Infinimo:
I am not threatening anyone with lawsuits. Rather I am warning them that it's not wise to steal someone's exact work because there are potential legal ramifications. I've done the same thing when people wanted to copy someone's exact work into Wyvern; imitation is something that everyone does when creating something new so it is in no way a bad thing. Wyvern, for example, imitated Crossfire's top down look to the point where some people who had no experience with the game thought it was a clone based on screen shots alone. However, if they took the time to play it, they would have seen that there was more to Wyvern than just that one aspect.
Likewise, when you imitate someone in life, you may imitate their style of dress or manner of speech, but you're your own person and not a clone, so you don't become that person totally (even if you're crazy and trying to copy them because you ultimately want to become them by wearing their skin). Thus, as I've said here and elsewhere; by all means, people should take aspects of the game that they like, but they should incorporate it into their own, unique game instead of trying to make an exact clone (which they'll never be able to accomplish from memory anyway and the wizards who retain access to source material wouldn't help them in a million years).
As for the game never coming back, I grow weary of repeating myself as I have spoken about this extensively in other threads and a bit in the post you replied to. However to sum up, I've always explained that even though I think Rhialto will drag things out for awhile, the game will return in some form or another down the road. I understand that it may not seem very likely from the perspective of someone who sees that the game just went down (and remained that way for almost three years) without any direction communication from Rhialto. Add on to that Rhialto's sporadic communications since then and you probably think he doesn't care about the game one way or another as that would probably be the case for most people who take their games down a similar path.
Regardless, things are not that simple when it comes to Rhialto's motivations. As strange and as counterintuitive as this may sound, (it is no less strange to me, I've just been dealing with it longer) the reason you haven't seen much out of him over years is because he cares enough to want to be able to do something grand with the game. Had he not wanted to, he would have just turned the reigns over to someone else or open sourced it by now as he doesn't want the game to die either. Unfortunately, his approach to doing that something has largely involved waiting around for the conditions to be just right and although he's been saying that such is finally the case, I remain skeptical as to whether he can pull it off. However, I can tell you that he's still trying to move things forward behind the scenes even though he is not inclined to talk to you guys about it at present. So, you'll either see the results of that at some point in the future (word of warning for those who haven't already figured this out: I wouldn't put much stock in his estimates) or it won't work out but you'll see him try to get things together a few more times in the future before finally settling for getting the game up some other way.
Do note that back in the day I myself sat around waiting for a game to come back after it was shut down only to see that their plans to sell the game fell through. So I do not make such statements lightly as the last thing I want to do is lead anyone along (hence why I have always made it clear that you guys shouldn't expect the game up any time soon and so people shouldn't hang around day after day waiting for it to suddenly reappear). But, I have inside information that you do not and have been dealing with Rhialto's inactivity for years behind the scenes, including during the last downtime where I said pretty much the same thing in the face of similar skepticism.
Nodlove:
1) If you sent your submission to
wyvern@cabochon.com then nobody looked at your maps. Rhialto had gone into his period of inactivity by that point and turned over handling wizard promotions to wizards ahead of that. So you had to contact a senior wizard or higher and ask them if they would look at your maps. Granted, the website hadn't been updated with this information, but I somehow suspect that the same people who couldn't figure this out also threw together random maps that we never would've gone for anyway.
2) As long as I don't have to download anything, I have no problem commenting on your map(s) regardless of whether or not you do so as part of a contest. Meaning, if you want to post screenshots in the Wyvern Development forum, feel free.