What is BWF?

[johnt]

Relevant discussion in the comments here.

[FlowerChild]

Oi vey. That's some pretty heavy shit. Definitely worth a read.

The revisionist history technic has practiced is entirely remarkable. Again, I'd *love* to have a copy of Kanker's "fuck you" to modders in the readme of the first release of Technic, as it would utterly deflate all of their arguments.

[BinoAl]

Relevant discussion in the comments here.

I'm incredibly curious who he was now. It's unbelievable that they would sink that low, especially just so they that could redistribute a mod.

[Ethinolicbob]

I'm incredibly curious who he was now

There are a few possibilities as they have done this to a few modders now.
Still priceless when the Forestry modder made his bees explode the landscape when used in that modpack.

[finite8]

I'm wondering if the only solution here is for the all mighty Notch to step in and apply a smack down. I think he would be disgusted with all of this behaviour and the opinion from the person that created the game in the first place would have the greatest weight.

[XantyZon]

snip

While I can understand the direction you are viewing this from and how it leads you to your current position, I can not help but sense the faint aroma of troll.

IP rights is a very hot topic right now and your dismissiveness of it, puts into question your experience as a claimed mod author. In times past you could also say that someone copying art from an artist "is not stealing a product and diverting funds", but now we call it a Forgery and officially recognize it as being wrong after the Copyright Act of the 1970s, copyright law is very much in it's infancy especially now in our digital age. Just because it is not against the law at the moment, doesn't make it right no matter the value of the creation.

While attempting to shame the opposition into civility is not uncommon, I would prefer a system that speaks out against injustices and not one ruled by bullies or mob mentality. Why the hate, you ask? Funny how it is very easy to dismiss the value of something to someone else, as FC outlined.

- Remember just like you can't have manslaughter without laughter, you can not have forgery without forge.

[Ulfengaard]

Remember just like you can't have manslaughter without laughter, you can not have forgery without forge.

Wow. Sig'd.

[FlowerChild]

I'm incredibly curious who he was now. It's unbelievable that they would sink that low, especially just so they that could redistribute a mod.

Please don't speculate on who he is. Don't forget, he doesn't want the Technic crowd to know, and the Technic/4Chan crowd watches these forums.

[agentwiggles]

I'm wondering if the only solution here is for the all mighty Notch to step in and apply a smack down. I think he would be disgusted with all of this behaviour and the opinion from the person that created the game in the first place would have the greatest weight.

I had a similar thought recently, but I think the likelihood of this happening is slim to none... and, really, even if he did voice an objection to it, would it really put an end to all this? Strong and well-reasoned objections have already been put forward, and the generic response seems to be along the lines of:

"fuck you, FC, we're going to do what we want, and if you don't like it, well, we aren't breaking any laws, so you're just being a selfish asshole by even hoping to deny us unfettered access to your ideas and grand vision."

Which is fucked up, I know, and I hate it as much as anyone (besides maybe FC), but I can't see how adding one more voice of reason, even if it is Notch himself, would be the tipping point where the BWF gang realizes just how massively douchebaggy they are.

This kind of shit really makes me think that FC should just get the fuck out of this ridiculous, awful community, and do his own game. It's sickening how the MC community has become so devolved and cancerous, and we all know the game itself has been going downhill for a while now.

The prospect of "Returning" to some FC-developed "Home" away from even Minecraft itself becomes more mouthwatering every day.

EDIT:

Just read the comment thread on that site. Fucking disgusting. No way to know 100% sure if its true, but I don't doubt it given the prevalence of this kind of behavior by immature assholes on the internet.

This internet faction shit is starting to become very freaky to me... It reminds me of fundamentalist/extremist religious beliefs to a certain degree. That kind of blind devotion to a nonsensical cause and willingness to do frankly inhuman shit to support it can lead to nothing good.

[Toyi]

Oi vey. That's some pretty heavy shit. Definitely worth a read.

The revisionist history technic has practiced is entirely remarkable. Again, I'd *love* to have a copy of Kanker's "fuck you" to modders in the readme of the first release of Technic, as it would utterly deflate all of their arguments.

I don't have an original readme, but the quote is right here in the forum:
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1170&start=25
"I did not get permission from anyone and I didn't even bother asking. The Minecraft modding community is terrible and the egos some of the modders themselves have is incredibly terrible. I simply made this pack because I love these mods and want other people to experience them as well with as little work on their part as possible."

[Battosay]

Just wanted to post here some of the comments found on that page :
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/01 ... nt-1167074

See it as a reminder of what already happened in the MC community.
Oh and, while it might be easy to guess who he is for the old timers, don't. He wants to be out of all that shit now.

