I love card games That's a weird opening statement, but the one thing i love about card games is the amount of creativity you have to go with them. There's a large subset of decisions around the game, around your deck, around each card. Card Hunter adds a layer of fun to this by adding items in the mix, meaning there's even MORE possibilities of objects to play around with, even with less cards This does bring up a question. Usually, when anyone plays any game, they daydream about the possibilities. They'll ask themselves "What will come next?", "What can they make for this class? Or these new classes or races?". Of course, people love fantasizing their own futures, and sharing these ideas. Most online game communities have entire sub-forums dedicated to sharing these custom thoughts. Card Hunter takes a good step in this direction by the Rise of the Custom Maps, it will just take some time until the community develops as we move onwards to open beta for these grand machinations to pan out into grandeur To the actual question (actually no, there's more explaining): I know very little about the law, but i do know a little about Intellectual Property. I know that game designers usually must avert their sight from unsolicited ideas, because that might result in very frivolous lawsuits regarding 'stealing your intellectual property', even if it is not legally copyrighted. The almost complete lack of these threads around, even in a small community, suggests that this has been enforced or at least considered by the players. The final question is: Will there be a forum dedicated for players to post their cards or items ideas without issues? Or is this not an issue at this moment and we are just stifled with doubt?
http://www.cardhunter.com/forum/threads/community-card-ideas.290/ http://www.cardhunter.com/forum/threads/beta-based-card-ideas.1256/
The biggest hurdle right now is that of game balance. The relative power levels of cards and items are still being actively fiddled with (Beta, and all that) to such an extent that it is difficult to pin down just what is a reasonable card or item suggestion. We just don't have a large enough stable set of cards and items to compare to. Most of my favorite (certainly not overpowered <_< ) items from the early Beta aren't even in the game anymore, and some truly wonderful cards and card combinations have disappeared from the item pool as a result. Many other items have had their card suites changed multiple times. Plenty of things that would have looked balanced in the recent past would now look either horribly overpowered or uselessly underpowered. And that will continue to shift until the item pool is in a more stable state. Also keep in mind that we only are seeing up through level 18 right now in the Beta whereas item levels are theoretically planned for all the way up to level 50 (stated maximum character level) and many new cards will surely be introduced to fill those items out. But, as Phaselock pointed out, those threads are out there. They just aren't terribly popular at the moment.
