Accepted [Network Wide Suggestion] revert town of the month for PMC copies

Marked as under review and awaiting community discussion. Will revisit in a week.

 

Honestly it's a competition I will never win on beauty as I suck at builds, so I think letting someone who copies a build win would keep the builders here from trying. A plagiarized paper losses you your academic standing why shouldn't a plagiarized town lose you your awards?

Now if the town uses elements from builds and discloses their sources UP FRONT I say leave it up to the community and judges to decide.

 

Honestly, I have no problem with "copies". But I thin in my opinion there would have been other town I would have chosen cause of their builders creativity.

Never the less the chosen one is a great build and looks rly nice.

In fact of getting this reward only once per lifetime it doesn't matter this much I think.

 

I don't think it hurts to allow this, it's not an exact copy of the pmc build (other buildings, blimp, etc.) and someone still has to gather the supplies and build it. Sure we have fly, but we don't have creative.

Builds like this also have to be implemented into the location which takes time. I've seen designs implemented into other structures in the past and don't see an exact copy of part of a build as an exception.

 

I totally understand this point and where you are coming from.

I agree with @FuriuosGeorge thought to credit those who build the original. People do use other people’s work all the time for their own, and get awarded because of it (so long as they cite their sources).

With that being said, in terms with the suggestion, since my town is the reason for all these suggestions, I will state that yes the original tower’s design isn’t my own. However, where I believe I differ from “stealing it” lies in the fact that:
1.) only like 60-70% of the whole tower is “stolen” and the rest was original.
2.) I did give credit where it was due (just couldn’t mention the server names. Didn’t know the build was on PMC as well)

That last paragraph wasn’t to defend my town, but to kind of explain that people use other people’s ideas all the time, and then credit them as a source

 

I was talking in general not about any town in particular. Like if you get, or campaign to get nominated just reply to the nomination hey I copied my design, and a mod can ask for sources. That would keep you from getting disqualified and allow the community to judge based on that.

I love some of your builds, but remember original designs have to source material and design their town.

It's not an accusation it's a let's incentivise creativity.

 

The town of the month wiki page is quite specific on the build being "towns that represents the best of the best and what ECC truly has to offer" and "how representative the town is of the overall theme of ECC". Towns that are direct copies of a different server's build, spawn in this months case, is in no way representative of ECC (imo).

Considering that "Prestige Levels are earned by achieving the greatest accomplishment on each of the EcoCityCraft servers," I don't believe plagiarized or copied towns should be rewarded with a prestige level. With that said, I can recognize that regardless of the build being copied/plagiarized it still probably took tremendous amounts of time, money, and effort, and for this reason I would be open to allowing the town of the month medal to stay with the recent town of the month winners.

 

I think a difference between inspiration and plagiarism is a kind of fine line. I know that in building my cathedral in my town, I definitely looked at google images (so some may be PMC, others may be from videos and other sources), I think its important to reference back to the build youre basing your stuff on and make sure that its just not a simple copy/paste.

In terms of revoking any rewards, while I do agree with the sentiment, I think that the best steps to take would be to make sure that it doesnt happen again. After all, even copied from pmc or elsewhere, people did spend time and effort and money making it.
I mean if anything, make them apologize for not being completely truthful, but make sure we take steps to prevent this in the future.

 

One thing I want to point out to everyone making, or about to make the "time and money" argument.

Original builds have that same investment PLUS the design.

Now for plagerism. There is no fine line. If your build is just like another build even just using parts that is plagerism. The diff lies in disclosing your source. Looking like a build isn't the same as being a build, and changing a thing here or there isn't enough.

I forgot to address the removal part earlier. Seeing as we had no rules in place and this provided us a test case I would say let these stand, but let's get some rules to subject future submissions to so it doesn't keep happening.

And one last thing. Props to @Jdawger for citing sources when called for it.

 

Honestly, if you check the block logs (and frankly the first posts of my build project page), I started its build in November, if not December. Town of the month became a thing almost half a year later. So to say that I plagiarized for town of the month is a false statement. Staff was the ones who awarded the medal and prestige, not me (not throwing shade at staff, just addressing all those people who’ve been saying I cheated the Town of the Month). Same thing for @PoopDolla who apparently also did something similar, I don’t believe he built his town for the sole purpose of town of the month.