Spoiler

Show

You may have sorted it out now, but the attitude of Kaker, and the “behind the scenes” threats and bs justifications were nothing short of disgusting.

I’m done contacting you directly and I’m all about airing your dirty laundry in public seeing as how your godawful goon cronies literally bullied me out of the minecraft modding scene. I can back up everything I write with primary evidence too. Incidently, you are not a moderator for this site, so stop being so arrogant as to tell me what I may or may not talk about here. You wanna be a mod on one of the best regarded PC gaming sites on the internet, make your own site and earn the communities respect, you ain’t shit around here.

The bs I was talking about is how when I complained the mod I had created had been included without my permission, I was told that because I had received considerable publicity and a lot of donations for my mod as a direct result of inclusion in the pack that they felt perfectly justified.

I have no donation button, nor do I receive any money from advertising. Any donations collected on my behalf have never been paid to me. My mod was never supposed to be big, I didn’t want the publicity.

Mean while, while these public, untrue statements were being made, in private communication, I was being told that if I continued to make a fuss, the goons would be unleashed on me – which eventually happened and that “someone” would remake my mod, exactly, which also happened. I haven’t even checked to see if they ripped off my code or not, I don’t care any more.

I am far from an isolated incident, need I mention Better than wolves?

So fuck you, this is fact, not opinion. It is my opinion that this is a disgusting way to behave, disrespectful to the hundreds of hours I put into my mod, for free, for anyone to enjoy gratis.

I didn’t actually have a problem with the inclusion in the pack, I would have liked to have been asked first, because I needed to keep all the fan mail, complaints and tech support emails way out of my life – I would have liked the chance to set up a forum first so my life wasn’t buried by the deluge of publicity, but no. I didn’t get that and now you will never benefit from my modding experience ever again, I’m done with it. The internet moved on and left me and people like me behind.

I will never, ever personally identify myself, not by naming any of my mods or by associating myself with the identities I used to use, wanna know why – wanna know how sick those goons got?

They vandalised a tribute to my dead 2 year old son.

Those sick bastards and their actions destroyed a marriage which was hanging on a thread due to the above, they hurt my mum and dad as well as the inlaws. They made me seriously consider suicide. You know what, I don’t need to paint you a vivid picture of how that shit affects lives, and believe you me, I will not invite this into my life again.

I know you two guys probably had exactly zero to do with that, I understand that by chatting about situations in chatrooms and making posts on forums does not make you responsible for the actions of the people who used that information to try by any means to mold technic to their whims – but the person who told me in IRC that he would not be responsible for the actions of, and I quote “his loyal goons” knew the power of Something Awful, yogscast and the charisma of kakermix and what would happen if he shit stirred.

As far as I’m concerned, it’s done. I hold two grudges and only two – and those are grudges held against usernames, and I realise just how fruitless that is. The past is the past and I’ve learnt, as I said above, that the internet has changed and now seems to be packed full of people who be unpleasant to each other from a veneer of anonymity. Wake me up when Something awful is a place I can visit without feeling physically sick, modders don’t cut each others throats, chatrooms aren’t full of flame wars, forums don’t wage war on other communities and people don’t get rich from the kind of tactics used against me and god knows how many others.

I don’t even know what that means, I’ve not touched minecraft since so I’m well out of the scene. But now the word trolling has been bought up, and people are starting to flood to my old mods website, I sense that whatever tribe takes offence at my words has started their investigations, I’ll bid you goodnight.

Don’t think I’m silenced though, I’ll never forget what was done to me in the name of Technic Pack.

[FlowerChild]

I think what has gone wrong in the MC community can be easily summed up in the following tweet by Pahimar, author of EE:

@Oncostman @Cloudhunter @SOTMead @minecraftcpw personal opinions and baggage aside, we do what's best for the community.

I suspect many people see something like the above and feel all warm and fuzzy. I see something like the above and want to go on a cross country killing spree.

As long as some place the "good of the people" ahead of the rights and respect due to actual content creators, we're fucked. It turns the act of creation from an act of personal expression into an act of subordination to the masses, and allows the moral justification of pretty much anything in the process. It also makes popularity the only creative ideal.

Why someone would want to create, and do so for free, within an environment like that is beyond me. I know I don't.

[FlowerChild]

Just following up on the above, I wanted to share a quote that has been cycling through my head over the past couple of days, attributed to Ayn Rand:

It only stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting the sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master.

I think in many situations in life it is very wise to consider who it is that is promoting altruistic behavior and what it is they stand to gain if you listen to them, just as you consider what you stand to lose in the process.

