The Mana World Forums

Erm. Since I joined in mid 2008, with the notable exception of the graveyard project, the vast majority of development work has been on IRC, Etherpad and derivatives, and Trello. The forums have been a near-negligible minority. I would be surprised if that has been something that has changed over the past year.


---Freeyorp

Platyna wrote:A captain of a ship after the mutiny is still considered a legitimate captain.

Well that also partly depends if the mutiny is successful... especially on pirate ships.

I've come to the conclusion that Platyna is either trying to get people to believe her propaganda, or actually seriously believes the things she says. If the latter I think must live on another planet.. And yes it's unintentionally hilarious.

https://github.com/themanaworld contains the entire development history of the project. Search for Platyna's commits.. Oh wait, there are none.. She didn't write any of it.

Ok well maybe she does something important for players? Let's check the GM logs that go back to 2008..

She's performed approximately 2542 GM actions since December 2008 - mainly letting people know about server status and holding trivia events. During that time the rest of the admin and GM team performed 768536 GM actions - mainly checking for bots and enforcing the rules. It doesn't look like she contributed much there other than treating TMW as her playground.

So here is a hosting provider (free or no) claiming ownership over a project that she did not develop and barely contributed to. Her behavior also managed to upset the developers and GMs enough to abandon her fairly-decent free hosting service.

--
To draw a parallel: What if you purchased a web hosting account and ran a community on it. Let's say a forum (that you wrote yourself) for simplicity's sake. One day the owner of the hosting company takes a liking to your community and decides to give themselves administrative privileges on the forum. They then start bossing people around like they own the place. You put up with it for a while only because the hosting is VERY cheap and high quality.

You eventually decide to move as the owner of the hosting company has become very overbearing in their actions on your forum. The owner of the hosting company then claims that you stole their forum, code, and the data of all the users on it. They then proceed to harass you and even set up a clone of your forum on another domain using your code and data.

That's extremely shady, entirely unethical, and probably illegal.

This is what happened. I'd like to suggest that every member of the community who has witnessed this should post here with their agreement and more information if available.

We need to put this topic to bed, it's getting silly.

MadCamel wrote: https://github.com/themanaworld contains the entire development history of the project. Search for Platyna's commits.. Oh wait, there are none.. She didn't write any of it.

Technically, she made 43 commits in server data repo. I haven't checked everything, but most of it seems to be moving files around, adding a newline at the end of a file, or committing on behalf of someone else (this was in the pre-git days).

I stand corrected! That's a good thing. We're after truth here.

I was game server, websites admin and forum administrator. I left development after I agreed with Bjorn that I will not involve in his work and he will not involve in mine. Therefore your story that I was restricting developers work is a blatant lie.

It is like you would say that we can copy eg. Stephen King books without his permission because he did not wrote a line of code for Microsoft Word.

Here comes twisted logic.

Also I do not claim ownership about the project, I do claim ownership of the files that I set up and cared for, for many years after project admins abandoned the project because they did not agreed that we should invest time in such things like eAthena server and the players.

Regards.

http://forums.themanaworld.org/viewtopi ... 12&t=17024

This thread was a sort of 'final straw' for me.

BC

Platyna wrote: Also I do not claim ownership about the project, I do claim ownership of the files that I set up and cared for

The project and the files go hand in hand, you can't own a project and have no files!

If I have a website with an internet provider, according to your logic, the internet provider owns everything, even if i walk away from the website! I don't think so.

I wasn't just an internet provider and this lie and propaganda was already discussed. Repeating lies several times doesn't make them truth.

Regards.

Platyna wrote:Repeating lies several times doesn't make them truth.

Regards.

But wasn't that the premise of 99% of all your posts!
Seriously, its become pathetic the way you act!

My congratulations to everyone, this thread is showing to the whole internet community how this project sucks.
You are working on this MMORG since 2006 or earlier and it did not grow at all, i read you had 5 players at the
very beginning and now after 8 years of developement 70 as average without counting the bots and the alts
and you brag about it, you should be ashamed.

