I would just like to introduce myself, I'm new to the forum here but certainly not new to the mudding world. I started my mudding career on a rom called Amtmud: The Burning Lands and from there discovered godwars and swr muds. I personally prefer LOW4 muds but haven't been able to find any good ones that stick around in a few years. I am saddened by this but have not given up my search. If any of you out there know of a good LOW4 mud that will most likely still be there next month then please inform me. Thank you, introduction is now over :)

No idea about that codebase…

But welcome to MudBytes!

It's a GodWars derivative that most of Dystopia/MindCloud/MidnightDreams/et al stemmed from at some point. GW MUD lineage is pretty shaky at best due to all the theft and backstabbing among owners :P

Be that as it may, Kline, I'll just second what Hades said. :wink:

There was definately a LOT of theft involved in the godwars family but can you really blame people for wanting to use Kavir's work? I know it's wrong but still can't blame them much for it, after all, if not for those thieves, i'd never have gotten so into mudding as i did. I liked mudding on Rom, I fell in love with mud on GW/Low4. I just wish i could find a decent Low4. I used to run one but lost the interest in coding a few years back… i'm afraid i might have to start another before too long cause i just haven't found a home since my favorite Low4 was shut down.

Code theft is still code theft, even if it can also have good consequences. Turn it around and consider how you would feel were you the developer whose work was stolen…

Uh… yeah you can.

Just because something is great doesn't mean you can't blame someone for stealing it. You couldn't really blame me for wanting to drive that awesome new fuel efficient car you just bought, so I guess you couldn't really blame me much for stealing it from you even though its wrong, right? I mean afterall, I might let a bunch of other people drive it and they switch to more fuel efficient cars and gas prices across the board go down because of my theft of your property. As long as some good came out of it, it doesn't matter how much that might hurt you, even if you lose your job because of lack of transportation and are out several thousand dollars. It's fine, right? You won't press charges I'm sure?

On a side note, forums like these and the ones on the MUD Connector are very, very heavy on the presence of MUD Admins that put a lot of work into their own games while respecting the hard work others have put into their own. You're not going to find a very sympathetic attitude toward code theft in places like this.

Bad admin! :sad:
Surely if you've been in mudding for years you already know better than this. :sad:



Amen! :smile:

ok, maybe i phrased it wrong, i do find their actions deplorable, but i do see why they wanted to steal the code. i'm not saying it was right, just that i see their point of view in a way. now, wanting to do something and acting on that desire are two different things. i am glad in a way that they took that code and altered it to make the great games i've played, but i'm not glad they screwed kavir over. as for the analogy of stealing my car, sure i'd be pissed about that but if i were to look at the bigger picture in the scenario you presented, i'd be extremely happy with the effect the theft had, as in the dropping of gas prices. i'd still be pissed about losing my job and my car, but the overall benefit outweighs the negative side. if everybody can get cheaper gas (and we ALL need that) then the loss of a job and a car isn't really that big of a deal in the long run. if you just look at the bad that happens to yourself and ignore the good that the entire community recieves then you're being short-sighted. i'm not saying everybody should go out and steal cars or code, cause the results wont ALWAYS come out the same. i'm just saying that in this particular case, there was some global good for the bad actions. sure kavir got screwed, but him being screwed over brought a good number of mudders into the community which creates more opportunities for people to create something original. and now i'm rambling on and losing track of what i was saying but i'm sure you people will point out to me any mistakes i've made here :)

Theft is theft, no amount of "good results" can possibly justify it.

You see only one small little sliver of the much bigger picture. Code thieves everywhere have caused a steady decline in the number of new releases. It's also caused a number of developers to leave the community at large entirely and go private to focus on their own projects. It fuels large amounts of hate and anger among those who remain. The lack of new material results in a deluge of stockmuds that are all the same. Players come to them, see they're all the same, and either leave or stay on one or two of them. Which has led to a massive drop in the over all number of players available.

