Napoleonic Wars: Official Scening Contest - Vote Now!
- Thread starter Vincenzo
- Start date
Users who are viewing this thread
- Status
You cant argue about community their opinion, the vote was fair and square. Ill start announcing the winners properly tomorrow and get everyone their prizes! 
CKtheFat
Veteran
No offense dude, I was just amazed, I heard so much negative about the map on the servers. Guess people actually did like it.
It seems a lot of people are more likely to give criticism than praise or constructive feedback, whether it is a new map or a new patch for the game, as we seem to have learned today heheh.
Well, you can actually, because of all the clans, gaming groups etc that people belong to will vote for their friends maps, so if one person has twenty people willing to vote for their map on the basis of the author saying "Guys, my map is in this poll, please vote" compared to another guy who has only a couple of people to call on - it can be a bit skewered. That's how community votes tend to go, people will always vote for their friends/clan mates. Best option is to have the people hosting the competition pick the winner.Vincenzo said:You cant argue about community their opinion, the vote was fair and square. Ill start announcing the winners properly tomorrow and get everyone their prizes!
Once again I have to say that I am surprised you allowed an unoriginal map into the contest for the following reasons;
- Firstly you're saying to your community that they can be rewarded for copying & entering unoriginal content into a competition.
- Secondly it puts yourselves on rocky legal ground, although I'd say there is absolutely no chance of the chaps behind CounterStrike or VALVe kicking up a fuss about this, it is the principle that counts especially if FSE want to go anywhere as a professional company. The legal problem is that you're offering a reward, in this case financial, to someone who is copying, even down to the name, the copyrighted work of another in the same form of media - that is plagiarism and breaks copyright laws. If there had not been a reward of any kind it would possibly be fine*, but as soon as you offer a 'prize', and they win a 'prize', then you're effectively paying them for stealing other peoples work. In this case it is the principle at stake.
-Thirdly; come on, DE_Dust is over 10 years old! I was playing it in the original versions of CounterStrike! It's such a well known, and well designed map, that to put it down for a competition is ridiculous, no matter how good or bad a copy of it it is.
Just something for you guys to think about for future competitions.
*Although by having it in your official map rotations you would then be having it as an official map, which then starts to head towards rocky legal ground again because you're endorsing the map as original content from your community and as an official part of NW when it is already under copyright for another company & their game.
Thank you for your concerns Rapier17.
But I'm sure Valve does not care about community additions to a game.
But I'm sure Valve does not care about community additions to a game.
As I said I do not think they would. It's the principle.
To put it this way, as a company you have to consider the legal implications of what you do with your product. If it were a mod then the implications would not be so important, but as your product is an official paid-for product that requires Mount&Blade: Warband you have effectively become a minor mouth-piece for Taleworlds. If you say you don't care about plagiarism then it potentially reflects that perhaps Taleworlds don't care about plagiarism either. By rewarding someone for stealing the work of another you're saying that FSE don't care about copyright.
You can't think like a modder anymore with your DLC and formation of your company. You have to think & respond as professionals if this is truly what you want to be doing for your profession. You should have come back with a good, reasoned argument as to why you, as a company, view the map 'Dust' as being suitably different enough from the original for such-and-such reasons. Instead you resort to one line within which you include an asterisked word, suggesting it is a profanity, as part of your response. Very professional.
Tell me, purely as an example, whether you think that if a company such as DICE had a community map competition for BF3, if there were modding tools for it, and someone submitted an exact 1:1 copy of Carentan from CoD1, called it 'Carentan' and had the exact same visual theme as the original - would DICE put it down for the short list?
To put it this way, as a company you have to consider the legal implications of what you do with your product. If it were a mod then the implications would not be so important, but as your product is an official paid-for product that requires Mount&Blade: Warband you have effectively become a minor mouth-piece for Taleworlds. If you say you don't care about plagiarism then it potentially reflects that perhaps Taleworlds don't care about plagiarism either. By rewarding someone for stealing the work of another you're saying that FSE don't care about copyright.
