spoiler alert though, it’s literally everybody. because everyone else is doing it, it’s not possible to survive as a business in a competitive space without doing, for lack of a better word, the devil’s work. It will take a major social disruption to change this, but it won’t happen in an organized fashion because we as a species are pathetic. The disruption will be the end of the world - North America cracking down the middle due to all the fracking, the Greenland glacier sliding into the ocean all at a go, something like that. FAFO endgame shit, due any minute now anyway.
As always with the Crown Prosecution service in the UK they love to bully and make an example of Autistic people. Only added by corporation running the court system, The CPS' Prosecution barristers are known to enjoy a life of luxury and gifts from them but you cant touch any of it.
Following an assessment by a psychiatrist, however, the judge in the case determined that Kurtaj was unfit to stand trial, and so the jury was asked only to determine if he had actually committed the hacks, but not whether it was done with criminal intent.
I need a solid tutorial vid to get me goin on this one, somehow it’s mechanics fail to click in my brain and I have the hardest time just not dying. Anyone have a lead on that?
This was me too. I know I would love it if I gave it the time but my first few playthroughs didn’t catch me right away. Couldn’t get into the game loop
Did you try it recently or during EA? They added an extensive guided tutorial/story now that gets you through the beginning.
Other than that, the best advice I ever got was not to go too wild with the glade openings, only do it if you need something otherwise you're just raising the hostility for no reason.
Beside each race portrait there is an expanded menu that shows what makes them happy. Referencing this menu is essential to ensure your workers don’t die or leave. I pretty much always get a lumber mill or carpenter asap to help speed up plank production too. Cloth and brick production are pretty essential too, but with planks alone you can at least get everyone housed in the large shelters.
My main suggestion is to set your recipe limits - if you just keep making everything beyond reasonable levels, you run out of materials nonsensically, i.e. “No, I REALLY don’t need 200 brick, thanks, I’d rather have some pottery, just a LITTLE BIT, PLEASE”
I think I love this game so much because I tend to be a macro player in RTS games (queuing up a bajillion actions for each unit)… so being able to set “keep my stocks of these at 20, these at 10” gives me such joy.
DLed for posterity, so once it’s down I can still share it with those interested in actually enjoying it, rather than letting Nintendo continue to ruin shit like the whiny babies they are.
It’s less Nintendo and more shitty trademark and IP laws.
If you don’t aggressively go after anyone that is transgressing your IP, you can lose it.
IP really needs major and comprehensive reform. It’s not going to happen anytime soon as too much is built up around the status quo, but it really should be done.
Edit: Also, it’s a bit more complicated in terms of IP, but it is relevant to future works.
For example, fictional characters.
Let’s take Mickey Mouse as an example. Steamboat Willie is entering public domain, so the protections on the character as defined in that work is entering the public domain. But characterization of the figure in works still under copyright that have added unique details are still protected.
But the test for infringement of a fictional character is twofold. (1) Can the figure be copyrighted? (2) Is there infringement of unique characteristics?
That second part becomes much more difficult to enforce if you’ve been allowing millions of variations of your protected character when you initial work defining the character is no longer enforceable.
So if LoZ on the NES enters the public domain making ‘Ganon’ as a pig usable by people, but since that game there’s been tons of spinoffs by others having Ganon as a human before Nintendo had Ganon as depicted in OoT, then they’d have a much harder time enforcing copyright on Ganon being depicted as a human even if Ganon as a pig was no longer under copyright.
No lawyer is going to say “yeah, let 3rd parties use your IP willy nilly, I’m sure it will be fine and not bite us in the ass later on.”
For example:
Copyright protection is effectively never lost, unless explicitly given away or the copyright has expired. However, if you do not actively defend your copyright, there may be broader unauthorized uses than you would like. It is a good idea to pursue enforcement actions as soon as you discover misuse of your copyright protected material.
If you have experienced copyright infringement, you have the right to pursue a lawsuit. However, you only have a limited time frame during which to file a claim. This legal principle is called the “statute of limitations.” Ensuring that you file a claim to enforce your copyright within the statute of limitations is crucial. If you wait too long, you will lose the right to enforce your copyright and obtain your deserved damages.
So a fan project that you don’t enforce against for three years which eventually monetizes as competition without infringement trademarks would be a potential concern.
...You realize that none of that is setting precedent, it just means you can't pursue, right? You still can't lose the IP even in the worst-case scenario, and the first example you gave even says that.
Copyright protection is effectively never lost, unless explicitly given away or the copyright has expired.