Wikipedia wrote:Delete The article says it all. 60 players online at any given time!?!? Kill it. Come back when it has a real fan base. Ray Yang (talk) 00:25, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

8 years and 70 players is the best you could achieve, 100 as peak
whilst you have got 10.590 total members in forum. Something is wrong in here.
Many of them could be fake yet it makes no sense.
Then you start this awesome thread which explains the hidden reasons about that numbers
and it's simply because the people that are managing it just... sucks.

To summarize;
- when someone post something similar to a complain about the game you shut him-her up because there are only contributors and they have a real life, excuses.
- when someone tries to work in it seriously then you ignore his-her work.
- when someone starts a new server you taunt him-her or DDoS it.
- The game is beta when developers do mistakes and do not want to fix them but somehow some other times it's not beta;
- most of the content are stolen ideas or else, to be more specific:
* Secret of mana look alike game;
* Bad copy of the graphics of Secret of mana;
* Some musics are stolen from some other games;
* Kirk and Spock NPCs from Star trek (now removed);
* Towel day with questions about the hitchhiker guide to the galaxy;
* And many other things that does not give your game anything new around the world.

To end;
This is not a troll post, this is the reality that you do not want to accept,
the project sucks and that's all, the free host let it survive until now,
you are not a serious effort to create an innovative free and open source MMORPG.
There's nothing innovative and there's nothing serious expecially after this thread,
there are only babies that cry when somebody write bad critics
because they think they are awesome while real projects grow and yours is dead but none of you noticed that yet.

Best whishes and have fun trolling my post or deleting it or censuring it as you use to.

bourner wrote: - when someone tries to work in it seriously then you ignore his-her work.

Link?

bourner wrote: - when someone starts a new server you taunt him-her or DDoS it.

Link?

bourner wrote: - The game is beta when developers do mistakes and do not want to fix them but somehow some other times it's not beta;

Link to each?

bourner wrote: * Secret of mana look alike game;
* Bad copy of the graphics of Secret of mana;

SoM didn't invent this style. Not everyone using it is trying to clone SoM. We're going for a particular art style that coincides with SoM and hundreds of other games. Given then number of commercial games with this style, there might be a reason it's so popular. As for quality, we are fixing the older stuff. People like you don't help.

bourner wrote: * Some musics are stolen from some other games;

Links?

bourner wrote: * Kirk and Spock NPCs from Star trek (now removed);
* Towel day with questions about the hitchhiker guide to the galaxy;
* And many other things that does not give your game anything new around the world.

So, we aren't allowed to use any popular culture in our game?

bourner wrote:you are not a serious effort to create an innovative free and open source MMORPG.

Why aren't we?

bourner wrote:there are only babies that cry when somebody write bad critics

Link?

bourner wrote:because they think they are awesome while real projects grow and yours is dead but none of you noticed that yet.

We've outlasted at least a dozen forks of this project and are still going. Things ebb and flow. We look to be heading back into another flow (higher volume) period.

bourner wrote:Best whishes and have fun trolling my post or deleting it or censuring it as you use to.

We only due that when things break the law or forum rules. You're thinking of Platyna.

and you brag about it, you should be ashamed.

Having a fan base at all is something we should pride ourselves on (however we should not be satisfied), people play TMW even with the near limitless alternatives available to them. While I agree the game has many failings and I'm certainly all for pointing them out . Such failings are not a reason to give up and should not be a justification for saying/implying we do so, but rather a reason to move forward and reinvent ourselves (You are indeed trolling, and you should be ashamed).

MadCamel wrote: So here is a hosting provider (free or no) claiming ownership over a project that she did not develop and barely contributed to. Her behavior also managed to upset the developers and GMs enough to abandon her fairly-decent free hosting service.