What modders do, by its very nature, is an act of self-sacrifice in providing free entertainment to people, whatever their personal reasons may be for doing so. To then demand that they give more and more, and to call anything less than putting oneself up on a cross for the common good as "egotistical" or "selfish", is pretty much my definition of evil. It is selectively targeting those few amongst us that have both the skills and desire to give of themselves and holding them up to a standard of behavior that no person is capable of, while calling them scum for failing to do so.

The message it sends is that if you give, those that you give to will demand more and more until they have completely exhausted your capacity to provide.

I have always been one of the strongest voices within the community in opposition of this way of thinking, and even I am now exhausted by it to the point where allowing myself to become complicit in a form of behavior that I consider to be wrong is more palatable to me than continuing to fight. This whole debacle has become so exhausting that my own integrity has become secondary to resolving it.

Regardless, the days in which I am willing to provide to such a community are rapidly drawing to my close. Their supposed "love" of my work has all but driven the desire from me to continue to provide it.

[Sarudak]

You know I never actually thought of it that way. Something always bothered me about the way people act so entitled like modders owe them something. People saying that mod authors ought to do this or that to be compatible with other mods. They ought to add this or that because lots of people want it. They ought to make such and such an option because not everyone wants to play that way.

How does someone who gave you something for free owe you anything more than they already gave? Shouldn't you just be thankful that they are providing at all? I find it hard to understand how they can think the way they do. But reading what you said I think I understand more why it bothers me.

[FlowerChild]

I find it hard to understand how they can think the way they do.

It's pretty simple man: they are representing their own desires and trying to portray you submitting yourself to them as a virtue. Remember when Lex made some comment about being tired to wait for me to do the "right" thing? That's the "right" he was talking about.

It's also very easy to attract support and form a mob against an individual when you cite "will of the people", and when your own personal desires are shared by others.

I know you personally like to think better of people man, but I suspect self-justification is far more common than you think, with representing your own selfish desires as somehow being "right" being one of the common forms of that. If you can get a mob of other people to back you up in that, all the better.

This is also one of the reasons I'm in no way putting a positive spin on potentially adopting the Forge again. I am not doing what is right here, and I intend to fully own that rather than to try and justify that to myself. Again, if I do it, I'm doing it at the point of a gun...nothing more.

[muggsbud]

I am not doing what is right here, and I intend to fully own that rather than to try and justify that to myself. Again, if I do it, I'm doing it at the point of a gun...nothing more.

you definitely aren't doing anything wrong here either. At this point I think you can't define going back to forge as right anyway, as it would just be further promoting the 'entitled' players who demand it. In fact I think that's the exact wrong thing to do in this situation. It's sad that you even think a situation may arise where you ARE forced to use forge again.

On top of that I finally got to a point where i felt comfortable playing with java, and thought of starting a mod. Just something to 'fix' the jigsaw effects of fire. But now i don't think I'll be even looking at -playing- MC for another month or so. This situation has made even playing minecraft depressing for me as, on top of many other things, it has a similar rationale/mentality to current politics (don't ask, Off topic. banned here anyway)

EDIT: fix'd quote

[FlowerChild]

you definitely aren't doing anything wrong here either. At this point I think you can't define going back to forge as right anyway, as it would just be further promoting the 'entitled' players who demand it. In fact I think that's the exact wrong thing to do in this situation. It's sad that you even think a situation may arise where you ARE forced to use forge again.

Well, yes, I am doing something wrong. I am considering using the Forge in order to end this, largely for my own peace of mind, and in the process, abandoning what I believe is right. That is wrong, as you yourself say above.

The choice has come down to this: conform to the will of the masses, or watch a year and a half of my work get blatantly ripped off. Sacrifice a portion of my creative control, or watch it get ripped away entirely.

I have no doubt that if I let things just continue the way they are, within a year's time BWF will be the only face of BTW that is really known. Thus, by conforming at least I may potentially be able to preserve *something* of what it is today.

Even when I started fighting against this, I admitted up front that I didn't think I could "win" it, but that my own integrity required me to fight. I had a small lingering hope that perhaps other modders would see what was happening and wouldn't stand for it, but either they don't care, or have bought into this philosophy of limitless self-sacrifice as being "right", or are too wrapped up in their own desires with regards to wanting to play BTW alongside their mods, or are too afraid of the impact it would have on their own mod to call Lex on his bullshit (which is understandable).

Without that support though, and I think at this point a month later without a peep against this coming out of any major modders, it is reasonable to assume that no such support is forthcoming, there's no "winning" for BTW, or me, in this. BWF will keep going, and will be released with the backing of the head of the Forge while the community at large claims that as being the right thing to have happened because it suits their own desires.

