vrt has generally been one of the biggest advocates for respecting artists and original content, and I know that he's on board with oetg. I'd be curious to hear his responses to Physsion/itr in this thread if he'd be willing to provide them.
I've struggled personally with whether the existence of oetg is respectful or not of zanz's property, and I've definitely felt both in favor of and against oetg at different points in time based on the arguments made by others, and I think hearing vrt's reasons why he supports it would be interesting to me.
On the one hand, some pieces of it (especially oetg-v) feel like a "tool" to me, where players can experiment with features not in the regular game (PVP with increased HP, mark, dexterity, etc), and allow for players to quickly PVP-test for events in order to decide things like which cards to upgrade (very valuable if they're on a budget) as well as honestly a faster and less unstable PVP for testing with.
On the other hand, I'm a person who tries to take intellectual property seriously, even owning a fairly significant real-physical-CDs music collection (nearly 200 hours of music, the vast majority of which is on physical CDs and ripped to computer; a small amount from legal downloads), trying to buy books or get them from the library to support the authors, not using adblock on any site, and so on. Several of my real-life friends and acquaintances are aspiring artists, and I've heard from them and from the artists I follow on tumblr/twitter about the various ways art isn't respected nearly enough today. It's that part of me that oetg doesn't 100% sit quite right with.
It somewhat seems to parallel the creation of DotA using Warcraft III resources to some extent, except that was made using a map editor that was actually part of the base game, and not just open-source created, and thus bears some amount of tacit approval by the game's original developer (while oetg does not)
I understand, before the strongest oetg advocates say it for me, that the game is LEGALLY acceptable due to using different art and due to writing the code from scratch. Ethically, however, is the grey area that I'm trying to address, and I'm still struggling with figuring out where ethics lie in this dilemma.
I'd like to propose, in response to itr and others' concern about oetg possibly being what drove Zanz away, that the makers of oetg write a direct letter to zanz both detailing the existence of oetg, and stating their willingness to destroy it if zanz so requests, as well as their intentions to respect his IP and make a loving alternate version rather than merely take from it. Such a letter, I should hope, would demonstrate good faith to zanz, and maybe even bring him back, had he left due to that reason.
What sources we have, as far as I can tell, suggest that zanz has RL reasons rather than player-induced reasons to have been away from EtG for so long. I don't mean to criticize zanz for his absence. RL can and even must come before flash games, even popular and profitable ones, and I really do understand that sometimes family and life are demanding on one's time. I'd just like one more layer of assurances that it's not us, his community, driving him away, because that would be sad indeed.
