This thread is meant as a re-introduction for members of the previous incarnation of The Mugen Fighters Guild. If you found the place completely different from your last visit, you will hopefully find an answer or two in this thread. On we go~
Okay, so just what the heck is going on?!
~ Preamble ~
Since the beginning of MUGEN, starting with the framework consisting of KFM and some TESTP stuff everyone was free to use and modify, the biggest part of the MUGEN community has continuously introduced more and more layers of restrictive rules. As of late, those interesting "community ethics" have caused nothing but grief to current creators, forum moderators, and last but not least, players. There has been lots of drama and fighting about practically meaningless things, scaring away not only those who were sick of such bullshit, but also new members and potential creators.
So, this is our proposition. Join us in foregoing these restrictive rules to have a community without the drama and welcoming to players and developers of all skillsets! This new course of events affects different kinds of members of this community in different ways, so I'll break this up into three parts.
I'm a "leecher", a player, enjoying MUGEN as a game ...what does this mean to me?
~ Less tripwire "community rules" to watch out for! Yay! ~
For "leechers," this means you get to get more stuff!! Links to so-called "warehouses" are now, at least from our side, fully tolerated, and there might soon even emerge a number of new sites which aim to host as many creations as possible, which you can enjoy to the fullest without anyone judging you--grasp as many characters and stages as you can, if that is your cup of tea.
Also, the Request Forum (http://mugenguild.com/forumx/index.php?board=313.0) is now open to everyone once again, and this time with no restrictions on what you can request whatsoever. Please do not abuse this section and only request something if you find yourself unable to get it any other way.
But,
please do us a favor and try to develop a sense of quality on the way. With the new possibilities of releasing and distributing creations, you will also find a great amount of very crappy ones... try to keep quality up by supporting well-made, reasonably competitive characters, and giving constructive feedback to authors on how they can improve. Thank you very much.
I'm a "creator", author of screenpacks/stages/chars/whatever ...what does this mean to me?
~ More rights for you, at the cost of rights. ~
Depending on your attitude towards the whole "permission asking" vs. "open source" idea, you might like this very much, or not. In a nutshell, we're going to implement what we think Elecbyte/TESTP originally intended about MUGEN creations. No "written permission" from the author of a creation will be required to use his stuff, a simple mentioning of the origins of material used is entirely sufficient for a creation to be
commonly accepted. If you don't agree with this and want permission from people for the use of your stuff, that's great, but it's not our job to make people follow rules for your personal satisfaction--think "common benefit." As DGJ put it:
[11:54] <JaredW> if someone stole a character of yours, don't cry to us as there's nothing we can do
[11:54] <JaredW> go call your local police and ask them for help
No, this does not mean we explicitly "disrespect" creators who have a line like "DO NOT USE MY STUFF OR ELSE!" in their creations' readme files by saying, "Go on! Don't listen to them, just take whatever you want." People are free to follow their own conscience and respect such, ah, hints. We just decided not to support creator "wishes" to the point where we have to harass users with their sometimes ridiculous demands ("If somebody posts a screenshot of this anywhere, I will
quit!!") any longer. If somebody "steals" something, it will become known most of the time, and we will do our best to enable users the ability to make informed decisions.
I'm a "warehouser", I'd like to share other authors' MUGEN Creations ...what does this mean to me?
~ You're welcome! ~
Generally speaking, "warehouses" are now totally okay with us. Just like for creations, if its author says "DO NOT HOST MY STUFF!", we are not going to go out of our way to prosecute those who do not respect that instruction. However, we
do ask those people to give proper credit to the authors of the things they host! "Proper credit" would ideally include the following:
- name of creation
- name(s) of author(s) involved
- author's original website url
- version number (if any)
- time of last update or timestamp of last updated file
But that
we don't pursue you for this if done correctly does not mean you cannot still be smitten by us or the community for certain related practices that often go hand-in-hand with "warehousing"--for instance, if you strip the creations you host of their readme files and make them look like they were yours, you will very likely make yourself very unwelcome around here.
There are special points to consider should you get it into your head to host files that are still currently available from the original author's page--don't forget to link back to the main original page, try to stay up-to-date with the releases and updates . . . and couldn't you just link to the author's main page
without also hosting the files yourself?? After all, maybe the author wants visitors to come and visit his own page, you know?
Whichever of those you are, we hope you can agree with our ideas, stay at the forum and have fun around here.
For those entirely unhappy with the decisions we made, we re-enabled account deletion (http://mugenguild.com/forumx/index.php?action=profile;sa=deleteAccount). If you feel you can't agree with us at all, which we anticipate will be the case for some people, then by all means delete your account, and go in peace.
For a more detailed explanation on the creator-rights-thing, please look here (http://mugenguild.com/forumx/index.php?topic=62287.0).
If you would like to comment on all of this, you're welcome (http://mugenguild.com/forumx/index.php?topic=62290.0). In fact, we'd very much like to hear your opinion, the more the better :)
Other notable changes include:
- change to default theme. it's easier to maintain, and neat.
- general amnesty, all bans lifted
- complete staff reset, not many for now. we'll see more about this later.
- all old posts moved to archive (http://mugenguild.com/forumx/index.php?archive), for a new start.