03-29-2004, 07:40 AM
Quote:No Jesus or Allah players running around sounds fine to me, but the trademarks thing gets me... Why would this matter? And media personalities? What if my name really is Dan Rather and I want to play as him?
As far as trademarked material it is just a general TOS item that has to be in there. technically any time you put trademarked material in print you are elligable for legal action from the trademark holder. Most of these things are vague and don't go to court but if you have any interest in Al Franken, or Bill O'Reilly for that matter, you probably know how these things can go. The amusing thing here is that in the TOS they actually print copyrighted material making themselves possible targets. The real problem here isn't people that would name their characters "Pepsi" but characters that would name their characters "PepsiSucks" thus defaming the product. That sort of attention Blizzard doesn't want to bring to itself if possible.
The same thing can be said for the media figures. They don't want people going around pretending to be media figures and duping the less than brilliant other players but they also don't want their actions in game to be reflected back on a media figure that doesn't actually support that behavior. Lets take the Bill O'Reilly point. If i started a character in-game with that name and then went around saying and doing obnoxious things i'd be willing to bet the real O'Reilly would inlist his legal factor in a second.
Quote:What the heck is the "essense"?!
This is probably just an easy way for them to control how people speak in a game without having to make the extra effort of creating true Role Playing servers. If people are running around talking about 1337 Haxxors it would be against the "essence" of WoW. I'm all about this clause cause if it is truly enforced it can keep out the swine that are attracted to the online environment.