Re: enough is enough, and it's time for a change.
First of all, there will be no nasty surprises from the staff team. I trust most of you can agree that we've been pretty transparent about this whole thing. Yes, we mishandled the Vast Horizon thing, if only because it looked like we were playing favourites with something we really haven't enforced elsewhere yet. We acknowledged this and have since been quite clear both with regard to our plans and intentions, and with regard to our willingness to incorporate player feedback.
Concept clones - that is, a game or project that is similar in its execution to something else - get into trouble only if they're borrowing very directly from their source. Manamon has a lot in common with pokemon, but as I've pointed out before, if Temtem can get away with it and be mainstream, Manamon isn't going to have any problems. Crazy Party being a sort of Mario Party+Pokemon hybrid...again, concept clones, but that's not the end of the world, although the card-battle aspect really does have quite a lot of pokemon stuff, right down to types and dozens of move names. I'm not sure if that alone would cause legal trouble - I suspect not - but it's a little gray.
The issue we're discussing here is the unauthorized use of assets, sounds in particular.So I haven't seen any evidence to suggest that a straight-up vote is a good idea, but I think that users being able to submit feedback about our proposed plan before that plan is enforced is a happy middle ground. This doesn't mean that if twelve of you get really loud and pushy, we'll just scrap it, but it does mean that if something is structurally wrong, or if there's a loophole we haven't found, we'll patch it. I think this is a compromise. Since responsibility rests with us, the actual ability to make that decision should probably rest with us as well. But since this ruling will impact some of you, you have a right to have a meaningful say in how it's set up.
On a side-note: Sarah is one of those games I've wanted to play for just about forever. I feel like I bought the game way way back in like 2012 or something, never got a key and then forgot to follow through on it. I'm not even sure if it works anymore. But that game, as an example, definitely falls into bad territory. It's using a lot of things that belong to JK Rowling and actually making money off them. And I mean, at this point I'm not JK Rowling's biggest fan - she's pretty much lost all of my respect - but that doesn't justify using the things she created to make yourself a profit. Unless, of course, this game actually got the go-ahead in an official capacity, the same way some of G. Norman Lippert's fanfiction has?
Sorry but how does responsibility rest with you? You're a third party, legally speaking. You're just hired to enforce the rules that the webmasters have set up, and they've not told you to do this. All the legal responsibility would be on their heads.
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