You can't think like a modder anymore with your DLC and formation of your company. You have to think & respond as professionals if this is truly what you want to be doing for your profession. You should have come back with a good, reasoned argument as to why you, as a company, view the map 'Dust' as being suitably different enough from the original for such-and-such reasons. Instead you resort to one line within which you include an asterisked word, suggesting it is a profanity, as part of your response. Very professional.
Tell me, purely as an example, whether you think that if a company such as DICE had a community map competition for BF3, if there were modding tools for it, and someone submitted an exact 1:1 copy of Carentan from CoD1, called it 'Carentan' and had the exact same visual theme as the original - would DICE put it down for the short list?
rapier17, I think you're missing a little bit of information about the game engines that would clear up your copyright concern and maybe allow you to appreciate my scene more. Namely, it is impossible to copy a map from the Half-Life or Source engine into the Mount and Blade engine.
This is because, unlike most FPSs, Mount and Blade scenes don't make use of BSP to store a series of brushes. Mount and Blade maps are composed entirely of a heightmap and a series of entities. Furthermore, to add a custom entity, one has to create a separate mod. This means that to have a Napoleonic Wars-compatible scene, one is limited to only the Napoleonic Wars entities. It also means that things like indoor areas (aside from the pre-built house entities) are modelled inherently different than in most FPSs.
So the nature of the work is fundamentally different, it literally can't share any amount of the copyrighted work, and it doesn't decrease the value of said work. Aside from the €25 I'm abiding by all four of the United States fair use doctrines and if need be I'll graciously refuse to be commercially compensated to be sure.
Now as for arguing that the results of a community vote will be skewered, skewered towards whom? Won't the results be skewered proportionately towards the clans, gaming groups, etc. that constitute the community? If 20% of the votes are skewered towards one group, do you feel like somehow that group makes up less than 20% of the community or do you just think that certain groups' views aren't as important to consider?
This is because, unlike most FPSs, Mount and Blade scenes don't make use of BSP to store a series of brushes. Mount and Blade maps are composed entirely of a heightmap and a series of entities. Furthermore, to add a custom entity, one has to create a separate mod. This means that to have a Napoleonic Wars-compatible scene, one is limited to only the Napoleonic Wars entities. It also means that things like indoor areas (aside from the pre-built house entities) are modelled inherently different than in most FPSs.
So the nature of the work is fundamentally different, it literally can't share any amount of the copyrighted work, and it doesn't decrease the value of said work. Aside from the €25 I'm abiding by all four of the United States fair use doctrines and if need be I'll graciously refuse to be commercially compensated to be sure.
Now as for arguing that the results of a community vote will be skewered, skewered towards whom? Won't the results be skewered proportionately towards the clans, gaming groups, etc. that constitute the community? If 20% of the votes are skewered towards one group, do you feel like somehow that group makes up less than 20% of the community or do you just think that certain groups' views aren't as important to consider?
CKtheFat
Veteran
Rapier, have you actually looked at the arabian house props and back to Counterstrike? There is nothing copy-pasted! The games run different engines! Making Dust was made difficult because of this, not easy, and it took an amount of creativity and workarounds to get the maps to resemble each another. I played Counterstrike a good bit years ago, but I wouldn't have recognized the map to be Dust without having first read that it was a recreation of it. Despite all this, disgrntled made a pretty cool map which earned one of my votes.
Fort Mackinaw was meant to be a NW version of Fort Mackinack in Michigan, the United States. It didn't take me long to significantly, then entirely, deviate away from its real-life counterpart. The spelling remains similar as a tribute.
Fort Mackinaw was meant to be a NW version of Fort Mackinack in Michigan, the United States. It didn't take me long to significantly, then entirely, deviate away from its real-life counterpart. The spelling remains similar as a tribute.
- Status
