Sony Bans Sale of Virtual Items from Everquest

Snaller writes "Everquest is an online roleplaying game where you have to work for long hours online to get your hands on the magical items... unless you buy them. Buy them in game using game currency, or on Ebay where players have been spending real dollars on buying virtual items. After you pay, you meet the seller in game and, hopefully, you get the item you payed for. But no longer, Sony has decreed that selling your virtual items is no longer allowed - try it and you may find yourself banned from the game. " As a somewhat related side note, obnoxious GMs are roaming the worlds and forcing people to change their nicks to crappy D&Dish names. Really ticked off friends of mine who spent months building up charachters only to have their identities forcibly stripped from them. Of course since EQ constantly crashed for me so I gave up and returned to hoping Diablo 2 runs under wine and is released before my first heart attack. But I find it interesting that virtual property is being regulated: trade restrictions between virtual worlds and the real one.

Comments

Life Imitates Stephenson

[Anonymous Coward]

"But I find it interesting that virtual property is being regulated: trade restrictionsbetween virtual worlds and the real one." Sounds a lot like the VR real estate in _Snow_Crash_!

No standards today.

[Anonymous Coward]

I know! I mean, there are a lot of characters I see nowadays who don't even have a single apostrophe in their name!

Re:Sony Had Good Reason

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah and castles/zones don't pop up in random locations. They're built and then they are. That's how MUDs work. Zones, and storylines. You run equipment zones to pop gear. That's the game. If it was random what would the point be in knowing the game? You can't know randomness. I've never played EverQuest and everytime I see EQ it just means equipment to me (EQ being shorthand for EQuipment) but if EverQuest is just a graphical MUD then it probably works the same as I am familiar with.

But there is randomness too. equipment can tweak and the same item popped multiple times can have all different stats each time it is popped. You could beat the crap outta big bad mudmonster, loot it, and end up with trash. Or pop a 4/4 ruin like I did once on an equipment run.

This is perfectly reasonable.

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone who used to be a wizard on a few muds, this seems perfectly reasonable. Most MUDs have laws against say having multiple characters played by the same player help eachother. Depending on the system of the mud, they generally have rules against 'giving' other players your account. The reason for this is simple, balance. You want people to have to work (in the game world) for their items. If anyone can just go in and drop a lot of money on an item, it alters gameplay. Also, these benefits are supposed to be reaped for accomplishments in the gameworld. Instead this ends up giving the rewards to whomwever pays. This gets even worse when the items are quest related. I guess it wouldn't be as bad on EQ as on a real MUD, since this still wouldn't make you a wizard.

Re:Karma

[Anonymous Coward]

You think Karma is only worth $1 per point?? I've been sweating for months here posting links to subpages of the links provided in the story, rabidly promoting linux and dissing M$FT, pretending to be others (this is Cmdr Taco posting from a palm pilot from convention X) and I still only have anonymous coward status. I would kill for karma. I'll offer $5 per point!

This is a good thing.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ebay auctioning was a real problem for Everquest. Because of the prices that items were being sold for, large groups of people were monopolizing certain areas of the game where the valuable items drop and farming them for sale on Ebay. This made it impossible for some users to get these items themselves.

Secondly, there is an incredible amount of scamming involved where people send money and never get receive their items or accounts. Buyer beware, yes, but unfortunately these people would flood Verant's support staff with these issues. Now that Verant is officially against it, these calls won't last long.

If Verant cracks down on anyone, it'll be the people controlling spawns for the purpose of mass selling for real money on Ebay. It is harmful for the game, and I think it's within their rights to protect their property from harm.

To *most* EQ users, this was a good thing.

As for people having their names changed, EQ has always had a fairly strict naming policy. If you were stupid and called yourself "Darksoul" or "Feardoom", you deserve what you get. Again, I think this is good for the game and appropriate for the fantasy setting.

Re:This is a good thing.

[Syberghost]

In the real world, sometimes parents name their kids stupid things like Darksoul, or Feardoom, or Moon Unit, or Dweezil.

In the real world, sometimes people change their own names legally to things like Darksoul, or Feardoom, or The Artist, or Columbia University.

In fantasy fiction, sometimes characters are named things like Darksoul, or Feardoom.

It's asinine to go around changing your paying customer's choice of names because they aren't what you would have picked. Hopefully all of those affected will respond by quitting the game.

Sony Had Good Reason

[Anonymous Coward]

Dagmar d'Surreal here...

What Sony did was rather apropos, although the way they did it may seem rather implausible to a lot of people. The trading of in-game items for cash was causing a serious problem on some of the servers where once a group of players had established high-level characters, they would simply camp (i.e., hog) the area or monster where a rare item dropped around-the-clock taking each and every one of the rare items and forcing anyone who wanted one to pay them money just to get it. Not only did this spoil the (granted, it's not much of one) illusion of a fantasy-world environment, it was pissing a lot of players off. It was rumored that for a short time on one server, multiple guilds had banded together to create a near-complete embargo of certain areas, where the sale of items took place over an 800 line.

