|Forum|Articles|Pay per Mill. By Anubis   I see the end of an establishment. For this to make any sense, a bit of history is in order. In the Myth community the central file exchange server was called the Mill. The Mill was run by the corrupt and biased Creation mapmaking group, and was owned by a conglomerate called Evichra. Evichra expanded its services approximately one year ago to include archives for games other than Myth. These archives were largely a failure, Liandri Depot, the UT archive, entered a field that already had a central archive (Planetunreal), and PC UT players consider Mac users, and by attachment, the Mac operated Liandri Depot, to be "trash". The Sims archive was blacklisted by the Sims community by accidentally violating one of their community leaders decrees. The Starcraft archives failed, the Starcraft community was feudal and decentralized and none of the Evichra people knew how to find its leaders. The Red Faction and Marathon communities were too small to make good use of the huge Evichra archives. About nine months after the introduction of the failing Mill clones, Myth 3 came out, and killed off the Myth community even more than Jinn did ( I would just like to point out that I predicted that Jinn would hurt the community big time, a year ago in the huge Jinn article on the Polycon website.). A month later the Mill met its mammal, when Mythmaps opened. Mythmaps looked and worked just like the Mill did, but unlike the Mill, it was not controlled by the corrupt Creation group. About 30 percent of the mapmakers and most of the players moved to Mythmaps,. So Evichara's only archive of any value was severely weakened. Without emissaries from other game communities, Evichra was in danger of becoming nothing but a bunch of dead file archives. It stands to reason that since Evichra was in danger of dying if they did not gain more users, that they would go to a subscription service I am not lying. On 3/28/2002 I got word that a lightning switch had occurred at Evichra. All user accounts had been locked out, users no longer had any control over the files they had uploaded to the server. In addition, only paying members may download the files contained in the archive. The forums were also completely locked, no one could even view most of the forums without paying, the Smiths forum could still be read by its members, but none of us could post to it. Within two hours the Smiths had left the Mill. The other forums were flooded with posts from angry Myth people, half were pissed that the Mill was charging people for free Myth maps, the rest were pissed that the Mill was holding their files hostage. Let me tell you the many reasons why this is a suicide move. For one the Mill is charging for a service that Mythmaps is giving away for free. The Mill may have a superior system to Mythmaps but for the reasons outlined in the article I wrote several months ago on the failings of subscription based web services, coupled with the fact that 60% of the Myth community is under the age of 18, will ensure that people use the free Mythmaps over the prettier looking Mill. Another problem is presentation. People upload their maps to a service like the Mill to get them in the hands of other users, no content creator would willingly upload, let alone pay to upload, to a service that blocks downloading of their file by the masses. In addition this move has given them a black eye that they will never shake. Stealing the maps of their users has pissed off the 100 or so mappers that stayed with the Mill after the introduction of Mythmaps, and they will be lucky to get out of this with any of their original users. A quick skimming of the various Myth forums showed that a lawsuit was taking shape, spearheaded by the Myth mapmakers who were lawyers in real life. So what claim do they have. In the readme file of most of my plugins there is a commercial exploitation clause in the legal section that reads "You are not allowed to commercially exploit this level, i.e. put it on a CD or any other electronic medium that is sold for money without my explicit permission. ". So with the Mills hard disk being an electronic medium that is sold for money, I have a solid legal case. However this is not a standard clause for a Myth readme, so I am one of the few mapmakers that use it. Which one has to wonder about, after all the community leaders that make the standards for readmes are allied with the Mill. Either way, most of the other mapmakers are not so well insured in a copyright infringement lawsuit. Fortunately in the original Bungie end user license agreement it clearly states that Myth plugins can not be sold for profit. Of course Bungie is owned by Microsoft now, and we all know how well Microsoft enforces its license agreements. I would say the Mill will be in a world of hurt before the week is over. : Followup: It appears the Mills pay move was nothing more than a sick loyalty test.Their plan. Step 1: Lock out all the accounts and all the downloads. Say they were becoming a pay site and that no one would be able to access their files unless they paid. Step 2: Present the illusion that they were giving in to the communities demands by allowing users to log on and delete their files if they wished. Take note of every member who deletes their files. Step 3: Remove the download ban. Remove the payment system. Remove all the news posts and changes related to the Mill becoming a pay site. Make it appear to anyone who was not paying attention that the Mill was never even a pay site. Permaban anyone who pulled their files. Make scathing news releases that said people were fuckheads for pulling their files for "no reason" Since they are community leaders, the survivors go along with it, just like they always have. The Mill closed it's doors for good about a month later.   Syntax Error/:|Forum|Articles|