I only just noticed this Adopt-A-Game thing today. In reading everyone's posts, it had me a little worried. I understood that CYS had the right to reproduce, redistribute, reprint, etc, a story I had written, I didn't realise they legally had the right to hand over something I was still working on and give it to someone else... Sometimes I go away from the site for a couple months, and then come back, working on stories again.
With "A Tale of Chian" that I'm working on at the moment, I came back to continue it almost a year after I initially began typing it into the website's editors. However, the whole story is plotted out, it's just a matter of typing it into editors and creating all the scripting for everything. I would go crazy if I came back and discovered a story I hadn't finished putting onto this website - due to working on some of my other stories, taking a break from writing, or going on a couple month-long holiday - had been considered 'inactive' and had been made freely available for anyone to do whatever they wanted with it!
I usually plan out my stories from beginning to end offline before I even begin typing anything into the editors, so most of what's in my account is not a dead-end, but just me having not gotten around to writing the pages into the editors yet. I'd go insane if the characters and plots and back-story I spent months designing had suddenly been taken off in random directions by someone who doesn't know what the point of the story was supposed to be, and just played around and did their own thing with something that was months of work for me to get to where it was at!
Maybe if you're going to do an Adopt-A-Game thing, you should allow authors to label some of their stories as "DO NOT GIVE THIS AWAY - I REALLY DO PLAN ON COMING BACK AND FINISHING THIS STORY!!!" because they are still committed to making those stories, they just aren't fast at doing it for whatever reasons they have at the time. My Far Reaches rpg story hasn't been updated in a long time, possibly over a year now, but I've been designing the universe, characters, technologies, dice system and everything, offline, with the idea that when I've worked it all out, I could then focus on finishing it and it would be quality work.
It's like someone writing half a novel, then coming back to finish it a year later after doing other things with their life, to find someone finished writing it for them, and completely changed the story on them, and published it themselves! It just doesn't seem right to me at all.
I'd be happy for an adopt-a-game where people volunteered their stories to be finished by other people, relinquishing their rights to the story, so anyone else could take it on and do something with it, but it really doesn't seem right if stories can be taken from authors without the author's permission.
