The Monk Model and its Rising Popularity

[[-z-]]

The number of new users playing as the monk is on the rise. I've only been with the Nexuiz community ~a year and in that time I have always admired the MoN clan. Running into someone with that model gave me a warm feeling inside, I know that teammate was reliable and (usually) we were thinking on the save wave.

Perhaps I think too highly of the game and what the model represents but I feel as though it's a total lack of respect for these new players to use it. Not only are they poor teammates and chatty kathys but I feel as though someone has just spit on something sacred within the community.

Am I over-reacting?

Does anyone else feel this way?

[torus]

Personally, I just think it's lazy- to just take another clan's model and use it, or just modify the skin to read your tag. Not much that can be done about it though.

[BENSTER]

I've seen this complaint since I started playing Q2 in '99. When you have autodownloads for skins, the newbs look at what they have, and pick one they like. You can only control what skin they use on your server, and that is it. If they don't understand, they just don't understand. Yeah, I've been irked by the same thing in the past, but unless they are blatantly disrespecting your clan, or trash talking, I've never kicked someone for it.

[shaggy]

I hate it when people use the MoN model. It's a clan model people. Join the clan if you want to use it.

[Dokujisan]

I think that's asking a bit much.

I didn't realize it was a clan model until I read this thread.

[shaggy]

Really, sorry.

[Asraniel]

perhaps there should be some sort of a native support for this in nexuiz?
for example:
The server can specify that a certain downloaded player model should not show up in the model selection dialog, but should only be used to show the other players. That could be done by placing the model in another directory.
Of course the player could then manualy copy the model out of that folder into the normal folder where the other models are. After all this is a open source game and people can do what they want. But it would protect against people that use that model by mistake and don't know that it's a clan model. shouldn't be that hard to do, no?

[Taiyo.uk]

I doubt that implementing DRM for models in this way would work. As with most things, if it's freely available it's going to be misused by some n00bs and morons sooner or later. I'd take it as a complement on making a decent model.

Server operators can always decide to enforce clantag/model misuse rules to reduce this problem.

[Xeno]

Before I joined MoN, when I first found out about the new model, I felt that the idea that "no one else but us can use this model" was silly (not that anyone in MoN came off that way, but that's pretty much what a "clan model" means). When I joined MoN, I only ever really used it when other MoNs were on the server to promote a sense of "claniness". There is only once incident in which I can remember commenting about someone else using the model when I was in MoN, and that was a side reaction to a bad mood caused by something else.

The truth is that if you inject a model into an open source game, it's going to be used by other people. Anyone who wants to talk about enforcement etc should go get a job with Big Content and figure out intelligent ways to implement packet filtering and all the other "make them stop, it's mine!" bullshit that we keep seeing more of these days. If people have to download the model and keep it on their machines to play on a server, I can't see a justification in denying them the ability to use it.

Of course, I do think that people should be appealed to in order to change their behavior, but it's not that big of a deal. Some people might not even realize that it's a clan model and of course some people are just deliberately disrespectful.

Summa summarum: Ask people to stop, make a mental note of who complies and who doesn't, and leave it at that. It's not really a big deal (just my opinion).

[Mr. Bougo]

Heh, everybody can use that, I don't know why it should be forbidden in any way...

The thing I don't like is the way it was included on some servers... Does that mean the MoN clan has become the only officially supported clan by some public servers? Nah. So why wouldn't they accept other clan models, then? And what about the ones who can't make a model?
I wouldn't like to see clan models everywhere... That's like going "man MY clan is SERIOUS BUSINESS, you're impressed and stuff"... Now there's that MoN model already present on some servers, can't be deleted I think, and since everybody can use it, I'd vote for a "neutralizing" of the skin or some secondary skin still featuring a "MoN" label, and a new default skin with no clan text... So people actually have the moral right to use it...

Now as Z said, he used that skin to recognize trustable people (many non-MoN are also trustable, heh)... That means that he can't identify his teammates easily. I can't either. Nexuiz needs some easier way to know who's who on the battlefield. Pointing and waiting is a bit hard...

I think we can have some hope about that with CSQC, yet to be used in a public release... 2.5?