You seem to just really strongly want to justify Nintendo's actions, which are not the norm across the industry for how IP issues are handled....
Like yeah there's shitty IP laws, and shitty trademark laws, but they don't justify Nintendo's specific reactions.
which are not the norm across the industry for how IP issues are handled…
Go ahead and cite whatever you think the ‘norm’ is then.
Where else do you see publishers turning a blind eye to unlicensed remakes of their games?
The difference isn’t Nintendo being more legal trigger happy, it’s that their stuff is way more often being used in unlicensed ways so they come up more often in stuff like this.
But there’s a ton of examples of the same being the ‘norm’:
-Everything related to Bethesda's mod scene
-The entire Touhou doujin scene, even including sold games/music
-Sonic games which included fans being brought in for sonic mania
-Megaman and Street fighter have huge histories in modding. Pretty sure megaman has an entire fan-game for Zero's orgin story
So...That gives us Bethesda, Sega, and Capcom at minimum for big players, and Touhou pretty much shows you aren't going to lose your fucking IP over this.
No, Nintendo really does just do it more often than everyone else. You don't gain that rep absolutely everywhere just on hearsay.
Bethesda is owned by Zenimax, and an officially licensed mod scene is completely different.
If you want to run the mods for Bethesda’s games, you need the retail software to do so.
I guarantee that if a group was creating a Morrowind remake that didn’t require owning some Bethesda core game that was being modded to achieve that, Zenimax’s lawyers would be quick to be on top of the issue.
It’s not like there’s not examples where Bethesda’s lawyers caused mods to be shut down where it involved redistribution of Bethesda game assets without needing to buy the game.
It’s *less about shitty trademark or copyright laws, and more about Nintendo.
First off, in all of your posts, you really don’t seem to realize that trademark has nothing to do with fan fiction or recreations. Not a single project that anyone has referenced has attempted to mimic Nintendo’s name and brand to sell a product. Zelda is trademarked, yes, so people can’t sell video games with “The Legend of Zelda” name- which has no bearing on this article or the work cited.
Second, the statute of limitations doesn’t go back three years to some arbitrary date, it goes back to when the alleged crime or infringement occurs. So if someone begins selling a TLoZ knockoff game, they have no grounds in court to say something dopey, like “well actually I started thinking about selling Zelda knockoff games five years ago, so even though I just started last month it is out of the statute of limitations”.
Third, from your list of shitty companies making it the norm, try Valve, who actively gives permission for people to mod and remake their games, and even allow the selling of remakes on their own platform. Or try Capcom, a Japanese company who has never attacked a fan game and still has full control over its IPs. But I digress, not being the norm has nothing to do with this.
If the laws surrounding copyright were suddenly and drastically changed today, Nintendo wouldn’t change their stance or their scare tactics. They don’t have to do it, they aren’t losing out on sales from it- and if modders had the ability to stand up for themselves in court, I don’t believe Nintendo would win even a notable amount of cases.
Two: Actually, per Petrella v. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s supreme court decision, damages are limited to 3 years prior to the suit being filed with no recovery for earlier infringements.
The same Hasbro that tried to make a land grab for all D&D derivative content by changing their Open Game License to grant them irrevocable, perpetual rights to it. This is not a nice company as they demonstrate time and again.
So maybe it’s time the RPG community stopped thinking Hasbro are ever going to change, mourn for what D&D has become, but move onto something else.
Yeah Pathfinder 2e is good. It’s more crunchy than 5e, but that also means there are rules for most situations that come up. I like the 3 action system, much better than the old, “main action, swift action, move action, move- equivalent action” thing the old version had going on.
I have a group of friends, half in same town as me, half on the other side of the country, that get together once a week ion discord and play dnd via a self hosted foundry virtual tabletop docker. We used to play 5e but we decided to try out pathfinder 2e to see if we liked it and we haven’t gone back, pathfinder is fantastic. The flexibility with the actions makes it feel like you always get a chance to do something and you aren’t just wasting your turn when you are getting into position or whatever. Feels close enough to 5e that most of your intuition will be pretty close, just use a different website to look shit up. Highly recommend pathfinder!
What? We don’t have a plethora of other games here in the US? I’ll have to remind the owners of all those shops that those hundreds of other games they’re selling currently only exist outside of the US. How embarrassing for us…
The OGL License happened after Larian teamed up with Hasbro to make Baldur’s Gate 3. Thankfully Larian is still independent so it can continue on to make better RPGs without Hasbro.
