At what point does the community own more of the game than the developers?

I don’t know maybe make a post on their twitter informing them of your time and dedication. I’m sure they’ll correct the misunderstanding and hand over your portion of the shares.

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No, I don’t think we can (not most of us).

Wowhead, addon authors/distributers and streamers hold some power to wrestle with Blizzard.

Rule-breaking RMT sellers and pirate servers maybe a little, indirectly through the fights against them?

Alas, armchair developers (DMs of the pencil and paper world who are really driving innovation and creativity of those games) have no path to adding contributions to the game, so will never have any leverage beyond regular customer feedback.

All of blizzards job postings say irvine california afaik. So it’s up to a select few of us to make a difference.

If Ion can go from player to dev, so can you.

Entitled is right.

You’re renting your character. You don’t own anything when it comes to this game. Not even your characters or your account.

Unless you can give Blizz hundreds of millions of dollars every year, then you don’t own squat.

This is a multi-billion dollar company. They’re not going to bend over backwards for your $15 a month.

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Legally it belongs to the copyright holder. It does not matter that a company caters to the consumer market to sell more product. If enough people ask for red bandanas from Walmart, that does not mean they own them if Walmart makes them.

We have no legal rights to any suggestions we make towards game development.

Even if you create fan art or something for a contest, once it is on Blizzard’s platform they have all rights to it.

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We own World of WarCraft at this point.

Each of us is a co-owner alongside Christ Metzen.

Thanks for that word vomit of a useless post.

ANNNNNNNNNNNYWAYS.

I just made this post for fun while I waited for the servers to come up. Flag it if you will.

LATER, GATORS.

When the player community own more shares of Blizzard than ABK.

Soooo…

Never.

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When they collectively own a controlling interest in that company.

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…and people wonder why genXers feel like our society is going down the toilet.

We raised an entire generation of narcissistic sociopaths that are now raising children to be even more entitled.

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You didn’t make this game and you don’t own it, and you never will.

Blizzard makes a product.

We like the product or we don’t.

We can offer suggestions, or not.

They can request feedback, or not.

It only makes sense for Blizzard to implement our feedback if doing so will improve the profitability of their product (better quality = more people use it = more incoming money, or better monetized = more transactions = more incoming money even if less people play, etc).

You own nothing… Not one pixel.

don’t hold your breath. i’m still waiting for Gates to send me checks for all of those emails that I forwarded back in the 90s./00s

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All the copyright stuff sort of misses the point that a lot of at least a few people really would like to have more ownership of their hobby rather than just being a passive consumer.

The problem is that MMOs are absolutely enormous beasts requiring an enormous collaboration of different skill sets to work plus require a critical mass of players (and their trust) to function. It’s not something we can easily homebrew our own versions of to actually get to be part of the creative process.

(but I’ve never managed to even get around to writing an add-on, so I’m mostly just hot air and pie-in-the-sky dreams)

The reason why the community won is because … Hasbro executes wanted to make money, and if they had the legal grounds to push through the OGL changes they would have done it

Yes, it is awesome what one were able to do as a community but… what Hasbro was trying to do would’ve been tested in a courtroom and it would’ve been neigh on impossible to defend what they were trying to do legally speaking

Sorry but… the OGL has always been covered under basic laws governing copyright, you don’t actually need the OGL to do what the OGL states you are allowed to do - its just good policy to officially support it as well, but … there’s no one who even can own what Hasbro was trying to push through here
Blizzard owns WoW, trying to change that ain’t happening

The community never owns the game that they are playing when you are talking about intellectual rights, and if you are talking about community leeway and influence you’d first have to get a general consensus which … doesn’t exist in terms of anything Blizzard related

Sorry but no, the community owns nothing, and we shouldn’t own anything except what we ourselves make - but none of that has anything to do with Blizzard’s official ownership or the like

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Just in this IP? Frequently.

As a prime example the WC3 campaign creator led to the Defense of the Ancients map, which became so popular it evolved into it’s own game DOTA.

DOTA of course is it’s own extremely successful IP at this point, but it started as a WC3 map created by the community.

Note that the Warcraft: Refunded remake of WC3 closed this particular window because they are OK with community creativity… but only if they can profit from it.