So yes, I'm considering doing the wrong thing in what I consider to be a choice between the lesser of two evils, and again...doing so at the point of a gun. I saw this happen within the community with Technic already, and a year or so after that, that thing is being referred to by many as a mod itself, Kanker is revered as some kind of popular hero for his amazing ability to use Winzip, and revisionist history has somehow managed to paint that whole thing as some kind of heroic rebellion instigated by people doing the right thing against the evil mod creators that would not conform fully to the will of the people in selfishly providing free content that wasn't precisely in the format desired.

We've already seen how this all plays out, and I'm frankly exhausted in fighting against it while being vilified for it all the while.

[Shengji]

It's pretty simple man: they are representing their own desires and trying to portray you submitting yourself to them as a virtue. Remember when Lex made some comment about being tired to wait for me to do the "right" thing? That's the "right" he was talking about.

It's also very easy to attract support and form a mob against an individual when you cite "will of the people", and when your own personal desires are shared by others.

It's difficult not to think of cults and many other situations where charismatic individuals control others through these, as you said, evil means.

I've made so many posts over these last few days and deleted them within 5-10 minutes over these last few days, the stuff on RPS came out of a frustration at an inability to voice my opinion with any clarity. I think you, over the posts on this page have put words to my feelings.

I wish I could offer some words to change the negative impact all this crap has had on you, I've tried and deleted many times! I wish I could offer you my praise and suppport and not feel like I'm actually feeding the problem, even if it's with the most sincere of intentions. If I had to condense everything down to one word it would be Thankyou, that is, gratitude with absolutely no strings attached.

[Ulfengaard]

-snip-

I hate to be a 'me too', but this voiced my sentiments quite well.

[muggsbud]

Damn. At this point all I have to say is that starting your own game is, IMHO, actually the best choice at this point. That is if you still have any interest in this project. If for no other reason than your own moral.

[nukularpowar]

Oi vey. That's some pretty heavy shit. Definitely worth a read.

The revisionist history technic has practiced is entirely remarkable. Again, I'd *love* to have a copy of Kanker's "fuck you" to modders in the readme of the first release of Technic, as it would utterly deflate all of their arguments.

Hey,

I guess I was banned on my normal name for my comment in the recent RP2 history thread. For the record, I will be keeping my mouth shut on that issue going forward (assuming this isn't rebanned) because it's a tired arguement and I don't even use RP2 anymore to be defending it.

Anyways, I only reregistered because I believe I happen to have a copy of that readme, hidden in the darkest corner of my hard drive. Here it is in pastebin form:

http://pastebin.com/8xYjEaJ5

edit: looks like someone beat me to it. Ah well.

[CrafterOfMines57]

I guess I was banned on my normal name for my comment in the recent RP2 history thread. For the record, I will be keeping my mouth shut on that issue going forward (assuming this isn't rebanned) because it's a tired arguement and I don't even use RP2 anymore to be defending it.

Anyways, I only reregistered because I believe I happen to have a copy of that readme, hidden in the darkest corner of my hard drive. Here it is in pastebin form:

http://pastebin.com/8xYjEaJ5

edit: looks like someone beat me to it. Ah well.

That right there is the exact disrespectful attitude that has been passed on to the community, I don't know if anyone here has seen it yet, but here's a thread where CovertJaguar (developer of RailCraft) attempts to remove his mod from the pack until they meet his requirements for permissions, it doesn't go over real well. http://forums.technicpack.net/threads/r ... ove.34910/

[FlowerChild]

That right there is the exact disrespectful attitude that has been passed on to the community, I don't know if anyone here has seen it yet, but here's a thread where CovertJaguar (developer of RailCraft) attempts to remove his mod from the pack until they meet his requirements for permissions, it doesn't go over real well. http://forums.technicpack.net/threads/r ... ove.34910/

Well, that thread sums up Technic and their saying they ask for permission quite nicely.

Another great example of "we ask for permissions, but you can't say no". Awesome community they have going there. As I've said before, those forums really are the handicapped parking area of the MC community, so I guess we should be thankful they exist as it means we have to deal with those people less often elsewhere.

[Sarudak]

*sigh*

You'll be much better off separating yourself from all of this. Although it seems like this kind of attitude of extreme entitlement permeates gamers everywhere. Or at least those who frequent gaming forums.

[BinoAl]

That right there is the exact disrespectful attitude that has been passed on to the community, I don't know if anyone here has seen it yet, but here's a thread where CovertJaguar (developer of RailCraft) attempts to remove his mod from the pack until they meet his requirements for permissions, it doesn't go over real well. http://forums.technicpack.net/threads/r ... ove.34910/

If covert can't prove what he says, why should Technic have to prove anything it says. If it says it has permission, then that's good enough. Covert should put up or shut up.

Christ, I can't keep on reading that thread. My jimmies are rustled.