Design-a-Troop Project - Temporarily Closed

Official News
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Hello everyone,

Some bad news for you today.
We’re going to temporarily close down the design-a-troop project :frowning:
Let me explain…

TL;DR - I screwed up. Design-a-troop will be back, but we’re temporarily closing it down, because legal stuff!

Unfortunately, we were all so busy with fixing issues from version 2.0 last week, that we didn’t think things through. When Jainus popped up with the idea, we simply thought “cool” and said “let’s do it!”. If we’d thought about the idea of community-related content, we would have realised there might be some legal issues that we needed to consider. This is entirely MY fault, and I should know better!

Anyway… it turns out there is some legal stuff we need to do first. We need anybody who takes part in something like this to sign a EULA (End User License Agreement), to ensure that there are no blurred lines around who owns the final content. It may seem pedantic, but the legal guys have impressed upon me (for about the 10th time in my career) that keeping this stuff in order is very very important.

Now, because we have NO simple way of policing EULA’s in this forum for people who might vote, we can’t continue in the current format. This means that we need to create a custom way to accept a EULA and participate in polls & idea submission. I’m going to get one of our guys to figure that out on Monday, but for now feel free to carry on discussion of ideas in a separate thread.

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Makes sense. It’s the same reason why you can’t just use any submissions we send you for troops and kingdoms, I gather.

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this saddens me, but makes much sense.

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Fair enough. I had wondered about how it would work legally :stuck_out_tongue: ah well, I’m happy to wait and jump back into it once it’s sorted out ^^

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Makes sense that there’s IP hurdles to clear. I’m still hyped!

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Seems like the easy solution would be to include this in the ToS when you sign-up for and use the forums.

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Seeing as I’ve signed these things before, I’m surprised I didn’t think of this issue. Oh well. Break time I guess.

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I spend half my life preparing legal documents for consulting work so this lot did cross my mind… However one can usually get around it with a few disclaimers, so I assumed we’d deal with that in due course.

My own firm’s legal department are invariably pretty reasonable and happy with applying a bit of common sense to these things. Hopefully 505’s experts set us out a pragmatic way forward soonest: this forum is provided by the GoW developers to discuss GoW content so I actually think that anyone trying to claim IP for content they’ve volunteered wouldn’t get very far.

Still better safe than sorry I suppose - just get a pop-up with a tick box so every forum member can unconditionally waive all IP rights to anything they put here… Or you pin a notice at the top of every thread reminding people of the blindingly obvious…

A more salient IP issue to check would be that the ideas don’t breach any third party rights (we’ve recently had suggestions like Dracula and Van Helsing which would be sailing close to the wind!)

Oh well, a respite gives everyone time to think of more fun ideas!

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could you not in the initial post about the creation say - by participating you understand that all content generated will be owned by us… MUHAHAHA so suck it or something along those lines?

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This is probably one of those, @sirrian jumped the gun again, mistakes.

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Makes sense. And whatever gets the community involved in troop design is still pretty cool.

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Considering he said as much, I’d say that’s a safe bet.

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Unfortunately not… we need to actually have a EULA that a person agrees to actively, not passively.

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Bah on stupid rules :stuck_out_tongue: a pox on them.

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maybe you could update the forum’s eula (did it even have one?) and make us sign a new one to log into the forum…

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does this mean your legal team browse the forums to see what us peons are doing??? WOwsers

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I feel so exposed thinking a legal team looks at the forums with that kind of legal authority.

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It’s a forum owned and run by Infinity+2. Are you surprised they might have staff (including legal) that might look at it?

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Staff no, legal yes. We knew from the word go that staff visit the forums and i can name almost five of them but none specifically from the side of lawyers.

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Lawyers would be among the people who monitor things quietly and don’t say anything to make sure the employees are following their own guidelines and not saying anything they shouldn’t.

Not only would it not be surprising, it would be expected.