players expect from you and from other players in that time.

As with all good things, those times had to end. DreamWeaver's old Head Game Master (Internet handle of Razi) dropped by after an 8 month absence and saw this incredibly vibrant world. He immediately contacted DreamWeaver and convinced him to bring on 5 other "old buddies". Suddenly, we found that Razi was "back in charge" with a brand new group of friends to run the server AND he had some new rules for how things would be done moving forward. I think I lasted 15 minutes in the IRC meeting that morning before Stacey told Razi and DreamWeaver they could "F" themselves. I quit about 5 minutes after that.

We had put so much of ourselves and our lives into that little world, we felt totally betrayed by DreamWeaver. The "new rules" included telling us we could no longer do anything we'd been doing before without prior approval from Razi. Where were we going to go, and what were we going to do?

It was probably 6 months of major Mytharria withdrawl before I realized I'd never be happy playing on anyone else's server. I convinced one of my best friends (Eldred) to buy a server class machine and host some bandwidth.

Sounds easy, I know. Actually, I'd been formulating some of the ideas I thought would make a good server for many months and convinced Eldred and Stacey that we could do the whole thing. We could put up a server to end all servers.

As are many people who dive into something unprepared, I was totally lacking in the requisite skills to put together my own, on-line world. You'd think that a vision of brilliance would be enough. It's not.

I poured on all my charm and personality in an attempt to put together a staff of scripters. It was actually easy to get scripters to come and help, but it was impossible to get them to script anything I wanted scripted. It ended badly time after time and I burned a lot of bridges by firing scripter after scripter.

Finally, I taught myself VB6 and came back to scripting. Now, I'm able to do about 70% of what I need done on a pretty regular basis. I badgered Eldred until he learned some scripting and now he's doing it with us. I also got REAL lucky when an old gaming buddy contacted me from out of state and it turned out he was a scripter, too.

Death

Death and knockouts. Don't know why I'm having such a very hard time getting it right, but sure enough, it doesn't want to come together.