As for the actual build itself (sans the town of the month thing), I tried to give as much credit as I could with staying within ECC’s rules (mentioning other servers) and usually do (My other project, Canterlot, I mentioned many times belonged to a build team I was a part of on another server). Yeah, I did it after the town of the month for the tower (because I wasn’t expecting or even trying for town of the month), but I still gave credit. I tried to alter it with different materials, layouts, etc. to make it more original—Really the outside tower and a little interior is the same—but I can see it is pretty similar still. [this could and should be argued in a different thread as it has nothing to do with this one]

And back to town of the month again for one final point: I love the idea with a medal, but I highly disagree with having prestige added to it (and that’s a lot coming from someone who just got prestige from it). In the three months/three awards given out so far, @gooseman1337 pointed out that two of those three winners’ builds had something that was not original (and the third possibly falling under the same, but is not confirmed at this point). I think by removing it, it will calm all this current/future tension and “witch-hunting”

 

It's meant to encourage people to build nice things.

These things pull people away from the melons and encourage them to buy resources to build their nice things. Nice things look good for the server.

It doesn't make sense from an economy standpoint to discourage this - more people spending more time to build and spending more moeny to do it is good for the server.

Also, to me at least, it doesn't make sense from a regualtion part either. Ensuring 24 towns a year haven't been copied from somewhere on the internet? The entire internet? It's honestly not a question of whether somebody will get away with it, it's how many will.

(Also reverting anything for breaking a "rule" we hadn't implemented is pretty draconian imho)

 

Some of the opinions I'm seeing in this thread are disregarding the most obvious point of all of this:

Prestige was given away for this, and that is embarrassing.

The Town-Of-The-Month Prestige is one of the rarest and hardest to acquire prestiges in the entire game. Every other prestige has some form of structure and logic to it, whether it be SkyBlock, VMR, Eco-Legend or otherwise, but the town-of-the-month is almost entirely based on factors out of your control. While the town's builder has control over what they build, that have almost no insight whatsoever into the guidelines and regulations which govern the selection of an ECC Town of the month. They have no idea if they've been nominated (this month), they have no idea if staff have visited their towns, and if they are an "unknown" user, it is likely that they have never even been thought of. Those most likely to be selected for prestige are always going to be the "more popular" people on ECC by virtue of the very selection process, because it requires people to know them.

This very fact should eliminate builds largely based on PMC submissions. I have no problem with people re-creating things on ECC from PMC; hell, I've done it in the past, but what I do have a problem with is people being rewarded for it in such a massive way.

In the past, we held build competitions, town-of-the-month selections, and other build-based events. Every single one of those events that I ran or had some input in made using PMC builds as a "majority" of your build illegal or disqualifying because it was an affront to the entire purpose of the competition. The purpose of this selection, now, is to reward the best towns on ECC: those that are the best example of the philosophy that "even though its hard to build things in a hybrid-survival server, these people have done it, and damn have they done it well!"

As others have said already, while it takes "work" to copy a schematic or a screenshot and build it ingame, its not the kind of work that should be rewarded. It takes a "lot of work" to clear out a town, flatten it, and build a 200x200 watermelon farm, but no one is suggesting we allow watermelon farms to win T.O.T.M. And, hell, some of the Watermelon farms I've seen require real technical knowledge to build. It requires little to no technical knowledge to copy a PMC build and rebuild it.

On creative servers, if you were to submit something so closely copied from PMC, you would be banned. We should NOT be rewarding people with a prestige for taking someone else's design without permission. Especially when we have BANNED people for this very act in previous competitions the last few years.

People like @thomasku11, @Krobkins and @TankPlays are a few examples of people on this server who are great at building and should be rewarded for that fact, so they keep building more great builds for the server. They are part of the history of a server whose great builders, including @Joliver and @outerlocal, have built some of the nicest towns on the server and deserve to be recognized for the incredible amount of work they put into their builds. There are dozens of other Presidents, Mayors, and even Residents who have shown great building experience too.

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My suggestion:
"All Town-of-the-Month submissions must be at least 60% your own build. While we allow reference to PMC builds, towns that are either entirely (or mostly) based on some form of schematic or MC Build you did not create are not eligible for winning Town-of-the-Month Prestige. This includes swapping blocks. While town-of-the-month selections are ongoing, the staff will agree to a "Top 5 Submissions" amongst themselves, based on clear criteria, and then speak with the town owners, informing them that they are in the final round of selection.

In that conversation, the town-owner will be directly asked if their town is from PMC, the Minecraft Forums, or any other design not of their own:

• Should it be, and they affirm that fact to the staff, they will not be disqualified from winning, but they will not be able to win Prestige. Instead, should the final selection be their town, they will win $650,000 and the warp/portal to their town will still be created.
  
• Should the user affirm that their build is no less than 60% of their own design, then they will be eligible to win the Prestige should they make it to the final selection.
  
• If a user lies to the staff, claiming their build is entirely their own when infact it is not and this is discovered, then their town-of-the-month-status will be stripped for lying to staff. Should they have won Prestige, this will also be stripped. They will not be banned, muted, or kicked, but they will not be monetarily rewarded. The statute of limitations for this is three months, so that if your build is found to not be your own up to three months after the awarding of T.O.T.M, your prestige and rewards may be stripped.

