Testing, no community affiliation and fair use of the ported content.

by rulesofp

When we established the porting rules, we made it clear that we wanted the mod as a whole to develop. For a mod to develop, we believe, there must be equal opportunity for all from the same point. We thought that, although some porters might be interested into adding some console messages and the likes, it’d be better to refrain from it. We, however, thought that the porting rules and the fair use rules should be different.

The content we wanted to port had to be available to all communities at the same time. Same time implies that, at the moment of its release, every community would try tweaking their config. values to what fits better in their own view. This would’ve meant that:

1. The maps had to be released together
2. The maps had to be of a more than average quality so that communities with slower administrations wouldn’t be hindered by using older versions
3. The maps, on top of all, had to be public when released

Some of the involved mappers had interests in having the communities they happen(ed) to be affiliated with in the maps. Although we thought that this wasn’t the best (it could stop server admins from adding that subset of maps), the amount of branded maps has come out to be negligible and we don’t think it will be a problem. We also reminded ourselves that popular CS:S maps (with Mako Reactor being a clear example of it) had similar advertisements so it wasn’t really a problem.

Three communities offered their servers for testing, being three the different servers we believed that would be needed for testing. We, since then, reached a fair amount of maps.

We knew the ports would, at a point, get downloaded by players and suggested. We had thought about security measures (such as making the server hang on an infinite loop or ban all the players which we had proven to be doable with the correct set of entities) but we thought that it would’ve hindered the process. Some communities, as expected, did so and claimed that they had ported the maps by themselves.

Perhaps in a too hot blooded fashion (but, still, simply firing rounds into the sky), we told them to stop or we’d have to add safety measures and reassured them that the maps would be public for everybody to use. We expected that this would stop and they’d be patient, but sadly it didn’t happen. It came to our attention (since most of us have mapped a fair share of original projects, some of which are among the ported maps) that they claimed all maps to be public (which, of course, we find ridiculous from the authorship point of view: a map will be public if its author states so, be it the original mapper or the person that, after explicitly asking to do so to the original mapper, works on a port). Instead of backing off, they still followed that path (which we think is just both saddening and hurtful for the mod as a whole). We are not going to give out the name (they shouldn’t get any publicity for playing dirty) of those communities (although they should, in our opinion, feel unwell about what they’ve done since we understand this as our efforts being disregarded).

On the bright side, other communities did wait. Appart from the testing communities of SteamGamers (SG), elManikomio (emk) and Mapeadores, we noticed that GFL were using some of these ports for testing (they had joined Mapeadores since there was a knockback fix, albeit less perfected than Peace Maker’s one, going at the time) and they told us that we didn’t have to worry since they’d wait for the first release of the complete pack.