I'm not sure the car analogy works as well as it could, but ok. So you've caused a momentary drop in gas prices. Lets move forward a bit. Your car getting stolen caused a bunch of people to convert to more efficient models. The small silver of the bigger picture, yes? The car companies are all hurting because this rapid shift due to the theft of your car has left them unable to meet demand. Their inability to meet demand leads to layoffs. Thousands of people are now out of work. These people cease spending money on all but their essentials. Local economies begin to suffer. Businesses close, and more people are out of work. Whole cities are now in depressive economic states. Unemployment is on a sharp rise. People have begun losing their homes. Then it happens. The Arabs are sick of losing money on their oil, so OPEC kicks the price per barrel through the roof. Suddenly that wonderful monetary dip in gas prices no longer exists and prices are skyrocketing, all while there's a huge depression in full swing. All because your car got stolen and you thought all was well because a little good came from it. [Note for the uninitiated, no I did not just claim the US economy is in a full blown depression. Please don't go there. The preceeding was brought to you by ridiculous hypotheticals inc.]

So do you still think the momentary influx of Godwars players was good for the overall community at large?

It doesn't really matter whether or not they had good reasons from their own point of view to steal the code. As many have said, code theft is terrible for the development community in the long run. The people who steal it almost always are not sufficiently good programmers to make useful contributions; those who play the games typically aren't developers; and the developers witness to all of this get edgy about sharing their work.

Besides, this whole idea of accepting theft due to its potential positive benefits is completely untenable when taken in a larger society. Who gets to decide which thefts are worthwhile? Are you going to start believing every person who, when caught stealing something, goes on about how they thought it'd benefit more people than it hurt?

Code theft is code theft, full stop. People who commit it are slimy, as are those who perpetuate it. As a friendly word of advice, it is not very advisable to spend much time defending the potential far-stretched benefits of code theft on a forum comprised of mostly developers. :wink:

True GodWars was originally stolen! But KaVir has since released the code to godwars (Thats GodWars 1 for those not in the know… the one based on Merc2.1) There have been several successful muds over the years based on this code, i have had the pleasure of running 2 of them :).

You are right tho Igabod, there arent many decent lords of war 4 based muds around anymore. i think this is partly due to the fact that the code is unstable, i had the misfortune to be on the developement team of low4 but Sage, the main developer decided to release the code in its unfinished form… complete with bugs!

Kline you are wrong about Dystopia being based on Lords of War 4, dystopia is based upon an early version of lords of war from 1998 (lords of war 3 and 4 were based on some code i was working in for some one else) I actually possess the code that became Dystopia i was given it several years ago!

GodWars may have started on stolen codebases but its still going 10 years on, with a much diluted playerbase!

How true, just ask Prometheus… :tongue:

Ok, you've explained it to me in a way that makes sense to me, and i'm not disagreeing with you totally, i'm just saying that i'll always be glad that Low4 came about, it's origins as a stolen code do not in any way diminish the fact that it was/is a good code.

I don't think anyone here has disputed that it was/is good code, and I can easily see your perspective in that had it not come about by whatever means then you'd have had no way to have ever gotten to use it. But I really think it'd be a much greater boon to you too if it had been derived from code that was released (and supported) than something stolen. :shrug:

If it hadn't been stolen, and quite possibly supported, there might have been a larger number of Low4 muds out there. *shrug*

Back to feeding my new kitten…

True, it would be a lot better if it were supported, but i haven't seen anything that suggests Kavir was planning on doing so. If he was then please correct me, but even if he was, who's to say godwars would have evolved into what Low4 became? I don't know, i'm just glad things went the way they did.

I hope you know that at some point you're supposed to stop feeding the new kitten for a little while, preferably before you hear a loud POP! and discover that your pristine white walls are now red and lumpy.

I've yet to meet a cat, even a new born kitten, that didn't lose interest in eating entirely on it's own quite awhile before that point…

Just keep in mind Igagbod, attitudes of "I'm glad things are the way they are" are why the community is in decline. People who are glad that stolen code is available are exactly why fewer and fewer releases are happening. Developers don't like their code being stolen.

And I tend to agree with Conner. Even newborn kittens will stop feeding long before becoming bloated blobs. Though they soon return for more.