--
To draw a parallel: What if you purchased a web hosting account and ran a community on it. Let's say a forum (that you wrote yourself) for simplicity's sake. One day the owner of the hosting company takes a liking to your community and decides to give themselves administrative privileges on the forum. They then start bossing people around like they own the place. You put up with it for a while only because the hosting is VERY cheap and high quality.

You eventually decide to move as the owner of the hosting company has become very overbearing in their actions on your forum. The owner of the hosting company then claims that you stole their forum, code, and the data of all the users on it. They then proceed to harass you and even set up a clone of your forum on another domain using your code and data.

That's extremely shady, entirely unethical, and probably illegal.

This is what happened. I'd like to suggest that every member of the community who has witnessed this should post here with their agreement and more information if available.

I can think of three examples off the top of my head (from MOG games I have played) where the original development team abandoned a project, and a new group took it over. Ryzom, Subspace (Continuum), and Hostile Space.

This is Platyna's claim. That Bjorn and Elven had no interest in maintaining a community for an eAthena based game. They were interested in making their own open source MMO from scratch, and the whole eAthena thing was supposed to be a temporary thing to flesh out some of the details and story, not the main event. When it became clear that eAthena was going to remain the defacto platform that the community was going to develop for and play, they abandoned the eAthena portion of the project to Platyna, to run as she saw fit. There is extra drama, as well, that they didn't really get along with Platyna either, but if the project was really of interest to them, they would have kept the project and gotten rid of her long ago, instead of just handing her the keys and leaving.

So, the project's code and art being open source and GPL licensed belongs to its contributors but with the freedom to make copies, distribute, and make your own server. The same did NOT apply to the player saves (output files) from the iteration running on Platinum; that is NOT covered by GPL. This project has NO constitution and NO formal declaration from its original developers on who the owners of the project currently are, and they left it in the care of Platyna, not just as a host, but as a top-admin and final arbitor. No one had the right or authority to copy any of those data files off of Platinum, except maybe Elven or Bjorn. Any access to those files was given on the basis of trust, and for the purpose of making commits and backups, not a mutiny. The people who made those unauthorized copies probably knew full well they had no right to do it; that is why they left a copy still on Platinum. If they had felt that they had full authority, as they claim, they would have done what anyone with true ownership would have done: they would have moved the data and not cloned it. No body with ownership of data just leaves a copy lying around when they vacate a host, as is now trying to be claimed.

As for illegal activity, others have put forward that it violates EU law to move clients' personal electronic data from an EU jurisdiction to elsewhere, such as the United States.

Add to all that, a number of the self-declared top-admins at .org are trolling the forums at .net, one even nominated a known rulesbreaker for GM there, in the wrong section. They do things there that they would not tolerate here, which only shows more how the integrity of this whole affair has degenerated into childish pranks. I have already begged both sides to hold joint democratic nominations and elections for a new set of top-admins that will not behave this way, but I think both sides have no interest in that. I have already begged both sides to write up a constitution clearly defining the ownership of the project and its assets (the data files), but again, both sides have no interest in it. I have suggested that Elvenprogrammer disable the DNS for themanaworld.org until such time as everyone in power decides to properly embrace the open-source concepts of freedom and community inclusion, but there is no interest in that, either. I'm just a player, just a bystander, and these are not demands in any case.

In closing, you are all hurting the project, by the way you continue to slander and taunt each other. None of you are looking for a way forward that doesn't involve you (one group or the other) being in power. Compromise, diplomacy, and sanity have taken a vacation, it seems. It's sad, what has become of this once fine open source MMO project, no matter how cleverly some of you will undoubtably try to spin it otherwise.

blackrazor wrote:I can think of three examples off the top of my head (from MOG games I have played) where the original development team abandoned a project, and a new group took it over. Ryzom, Subspace (Continuum), and Hostile Space.

