Posted - 2006.01.29 20:08:00 - [211]

 

Hi Everyone
If this is true that you cant buy ISK for real money, how come most of the fansites that are advertised on eve website have links in them to places where you can buy ISK for real money?
Just noticed this thread and thought id ask the question.

Posted - 2006.01.29 23:14:00 - [213]

 

Some are some arent
Eve-db has direct link to ISK sales.
My thought was if its not allowed why are the sites even allowed to have any links to sales of isk google or not?
I can imagine lots of people would be tempted by buying in game credit for real money.
and if its not legal etc then surely they should start by not allowing it on the fansites. I didnt even know this sort of trade existed until i was browsing through the fansites.

Posted - 2006.01.29 23:37:00 - [215]

 

Just another point as well
I am a power seller on ebay.
All ccp has to do is inform ebay through the ebay VERO program ("Verified Rights Owner")
Not sure how it works, but i had to register with them before i could sell certain goods and forward a letter from the manufacturer of the goods stating i had permission to use their logos etc.
Until i did that ebay simply ended any of my listings that contained certain words.
There are tools there for ebay users and companies to use to stop people selling goods that the owner of the goods doesnt want them to sell.
Sorry if im not clear enough on this i confuse myself sometimes.

Posted - 2006.01.30 01:42:00 - [217]

 

Edited by: Arnen on 30/01/2006 01:42:29

Originally by: Rod Blaine

---

The problem being that ownership of virtual goods is untested waters in legal terms.

Some MMO's take te chance, some dont. Those that do take a risk cause if some court would judge the ownership to lie with the player and rule the relevant EULA passage to be invalid, said MMP company would be in for a world of hurt.

---

That's it in a nutshell, right there. That's why there's the time consuming process of banning individual accounts and not a court case along the lines of

Blizzard, Sony Online Entertainment, CCP, et.al. v. IGE Inc.

It's not just that particular MMO company that brought the suit that would be hurt, it would be every MMO made from that point on. No one wants to open that can of worms.

All we will have is either MMO companies co-opting the IGE's of the world by offering their own RMT (Sony Online's Station Exchange, Second Life), making the ruleset so draconian that RMT is impossible, or what we have now which is MMO's muddling about banning where they can and trying to contain the problem.

I applaud Eve for trying though, but I imagine its somewhat of a losing battle. Kind of like those big drug bust photo ops where the police are standing next to the 10 tons of drugs they stopped while the other 1000 tons are already on the street.

Posted - 2006.01.30 05:55:00 - [219]

 

Edited by: riprjak on 30/01/2006 06:01:22
Edited by: riprjak on 30/01/2006 05:58:15

Originally by: Rod Blaine

---

The problem being that ownership of virtual goods is untested waters in legal terms.

Some MMO's take te chance, some dont. Those that do take a risk cause if some court would judge the ownership to lie with the player and rule the relevant EULA passage to be invalid, said MMP company would be in for a world of hurt.

---

The "Ownership" of virtual goods clearly resides with the developer for most MMO's (Project Entropia would be a clear exception, Second Life due to the implied contract... but I cant think of others of the top of my head).

We OWN nothing in the game. We pay CCP for entertainment. They provide that entertainment for the period we paid. End of Transaction. We no more own the "virtual goods" than we own the 20,456,980 score on a star-wars pinball machine.

To consider our In-Game items are somehow magically converted to chattel simply because we spend time playing the game is fallacious logic at best.

Paying our EVE subscription is no different to paying our Cable TV subscription (or for movie tickets), we pay for access to that entertainment and CCP provide that. No More. We dont have the right to sell the latest episode of >Insert Favourite Show< that we watched last week do we??

This arguement crops up regularly but has NO supporting case that I have seen. *IF* you can support this arguement with a law or statuate in ANY jurisdiction, please do so.

A wise fellow also notes the lack of a world court with Jurisdiction to prosecute such cases, which beats my arguement against this point by a mile :)
Otherwise; I value your opinion, but show me the data.

:) Just my $0.02
err!
jak

Posted - 2006.01.30 09:04:00 - [221]

 

Originally by: riprjak

---

Just my $0.02

---

Whilst I agree with what you are saying on the whole, I have one question for you.

Is that $0.02 of yours cash, or just a string of 1' & 0's in your banks database?

Posted - 2006.01.30 13:01:00 - [223]

 

Edited by: Andouus La on 30/01/2006 19:48:16
I dont know about the whole context of this discussion. Can state that I made personnally some petitions against ebay mining or whatever you want to call it and it did worked. The bans do work. The system where I was at for a while now was pleagued by those iskies farmers and since the petitions there gone and I've not seened them since.

1-0 for ccp lol

There are other cheats I came across like skills macros and probably targetting macros that enables you to target and lock up faster. (yes I did checked on the net for those...).

A Megathron shot in me to the armor while in warp. When I got out of warp my frig was 14% in the armor. Some performance for battleship against a warping frig rofl.

The blog I think is about spormanship. If you play a game it's for everybody to have at start the same chance to win. Same goes for any type of game. If I dont have the same game as my oponent then it's not a game anymore and thus since it's not why should I play then?

