
Old Battlefield games re-killed after EA’s legal warning - smacktoward
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/10/27/old-battlefied-games-killed-after-ea-legal-warning/
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ajmurmann
What bothers me about this is that people bought the game, but they can't play
it because EA doesn't want to run servers for it and prohibits everyone else
from doing so. I very much preferred the old days when players had to run
their own servers. It was less convenient, but made for great community and
avoided situations like this.

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slezyr
Well it's not about server, but about MASTER servers. Those used to discover
"players own servers" in the internet.

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masklinn
Isn't that even worse? That would require even less resources on EA's part,
and is even less consequential to the actual game.

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Thaxll
Yeah right ... showing homemade server by official EA servers. It's a recipe
for disaster.

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scopecreep
This is how it was for many years. Decades even. It was fine.

They weren't exactly "homemade" servers either. There was an entire industry
of game server rentals and these were datacenter rack servers connected to fat
pipes.

It wasn't unusual at all to find third-party servers with way better pings
(and higher player caps) than the official servers.

I don't remember the official bf1942 servers ever having 32v32 player matches
but that was fairly common for thirdparty servers for example.

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tomohawk
It's too bad there isn't a yearly tax on the value of 'intellectual property',
just like on real property. If a company doesn't pay the tax, someone else
could pick it up. It would provide a legal path to handle abandoned things.

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ben_jones
On the other hand its common for people to inherit property they can't
maintain, forcing them to sell it with much regret. If a poor person patented
tremendously valuable intellectual property it might be lost to an
unscrupulous buyer.

~~~
pjc50
> If a poor person patented tremendously valuable intellectual property

Challenge for HN: find the most recent three patents which (a) were filed by
individuals not an employer (b) those individuals could reasonably be
described as poor (c) aren't subject to widespread infringement by a big
company. (and (d) is for something actually useful not a perpetual motion
machine etc)

I think it might be quite a hard thing to find.

~~~
Someone
a) is (technically) easily satisfied. In the USA, only persons can apply for a
patent. See [https://www.uspto.gov/patents-getting-started/general-
inform...](https://www.uspto.gov/patents-getting-started/general-information-
concerning-patents#heading-10):

 _”According to the law, the inventor, or a person to whom the inventor has
assigned or is under an obligation to assign the invention, may apply for a
patent, with certain exceptions.”_

and, more explicitly,
[http://www.iusmentis.com/patents/crashcourse/applicant/](http://www.iusmentis.com/patents/crashcourse/applicant/):

 _”When someone makes an invention, and does so as an employee of a company,
usually the company owns the right to apply for a patent. The exception once
again is the United States, where only natural persons may apply for a patent.
In the USA, the employee will typically have a clause in his employment
contract stating that he assigns all his patent rights to the company. The
filing is then done on behalf of the employee, but the rights immediately go
to the company.”_

~~~
Nomentatus
This reverses the meaning of the question. When last did a poor person get to
the patent office first and then retain the rights themselves to critical
tech.

Patent law as it is explains much of the 6-fold increase in inequality in the
US in the last few decades. [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/our-biggest-
economic-social-p...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/our-biggest-economic-
social-political-issue-two-economies-ray-dalio?articleId=6327163206116667393)

PS Employees aren't generally amongst the poor.

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djsumdog
This reminds me of the old Blizzard vs open battlenet (bnetd) crap that
happened in the early 2000s. I think it really hit a full head when people
were using modified bnetd servers so they could play leaked beats of WarCraft
3.

It's sad because bnetd lost their case, even though it was a total open source
re-implementation and was an amazing work for what it was.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bnetd](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bnetd)

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brango
Anyone play Battlefield 2 on the PS2 I think it was? You could look at any
allied character on the battlefield and hit a button and you'd take over
control of the character. So you could be a soldier on the ground being pinned
down by a machine gun nest, look up to an allied helicopter, hit the button,
become the pilot, launch missiles at the nest, then look down to a tank,
become the driver, then back to the soldier, etc,... So much fun! I think they
called it 'hotswap' or something.

Any game devs: This was the single most fun mechanic I've played in years.
Please please please make an FPS where you can hotswap between characters like
that. For some reason apparently this awesome feature didn't even make it into
the PC version of the game. I'd love to play a game with that mechanic again.

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pdelbarba
All of the ARMA games have had this feature if you bother to enable it. It's
not usually seen in the popular online "maps" though

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brango
Thanks! I've set up an alert for when it goes on sale :-)

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pdelbarba
Go in the editor and you can set units to "player" and "playable", playable
meaning you can then switch to them in game from the map menu under I think
"team".

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jannes
In my opinion the question is how do we treat hybrid software products: A part
of it runs locally and another part runs on a server.

If you sell/advertise those two pieces of software as a single integrated
product but you only give away the client executable, how long after the sale
should you be required to keep the server running?

It's a bit like a web app: The user downloads some HTML+JS which makes
XmlHttpRequests to a server backend. In theory the user could download the
HTML+JS only once and keep working with that initial copy, but after a few
weeks the server endpoint might change and break that copy.

I think the expectation for a web app is to keep working for a day or so and
the expectation for a console game is at least 20 years?

~~~
wbl
In games traditionally people hosted their own servers.

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syril
Pretty upsetting, my buddies and me would get together on weekends and play
Battlefield 2. Hopefully they find a way to get setup again (torrent client
downloads)

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try_sincerely
I found Squad and Planetside 2 to be great heirs to the Battlefield 2 and
Battlefield 2142 legacy.

Amazing how Planetside 2 being a free game manages to outclass pretty much any
combined arms FPS and is still looking really good visually for 2012 release.

~~~
DaggerDagger
Oh man I forgot about Planetside 2! Super underrated, it came out in a huge
FPS glut in the market. I dig huge combined arms stuff but man I used to die
to snipers in that game so much haha.

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rm_-rf_slash
We need to re-think intellectual property. If a creator (or worse, buyer) of
an IP loses interest in supporting it, then why should they retain a legal
monopoly to do so?

~~~
JasonFruit
That sounds like a rationalization of "But I _want_ it!" If someone owns
useful land, but prefers to leave it fallow, they don't lose ownership of it;
why shouldn't they have the right to leave their intellectual property idle?
Part of ownership is the right to use your property as you please.

~~~
waqf
You begged the question here. The question is whether and to what extent the
creator of software _should_ have "ownership".

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rm_-rf_slash
Precisely. That's the difference between land and IP. IP is made. Land is
bought, maybe worked on, developed, but as Mark Twain said about land,
"they're not making it anymore."

>Inb4 South China Sea.

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charlesdm
APIs and protocols generally can't be copyrighted in Europe. Not sure where
they're based, but what stops them from running this in Europe?

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Thaxll
What most people don't understand is EA can't legally release server code
because they probably use libraries that forbid public distribution, physics
engine ect ...

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Illniyar
I fail to see how is that relevant, people are saying either keep the server
up or let other people run their own, reversed engineered server.