You are eligible to win T.OT.M more than once, should you show great progress in your builds between winning, but you cannot win it two months in a row. (this is done to reward people for continual progress of their towns/nations)"

This month's prestige should be stripped, and the user instead awarded $500,000. Allow them to keep the portal.

 

This is a galaxy-brain take when we consider that people are banned for doing things that weren't previously against the rules and then make a rule saying exactly what they did is now illegal. It happened with the spawn competition in the past.

Also, you were staff during the time I ran the build-competitions. You yourself should remember that it was incredibly easy to find PMC/MCForums copies and that I made it strictly forbidden when I ran those events. I was the one that found this month's T.O.T.M on PMC and it took me less than 5 minutes.

Suggesting that we can't do anything to prevent this is flat-out wrong, because we can, we have, and we should again.

 

By this logic, then, Cydonia would still qualify since the only things used from the PMC were the exterior compass tower and some interior work (the bridges, giant stairs by spawn, and the landing pad were original builds that I created, making really only 60-arguably 70% taken from PMC). The airship, while technically not mine, was built from a collaboration between me and a few other builders on an old server, thus making it all of ours collectively (and technically mine). Plus, the town has other builds in it, like the giant house with elaborate stuff inside going to basically bedrock (arguably almost as big as the tower itself, just not as expensive), not to mention a wooden ship that @VelvetRemedy built for me years ago in a private world, etc.

 

Town of the Month is a very prestigious honor to win, and once won you receive two things: the Town of the Month Forum Medal as well as a Prestige.

According to the ECC Wiki Page "Towns of the Month | Featured Towns,"

"On the first day of every month, two new Towns of the Month will be selected and declared by the ECC administration, one on Main and another on Main North. Such a selection will be based on artistic merit, uniqueness, beauty and how representative the town is of the overall theme of ECC."​

Four defining characteristics for each town are considered by the administrators: artistic design, uniqueness, beauty, and how it represents our server. When a build is stolen, even "only 60% stolen," it disqualifies that person from 2/4 of the defining characteristics from Town of the Month. You cannot claim it is your artistic design, since you did not create a majority (if not all) of the town, and you most certainly cannot claim uniqueness.

That being said, I understand Nicit's point in saying it still takes a lot of time and resources to build, even if the design is not your own. You still gathered all of the materials by your own means, and you still (hopefully placed all of the blocks yourself, or with the work of hired users. You are therefore still eligible for the "beauty" and "theme of ECC" characteristics, seeing as it was obviously deemed a beautiful build. To me, the theme of ECC is economy, and even if the design is not your own, if you still went about creating it in ECC you still did something.

For these reasons, I believe any stolen designs that win Town of the Month should be allowed to win the Forum Medal only. There are 10 Prestiges available to the users of ECC, and Town of the Month is one of them. Prestiges are a major boost for users, and it doesn't seem right to award someone who at best met half of the requirements of Town of the Month. But, as Nicit has pointed out, the materials were still gathered on ECC and the time was still put in to recreate the designs. Therefore, you should get half of the reward if you are found out to have used an unoriginal design.

I also realize that not everyone's builds will be noticed as stolen before they are chosen as the winner. I believe that even if you are found out at ANY point, you should lost the Prestige. It is not fair for someone who has done barely half the work to reap the full benefits. You can keep Town of the Month status, but not the Prestige in my opinion.

TL;DR: Town of the Month winners with designs stolen from external sources (i.e. PMC) have only met half of the required standards for Town of the Month, and should be granted the Forum Medal but NOT the Prestige.

 

It is incredibly clear that your town was not rewarded for the blimp or the large boxs, but for the massive compass rose. I also questioned the ship, because it looks incredibly similar to this sailboat, also built by users on PMC, but back in 2012.



I will note the incredible similarities between the two dark lines of wood in your ship and this screenshot, the exact same fence "ropes" that connect to the main masts, and the hull. My full comparison is here.



See side-by-side above. It is clear, to me, that this ship is clearly "inspired" by the PMC build, but either because of resource requirements or other constraints, has been reduced from 3 masts to 2. The lack of wool is likely the result of wool being too high on ecc.

 

iirc, there is a reason why it never says “your artistic merit” etc. What if my town was built by someone else whom I hired on ECC? Would I be disqualified because I didn’t actually build that?
Not saying you are wrong, but this just brings up a (probably unintentional) gray area in the rules.

A lot of boat designs are similar probably because they are based off of irl boat pictures or designs, but I can assure you that design was not based off the one you pictured. You would need to ask @VelvetRemedy his inspiration/sources as that one was not technically built by just me.

 

No. Because someone actually built it on ECC and didn't copy it from PMC, MCF, or elsewhere.