The whole iskie business stinks and for some poor loosers who uses those macros and bots they are just cheating themselve of quite a good game.

Posted - 2006.01.30 14:50:00 - [225]

 

Originally by: riprjak

---

:) Just my $0.02
err!
jak

---

Ok, on one side my felling agrees with you.
On the other, law simply does not.

And a world court is not even needed. CCP fall under a jurisdiction, that means their EULA does. As soon as an Icelandic court invalidated parts of it, that goes worldwide for all practical purposes.

If for example a US court would, CCP would still be in for alot of hurtin', since a large part of their customer base now can take legal action as a pressure tool against CCP.

Sure, a US court won't close down the server, but it will forbid access to it or advertisement via US based companies as a pressure tool of its own, which would largely come down to closing half of the server at this time. CCP won't risk that. CCP doesn't need to be based in the US to have US law applied to them. They only need to be active in the US to have said law applied to their activity there. And yes, that works on the internet too in this case. Why do you think they are making a new server just for China ?

So world court issues are irrelevant, when the court in question is situated in a country where a considerable part of CCP's clientele is, they are in for it.


Now, as for court decisions. Read the follwing link and the sources the author used for that article. Then proceed to cry because your picture of what MMO's should be is slowly going to slip away, forever.

an example:

Quote:

---

the conflict between the laws of the real world and the rules of virtual worlds has yet to be resolved. While recent U.S. court opinions indicate that End User License Agreements and Terms of Service (EULA and TOS) govern the relationships between game developers and the denizens of their virtual worlds3, other countries' legal systems are beginning to recognize the rights of the players who inhabit these virtual worlds. For instance, in 2003, a Chinese man sued Beijing Arctic Ice Technology Development Co. Ltd., the developer of the game Red Moon, seeking the return of weapons and treasure that were stolen from him by an account hacker.4 Arguing that his investment of "labor, time, wisdom and money" made his virtual belongings his property, Li Hongchen demanded 10,000 yuan ($1,205 U.S.) in damages.5 The Beijing Chaoyang District People's Court ruled that since the game servers were vulnerable to hacking, the developers had to take responsibility for the lost property.6 Although this is not binding precedent for U.S. courts, it seems to represent a shift in the way we think about virtual worlds.7

---

From this insightfull article that makes for somewhat easy reading on the subject. Dig around there a bit and you'll find plenty more that supports the logic of virtual goods being at least partly owned in some way by the players of MMO's like Eve in which conscious effort plays such a large role
.

Posted - 2006.01.30 15:47:00 - [227]

 

LOL Sorja.

Compared to other MMO's, Eve is extremely well designed in that department.

Posted - 2006.01.30 19:57:00 - [229]

 

Originally by: Zooish

---

Quote:

---

The blog I think is about sportmanship. If you play a game it's for everybody to have at start the same chance to win.

---

I'm sorry but title should be changed to "CCP War or Macro Miners, ISK farmers and Ebayer's"

this has nothing to do with "Fair Play" .....

Player A, Spends $5000 on Game Cards, Sells for ISK and buys a Titan / T2 BPO or whatever ....

CCP Approves = Yes ...... the only difference is that you are buying yor ISK from CCP .....

---

Yea that's why I started by saying that I did'nt had the whole context. Just heard of this here in this thread.

For me it's abc.

You create an account and play your char. Wanna have some iskies, heck go hunt, blow some industrials in low sec or thief miners, scam ingame whatever cheap deal you can genuinely pull within the limit of the game.

Going from cash to ingame iskies this is an other story. Sorry this out for me.

Yes this is about sportmanship. The fairness of the game is contained in EULA and the whole game is based on it. That is why it's called a game. Cuz it's got rules and there is a game cuz everybody sticks to the same game.

If there are exploits, even those "tolerated" by ccp well there should'nt be any. I've read somewhere ccp now has 95k regular subcrivers, so there is cash comining in. If the whole deal is about revenues to pay for a new cluster, they could just raise the montly cost of an account of a couple of dollars if that is the only motivation to tolerate iskies for cash or vice versa.

Posted - 2006.01.30 21:08:00 - [231]

 

So I pay for 4 accounts which 2 are mine and 2 are my friends. If my friend fsks up something, I get banned too?

Grrreat .. almost like Click2Pay who refused me to do multiple accounts on my CC because one CC is tied to one account (Luckily game that uses Click2Pay is actually crap so I didn't lose anything there ).

Other than that, good job. I know many people running around screaming that end is coming and trying to cover their isks

Posted - 2006.01.31 03:04:00 - [233]

 

Why "give ISK" AT ALL?

Indeed, it's a liability when they're banning people for taking ISK which comes from a character which is ebayed. At the very least, there needs to be a confirmation before you take ISK (so you can see the recipient WANTED the ISK).

Let people meet to transfer ISK, shrug.