He’s not talking about Larian, he’s talking aboutbthe actual D&D team at Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast. Hasbro got a new CEO last year and the way they’ve been operating certain business units like WotC has changed dramatically, coupled with massive layoffs across many Hasbro subsidiaries. All he’s saying is the DnD team at WotC now is completely different to the one that Larian knew as they developed BG3.
Please do not tell me that anyone is surprised that a triple A game studio laid off most of their employees as a reward for a job well done.
Please. Please tell me everyone has figured out that nearly all large game dev companies are pure fucking evil.
EDIT: Welp, thats what I get for making an ill informed post after 36 hours on the road before passing out in my motel, yep, I probably should have read the article.
The headline here on lemmy is unreadable gibberish with BG3 in the title. It could as well be
Layoff 5blagagasjjee Swen shgrwaaahahaaaa Baldurs Gate 3 dacghgfrtf gone. Click here for ads.
So i get where he’s coming from. On the other hand, once you start reading the ads with some content in between it becomes clear immediately that this is about the IP holder, not the game studio.
‘There’s almost nobody left’: CEO of Baldur’s Gate 3 dev Swen Vincke says the D&D team he initially worked with is gone, due to Hasbro layoffs
Same Lemmy title as the article. You know exactly who’s talking (“CEO of Baldur’s Gate 3 dev Swen Vincke”), about whom (“the D&D team he initially worked with”), what happened to them (“is gone”) and who is to blame (“due to Hasbro layoffs”).
As far as titles go, it’s pretty good at telling you exactly what the actual article is about. Sure, you may need basic knowledge about how a licenced product works, and that BG3 is under the D&D licence. It would be rather hard to fit all that in a title.
Off-topic, but when I mentioned this in a different thread, an actual answer I got is basically the fediverse is really similar to reddit - how can the culture be any different?
Anyways, if the fediverse starts to become Reddit 2.0 I think it would be high time to go.
You…You might want to consider reading the article.
Hasbro owns Wizards of the Coast, who own DnD. Larian, a completely separate company, got the rights to make BG3 from Hasbro. Hasbro laid off nearly everyone Larian Studios worked with at Wizards of the Coast.
What? No. They’re saying that Larian, a completely independent company, worked with a team from Wizards of the Coast. Wizards of the Coast is owned by Hasbro. Hasbro laid off 1100 employees from Wizards of the Coast. Many of those employees were on the team that worked with Larian to make BG3.
Larian Studios had literally nothing to do with this. Larian did nothing wrong.
laying off 1,100 employees as a way to "modernize our organization and get even leaner
Yeah because that’s what we want of the ones in charge of publishing, administering and providing support for some of the most played games in the world now and historically: leanness! The fewer people to take care of important things, the better! 🤦
I know that he’s talking to investors rather than players, but come on! Also, there’s nothing “modern” about stupidly trying to increase profits via mass layoffs without expecting blowback and for quality to suffer. That’s some 1700s bullshit right there.
Also, when your company is ailing (read: Not making more profit than last year, no matter what ocean of money your managers are swimming in), fire the good parts. That’ll fix it!
Hasbro is unprofitable, but there was a memo a while back that said Wizards of the Coast was their most profitable division. Possibly their only profitable division. That covers Magic: The Gathering and D&D.
This is also why we’re seeing both those properties getting the fuck monetized out of them. Big influxes of MTG sets based on other licensed properties, and attempts to undo the open licensing around One D&D.
But then it makes even less sense to lay people off from those divisions.
They also said in a memo maybe 2 years ago they want WotC to be worth double their value in 5 years. That’s pretty unrealistic standards for an already established company.
The best way to save hasbro is cut back on making trash plastic toys for kids and stake the company to a well-staffed, functional WoTC who can deliver what MTG and DND fans want.
Is that in the original spirit of the company? No, but who the hell cares? Certainly not investors and certainly not consumers or they’d be buying the toys
God that’s so corporate-coded - instead of fixing your divisions so they are all profitable, just take your two successful divisions and squeeze them like you’re trying to get blood out of a stone.
I’ve survived layoffs at companies where we were told that following the cuts, we were going to get leaner and more agile and more efficient.
I’m sure you’ll be just shocked to learn that what actually happened is I ended up doing twice as much work to pick up the laid off people’s slack, and at the end of the year got a smaller bonus than the previous year, along with a raise that didn’t cover inflation. Overall company profits, of course, hit a record high.
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Aktywne