Monday, April 30, 2007

Firearms 2 Mod is a No a-Go-Go

I can in part imagine what the Firearms team think and feel, after years of developing a mod it was snatched away from them by a bunch of over zealous 'fans' and now using the Firearms name are making a sequel to a mod they never created but stole.
The same can't be said for the Firearms 2 Team, who kicked off their mod in August 2005 by hijacking the Firearms Forums, FTP, and servers using back-door access supplied by our server provider, ReconGamer. Every single team member and most of the forum admin/mod staff were banned, and we lost all of our art source and personal files stored on the server. As a result, this website was rebuilt from archived sites. The server takeover didn't affect the domain names, so the FA Team still controls those. For a while, they redirected to the site of our follow-up mod, World at War.
Full Story

The developers of the original Firearms mod don't want to remember this gross past, (understandably so) they are moving on and making World at War, a Half-Life 2 mod.

What I don't understand is how the gaming community can allow this sort of behavior and even support it (yes people do support Firearms 2). While Firearms 2 may turn out to be a good mod it was stolen no less, if we took all legalities out of the equation and said that Sony stole Bungie and plans to release a second rate knock off on the Playstation 3 would anyone agree much less support Sony in that move?

Is it different that this is the mod community? Shouldn't it be even more aggravating to the community that such a mod is in fact profiting off the name of another teams entire efforts, even the original creator didn't like the idea of giving Firearms 2 to another team:
During this period, Zerk [creator of Firearms] consulted with the DICE legal team and learned that, despite having signed a contract, no legal action could be taken against the theft of intellectual property online.
I don't see how people can be shallow enough to say 'yes we support this mod because it looks cool' despite it being a complete ripoff of someone else's work, better or not it's stolen and if we continue this line of thought we could see more of this happening - more startup mods having their thunder snatched from them due to such and such glory hogs who think they know better.

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