This is Platyna's claim. That Bjorn and Elven had no interest in maintaining a community for an eAthena based game. They were interested in making their own open source MMO from scratch, and the whole eAthena thing was supposed to be a temporary thing to flesh out some of the details and story, not the main event. When it became clear that eAthena was going to remain the defacto platform that the community was going to develop for and play, they abandoned the eAthena portion of the project to Platyna, to run as she saw fit. There is extra drama, as well, that they didn't really get along with Platyna either, but if the project was really of interest to them, they would have kept the project and gotten rid of her long ago, instead of just handing her the keys and leaving

So wrong. There is a complete continuum from Elven to the current admins of themanaworld.org. Before Mana was split off, there were other admins that were doing most of the work (not Platyna). eAthena was supposed to be temporary, but as development on TmwServ (later ManaServ) slowed, it became obvious that eAthena wasn't going to go away anytime soon. So more efforts were put to maintaining it. There are no commits from Patyna in the tmwAthena repository (which goes back to late 2008). I'm trying to locate the older repository. Even before the manaserv split, Platyna agreed to a role that is almost entirely host (you can look at threads from that time that we've made public where she says that).

blackrazor wrote:So, the project's code and art being open source and GPL licensed belongs to its contributors but with the freedom to make copies, distribute, and make your own server. The same did NOT apply to the player saves (output files) from the iteration running on Platinum; that is NOT covered by GPL. This project has NO constitution and NO formal declaration from its original developers on who the owners of the project currently are, and they left it in the care of Platyna, not just as a host, but as a top-admin and final arbitor. No one had the right or authority to copy any of those data files off of Platinum, except maybe Elven or Bjorn. Any access to those files was given on the basis of trust, and for the purpose of making commits and backups, not a mutiny. The people who made those unauthorized copies probably knew full well they had no right to do it; that is why they left a copy still on Platinum. If they had felt that they had full authority, as they claim, they would have done what anyone with true ownership would have done: they would have moved the data and not cloned it. No body with ownership of data just leaves a copy lying around when they vacate a host, as is now trying to be claimed.

The active project administration (which hasn't included Platyna for a few years) made the decision. Elven agreed with it. Also, even if TMWC did delete what they could on Platinum, Platyna made semi-regular backups that she would still have to restore stuff.

blackrazor wrote:As for illegal activity, others have put forward that it violates EU law to move clients' personal electronic data from an EU jurisdiction to elsewhere, such as the United States.

It's also required under EU law to remove an EU citizen's data from your server when they request it. Something that Platyna refuses. See http://forums.themanaworld.net/viewtopi ... =4&t=17178 for example.

blackrazor wrote:Add to all that, a number of the self-declared top-admins at .org are trolling the forums at .net, one even nominated a known rulesbreaker for GM there, in the wrong section.

First off, they were posting as individuals, not as representatives of TMWC. Second, the person nominated was already GM and lead dev at the time; the one who made the post was trying to get someone over there to make that connection. Note that having someone as both dev and GM goes against Paltyna's own rules.

Also note that top admins from tmw.net (including Platyna herself) have regularly trolled here.

blackrazor wrote:They do things there that they would not tolerate here, which only shows more how the integrity of this whole affair has degenerated into childish pranks.

And Platyna has done plenty that goes against the rules she herself made. But then again, she never held herself to her own rules, only every one else.

blackrazor wrote:I have already begged both sides to hold joint democratic nominations and elections for a new set of top-admins that will not behave this way, but I think both sides have no interest in that. I have already begged both sides to write up a constitution clearly defining the ownership of the project and its assets (the data files), but again, both sides have no interest in it. I have suggested that Elvenprogrammer disable the DNS for themanaworld.org until such time as everyone in power decides to properly embrace the open-source concepts of freedom and community inclusion, but there is no interest in that, either. I'm just a player, just a bystander, and these are not demands in any case.

And who would ensure that the elections were fair and not flooded with with sock puppets? Also, your suggestion would kill the project until the elections were finished.