(And there are perfectly legit reasons to transfer a lot of ISK for no material good, i.e. mercenary contracts)

Posted - 2006.01.31 06:15:00 - [235]

 

Originally by: Tycalos

---

Edited by: Tycalos on 27/01/2006 00:26:50
looks like first and hardest punishments goes to those who sell ISK (because they get permanent ban) and not to those who buy's (who get temp ban or less)

Who's cheating those who sell or those who buy? Because those who's selling they just making real money in real life because they saw an opurtunity to make $ and the people who buy'ing r the cheaters because they getting much more advantages than a regular player ...instant cash instant assets in eve and that means CHEAT ... what u want to stop first???

BAN without remorse buyers and the sellers will drop if they will not find any demand for isk.
CCP can fill the ebay market with at least 50 fake isk sellers , sell isk and when a fake isk account will have in his database 30-40 buyer accounts ban permanently all of them even they buyed 1mill ISK or 1 bil ISK. (A good thing is the buyers can be catch much easy than the sellers because the buyers will come straight to the ISK police.)
Soon rumors will goes between all buyers and they will stop buying beeing afraid to be banned.... NO DEMAND NO OFFER this is the economy rulles

---

This would be a good system but if you go on google and type isk and eve you will see that ebay is not the only site where you can buy iskies for hard bucks. It's kinda of delirious to think about it but ebay is only the most known site and if you would make such a ebay police then sellors and buyers would just flee to another site and... bla bla bla so on.

What I dont understand is that I checked last year to look up on these sellors of iskies and the same sellers are still there. I dont know how they operate but the must be some sort of organised system of big buyers of isks and some more little "exploiters" tru some sort of channel ingame or outgame.

Best bet these big buyers must be tracables ingame cuz they have to transfer the iskies ingame somehow. They prolly dont operate directly but tru alts. So really it's not about setting up ebay iskies bogus accounts but maybe from CCP to buy from these "sellers" and see where it leads ingame.

No player can genuinely do this cuz this would be a breach of EULA even for a just cause. But CCP has that authority to do so as means of an internal inquiry.

This is really a suggestion, I am not implying to get into a bannable activetie in any remote case.

Posted - 2006.01.31 10:14:00 - [237]

 

Originally by: riprjak

---

Originally by: Rod Blaine

---

Ok, on one side my felling agrees with you.
On the other, law simply does not.

And a world court is not even needed. CCP fall under a jurisdiction, that means their EULA does. As soon as an Icelandic court invalidated parts of it, that goes worldwide for all practical purposes.

---

Im amused that you think the law does not agree. It is entirely untested as has already been pointed out.

Anyway, I'm not inclined to get into an in depth discussion I will attempt to further clarify my point.

I maintain that the logic is fallacious and have seen NO arguement that dissuades me, regurgitating existing arguements isnt going to help. Im not even particularly interested in the EULA and its contents.

Im referring to the whole arguement that there exists chattel inside a video game or, by extension of the paid entertainment metaphore, a movie or video. This is what I believe is fallacious. This is also what a jury must be made to believe in order to get anywhere with this discussion. If you cant, the rest of the house of cards falls down.

Only in cases like project entropia would this be the case as they explicitly provide for transfer of real world money for virtual assets. In fact, there are countries where this would actually constitute gambling for this very fact.

Anyway, this is all opinion and we all know that opinion is meaningless unless there exist facts.

Irregardless of the noise, the basic signal remains. Good on CCP for taking firm action to deal with cheats and queue jumpers.

Err!
jak.

---

Let us hope that when this does go to court (and it undoubtedly will sooner or later), that the judge has your ability to seperate work and play.
The points you make are obvious, and in fact there is precedent for the seperation of games from 'normal law' - even games and sports played in the real world.
Tackling a player in a ball game and taking the ball is not theft, and is not prosecuted as such.
Boxers and wrestlers are not arrested for assault.
There is even a case of a player being killed by a baseball, surely a serious incident, no charges.

The rules of the game superceed those of common law, so long as all actions fall within those rules - and this is tried and tested in court.

Posted - 2006.01.31 13:34:00 - [239]

 

Look guys, I agree fully and unconditionally that virtual property should not exist in the context of MMO's with a no-RMT rule.

But the problem is, and that's why I make this argument on these forums, that the wider implications of that legal fuzzyness regarding it means that CCP or any other MMO developing company cannot really enforce anti-RMT enforcement means outside of their game environment. Hell, some things they can't even do inside it for that matter.

Sure, I'd love to have it all cleared up and get back to playing a game in which rl money plays a minimal role. But the arguments exist, the fuzzyness exists, and the uncertainty with regard to the outcome of this process of getting to grips with what virtual worlds really are is also a fact.

All in all, would you want CCP to take the risk ? And can you expect CCP to take it when it's not just a game to them, but a livelyhood ? And maybe, just maybe, the future isn't in what we all find acceptable at this time, maybe there IS a point to it all anyway ?

I mean, other then what I and a few rare others post here noone even tries having a valid discussion about the ethics or expectations we have as players that goes beyond "waa waa cheaters killemall BANz0r" ?

Have you really ever tried putting yourself into a position in which you can ignore that voice screaming "cheaters!" as soon as you see something about people buying isk for cash, even if just for arguments' sake ?

Why the hell not have that discussion ? Don't you think CCP is mature enough to handle an open discussion without suddenly starting to sell isk and officer modules in their online shop ?