Guardians of the Faith, a PDF VTES Set by PCK

Developers demanding a copyright on cards is all new for this community. Never before single persons stressed this right (the company did of course).

Some cards in the set were developed from discussions in this forum. So it is rather strange for one person to say it is all his idea.

As humble and well mannered those three gamers are, this move really wasn't clever or beneficial to the game.

Fangroups developing cards for the game is alright normally. Leaking information about the early stage of a new set is just bad.

Thank you for your interest in the “Guardians of the Faith” PDF expansion. The release of our PDF set should not be surprising, since
we were publicly transparent with our plans when we posted them on the VEKN.NET forum in April 2012:

“...We [Carl and Eric] are removing ourselves and our cards, so that the Design Team Leader has ample opportunity to develop his own creative ideas.

The cards we have designed are not to be used by the V:EKN Design Team. Since the creative content for Round 1 originated from our work (including Jeff Kuta’s), and had no significant contributions from the remaining Design Team members, we insist that the Design Team refrains from further playtest of such cards and from including them in the upcoming set without our explicit permission. This creative content includes all of the cards from Round 1, with one exception, and any other ideas that we initiated and explored.”

In a follow-up post on April 21st, Carl further clarified:

“Eric, Jeff, and I are going to continue developing our cards on our own and these cards will be freely available for use by the public. We will be doing this voluntarily out of our love for the game – we are not seeking to make any monetary profit.

When we are finished with our set after additional public playtesting (any players interested in playtesting would be welcome), we will make the set available to the public and the V:EKN has the option to sanction the use of our set in official V:EKN tournaments. We would be pleased if they did.”

We continued developing our cards.

We conducted additional playtesting, during which no effort was made to conceal the contents of our set from the V:EKN. Pascal Bertrand generously proofread any new or changed card texts. We sent our playtest PDF to several V:EKN affiliates.

When the PCK set was completed to our satisfaction, we submitted it to the V:EKN for consideration in August.

After waiting some time without an official decision or any information as to when a decision would be possible, we made our set available to the public on a pre-determined date, just like we said back in April.

We would like to emphasize that during the last few months, the flow of card design information has gone in one direction: Team PCK reached out to the V:EKN Inner Circle and offered our work for consideration for sanctioned play. We can only assume that the V:EKN made its decisions (or lack thereof) on how to proceed with a fairly good idea of our concurrently taken actions and future intentions.

Thanks for understanding,

Jeff, Carl and Eric

So why the need to assert copyright, then?

If this were as altruistic as you three keep claiming it to be, you'd have offered the cards to the VEKN with no strings or conditions.

Now you're trying to come back across the bridge that you burned on your way out, it sounds like your cards will never be printed in any tournament-legal form, and your name is mud within the community. A bitter harvest, to be sure.

for clarity's sake,

Y'all (Jeff, Carl, and Eric) were a part of the VEKN design team. You weren't happy with the process, and announced that you were picking up your toys and going home, withdrawing your ideas from the group. you then continued to develop among yourselves and are now 'publishing' them?

It's more complicated than that, Self-Biased. And I don't think that the true story will ever be made completely clear. I think it's safe to say that there were some misunderstandings and some situations that were not handled with the diplomacy that hindsight suggests would have been appropriate. I seriously doubt there are any who are truly blameless in this unfortunate falling-out.

Who has said there is anyone who is blameless? Just by being part of the problem, all parties take some responsibility. Why even bring that up and try to obfuscate the issue?

And why the moral equivalency argument?