Questionable Questing

It's forum thing. He's muted for me too. I'm 99% sure it just means he cannot post for [x] amount of time. I don't know how long that is.

From what I understand: He got fed up with the WC and tried to make his own version. Problem was that his 'Companion Catalogue' was too similar to the WC that it got hit with a plagiarization complaint and he's muted for... I dunno how long.

Which is beyond weird as while it's clearly heavily inspired by WC it's not really plagiarism, sure things have the same names for some talents and whatnot but really thats not plagiarism. From what I read he went out of his way to avoid plagiarism beyond those surface level details. It's like claiming other games can't use the term Assault Rifle because Call of Duty uses it.

I'm sorry, a *plagiarism* complaint?! On a glorified story outline? For fanfiction?

Whoever did that is really up themselves and it concerns me that it was taken this seriously. Here's hoping the moderators are just going over the prompt before they dismiss the complaint.

Again, from what I've heard? Most of it was copied from WC. Dunno if it's true as I haven't compared them yet.

Neither have I. Probably shouldn't be shooting my mouth off about it, then.

Something like 90% of it was from some version of the catalog or a fan DLC, all of which was used without crediting...and he took a bunch of shots at the WC & Swift in the post and document. If he made his version just to use it, no one would have cared, but the way he went about it was like he was looking for a fight. *shrug* I guess he got one.

I did actually read the document, it's not plagiarism. Yes it does use concepts and even names but frankly they aren't copyrighted, or even unique to the WC. And given the thing is essentially an extensive open ended prompt for FanFics any accusations of plagiarism is laughable. As for taking shots he took a few, but given the fact Swift antagonized him to the point of multiple threadbans it's not unwarranted.

Don't you know lot know that WC is the pinnacle of all original works and definitely isn't built on the back of hundreds of IP's

It definitely didn't start life as an offshoot of R34 economy CYOAs

It also hasn't got multiple iterations made by completely separate people that all look vaguely similar.

Honestly if Lee really did get muted over "plagiarism" I will be very disappointed.

Gonna say it was for the Rule 1 violation. You know 'play nice.' As in he actually got reported for his delivery of the CC.

Because that's punishable by site rules, whereas WC vs CC is a lot like D&D 3.5 vs Pathfinder 1e. And the WC has absolute none of the protections D&D had.

And it's 100% based on reports. The 'other side' in this social conflict is full of people who report for rule violations.

Like when Lee got called 'the Leech' I'm sure most of us just rolled our eyes and moved on. But the Swifties descend from their discord en masse to report Lee at the order of their cult leader kinda thing.

I don't know about anyone else but I never really liked rule 1. We're all adults here people can handle a little name calling and shit stirring and if it does go to far smack it down with the "Thread Derail" hammer. Also the Ignore function exists!

Also, Swift has a cult? How? The only thing he does is answer the most inane questions in the known universe about WC of all things.

Also for someone throwing around the title "Leech" he has a serious lack of any stories or threads that go beyond generic nonsense that you'd find on any other XenForo site (E.G SB & SV).

Also, also, I hate this character limit it feels arbitrary and it makes me VIOLENT! (I'm sure the mods will get things ironed out soon but if that isn't the case I'll probs complain loudly)

He doesn't really have a cult.

His big thing is the WC. Like that's it. And there are people that fellate him over it and functionally act like simps and groupies.

Lee has his own simps, to be fair, but in general Lee's simps seem a lot more rational to me.

Also the CC thread generated three pages of really hostile, if not rule breaking, back and forth. I bet there was lots of reporting going on. That tends to upset mods on any forum.

The discord channel didn't even know about the post until after the thread was locked. While I wasn't one of the people that reported him, I probably would have because my college professor once told me that plagiarism is using someone's work and then claiming it to be your own. If you change most of the language, but use another paper as your literal starting point… it's still plagiarism.

Even if you consider 'Swift sucks' a good argument to use his stuff? Even a quick glance of Wendigo shows that it was used with minimal changes. If you think the amount of changes he made to that aren't plagiarism? Man do I got some bad news for you if you go to college. A lot of the changes are literally just thesaurus level substitutions, with no material change in content.

Then every bit of the WC would be plagiarism, as would every single FanFic, or even most college essays. There's degrees of nuance that your professor didn't bother including in that little "fact" they taught you. Because using others work as a springboard is one of the bare basics of the creative process.

Windborne, there is a difference between "derivative work" and "plagiarism."

It would be impossible to give the topic the detail necessary to properly explain the differences here because of the character limit. So, so implore you to look up some academic discussions on it.

Okay, could we stop this comment chain? I don't want to find out the Mods can perform the equivalent of a Thread Lock on a profile post comment chain, or something worse, since they said no more discussing the topic of that Locked Thread even outside of it.

Also, you guys are blowing up my Alert Box.