Abandonware Proposal

[Lucas]

1 hour ago, Big Roguey said:

Lucas, I think the large point of your post has already been discussed and agreed to. 

Yep, I know that. I was asked questions and so I answered (repeating myself and others again, if necessary).

That's fine. In any case, I only came into the thread to state my view as it asked in the OP, whatever it is worth,

1 hour ago, Big Roguey said:

And given that the criteria for this is no posts/updates on a mod for three years, I'm not actually sure if any of your current works would be in for consideration here?

If that is what it is, it would seem the criteria realistically might be TEW20 mods only - and this thread is asking for feedback, I'm assuming that's being read and taken into consideration. So I'm giving my take on it, given I have contributed to the community (and had more than one person trying to re-release work I've done for TEW20).

Until a rule is laid down, we don't know what it is exactly. It's only being proposed at this stage and explicit statements seem to be required whether something is abandoned or not. So I'm just saying my work isn't. But the moderating team know how to easily contact me if need be anyway.

 

[Paxlux]

1 hour ago, ColossusPT said:

There is a huge difference there though. The C-Verse is, for all intents and purposes, Adam's IP. It was created by him, it contains his original work. The incredibly valuable work done by modders is not your original work. You are, for all the work that you do, collecting existing data and putting it in the game

I agree and disagree with this. Even while doing real world mods, you're still putting a good amount of creative work into it. There are no online references where you can easily decide "okay this guy's mic skills should be X and his charisma should be Y." Mod makers have to eyeball that sorta thing and put their own creativity into it. Things like skills and attributes breathe life into mods and they do take quite a bit of creative work to get done. However I wouldn't make a big deal out of people importing things like title lineages because title lineages are basically just importing a Wikipedia list into your mod. At most it just saves people an hour of going back and forth between Wikipedia and TEW. In theory someone could do it on their own and have the exact same title lineages as another mod.

But in general people should be asking for permission and giving credit if they're going to use other people's work. That goes for any creative work in any medium. Where I dissent from other people in this thread is that I think at a certain point mods should become abandonware regardless of the author's feelings about it. If we came back to this when TEW2035 releases, odds are someone who's been gone for 10+ years isn't going to be around to care if other people are using their mod as a base, making their feelings about the concept of abandonware kinda irrelevant.

[Crym]

This is really quite confusing to me. The wording on Adam's post covers everything that people somehow seem to not understand about it.

"I don't want people to ever work on my project, it isn't abandonware!"
Then it isn't, like it's explicitly said on line 11 of Adam's post.

"People should contact others no matter what before using their content!"
As Adam himself said on line 9, where there's not only a whole 3 years of no updates, which is quite a long time, but it also requires you to contact the mod maker and only if you don't receive a response in 3 months you can start working on it.

"But I no longer care about TEW, I still make mods for this other new game!"
Once more, line 10, you need to search the internet for proof that this mod isn't being worked on by the original creator elsewhere.

 

"I had this personal issue that debilitated me for 3 years but I will surely be back one day to keep working on my mod, trust!"
So, you say your mod isn't abandonware, which should take a simple message you can write in 10 seconds on the board. If you don't update your work for 3 years and then don't even bother replying during the 3 month period someone contacted you to continue work on your mod, will you ever really return?

[Adam Ryland]

Thank you for everyone's votes and feedback, both here are from those who chose to send it privately. I think the thread has now been open long enough that everyone who wants to have a say will have had time to do so, so we're going to close it down at this point.

The team have gone over all the feedback received and, after some long discussions, we've come to the following decision.

Although the votes show that the majority of people are in favour of either this proposal or a slightly modified version, there have also been some very valid points raised about how this suggestion would be practically applied and the potential for some problematic situations to arise. As we've not been able to come up with a satisfactory way to address those concerns, we've decided that ultimately we're going to err on the side of caution and decline this policy proposal in favour of maintaining the current one (e.g. that you always need permission to use another person's data).