There was also the problem of people selling characters (which involved selling the entire account) on E-Bay, only to wait until a couple of weeks had passed, and then calling customer support, verifying the information which would almost invariably still be associated with the selling player, and taking the account BACK. Since Verant has no way of verifying who owns an account beyond what information was used to create the account, this was causing MASSIVE headaches for their customer support people, because when someone pays a few thousand dollars for a high-level character, they tend to not take "We're sorry there's nothing more we can do" for an answer.

Now when foolish players get screwed, Verant is no longer in a position of having to attempt to sort out the impossible. They can finally say "You knew it was against the rules, you're on your own, chum." This isn't something they can actively go out and police, but at least it eliminates the huge headaches that underhanded "entreprenuers" were causing for them and the people playing the game.

The long and the short of it is that this is not some petty manouever by Sony to keep people from making a profit on the game without Sony getting any.

Re:Sony Had Good Reason

[cpt kangarooski]

You think that a strict control over goods by the powerful is somehow not what's likely to happen in any social group sooner or later? There's a reason there are precious few working communes you know. EQ might want to consider setting up an in-game legal system or something (preferably with players as judges/juries, and not the company)

Re:Sony Had Good Reason

[cpt kangarooski]

wrt randomness, that seems rather dumb. if i kill all the monsters in a given area, they should stay dead. new monsters can wander in, or be imported, but sooner or later, if there's a concerted effort, they'll be extinct.

i'd say that one answer would be for characters above a particular level (e.g. evil wizards; might be npcs or pcs) to be able to attract or summon hordes of creatures, and for there to be some coming from the borders periodically (who would have guessed that trolls are migratory)

having stuff regularly appear in the same location is a little odd, and doesn't lend itself to the sorts of economic models that we're all used to.

As for treasure of course, there is a good KoDT in which they encounter a dragon who is wealthy, but invested his gold in stocks and bonds. They didn't get any treasure, but did get some good investment tips ;)

Re:Sony Had Good Reason

[Kris_J]

The trading of in-game items for cash was causing a serious problem on some of the servers where once a group of players had established high-level characters, they would simply camp (i.e., hog) the area or monster where a rare item dropped around-the-clock taking each and every one of the rare items and forcing anyone who wanted one to pay them money just to get it. Not only did this spoil the (granted, it's not much of one) illusion of a fantasy-world environment, it was pissing a lot of players off. It was rumored that for a short time on one server, multiple guilds had banded together to create a near-complete embargo of certain areas, where the sale of items took place over an 800 line.

You say that like it's a bad thing, but I think it's so cool. I was never even slightly interested in Ultima or Everquest until I heard about the virtual items being sold on eBay, then I thought it was facinating. It is a shame that there are so many scams, but legitimate business of selling virtual items in the real world something "new" (relatively), something interesting. To me, this sort of stuff makes the game more real, not less so - although the game is no longer what the developers wanted...

"It's a game. We're not going to play by their rules, but that doesn't mean we're not going to play" -- Vampire, Buffy: the Vampire Slayer.

Re:Sony Had Good Reason

[swb]

I totally agree with Sony's rationale. While I find the sale of virtual items in the real world to be a fascinating concept, I can't help but feel a little bit sorry for the people playing it. Don't they have better things to spend their money on?

I guess what Sony wanted was a succesful game, not a surragate lifestyle.

Re:Sony Had Good Reason

[Dredd13]

The trading of in-game items for cash was causing a serious problem on some of the servers where once a group of players had established high-level characters, they would simply camp (i.e., hog) the area or monster where a rare item dropped around-the-clock taking each and every one of the rare items and forcing anyone who wanted one to pay them money just to get it.

Then EQ's code should have better randomization. Or, more appropriately it sounds like, some CONCEPT of randomization. That's just stupid coding. In the 'real' world, orc's aren't born in the same spot every day with the same rare item. Randomize it, and that problem goes away, WITHOUT breaking valid uses of Virtual Real Estate.

There was also the problem of people selling characters (which involved selling the entire account) on E-Bay, only to wait until a couple of weeks had passed, and then calling customer support, verifying the information which would almost invariably still be associated with the selling player, and taking the account BACK. Since Verant has no way of verifying who owns an account beyond what information was used to create the account, this was causing MASSIVE headaches for their customer support people, because when someone pays a few thousand dollars for a high-level character, they tend to not take "We're sorry there's nothing more we can do" for an answer.

So what you're saying is that because some luser couldn't figure out how to get something in writing about the transfer of the account, it is now up to EQ to solve the problem? Nope. Let the affected user prosecute the seller for fraud using whatever documentation he has. That's what its all about.

Re:Sony Had Good Reason

[tadas]

Anyone here remember Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld series? In this science fiction series, the basic premise was that everyone who had ever lived on earth woke up after death on the banks of a giant river. Their food and clothing were provided at "grails", located at regular intervals along the river, which dispensed their bounty at regular intervals.

The interesting thing is that in the novel, people behave exactly like the folks described "camping" in the game world. I'm not a gamer, and I'm not sure why I started reading this article, but I find the behavior caused by a non-random distribution of the game goodies to be far more interesting from a social point of view than what would result from random distribution.

BTW, I highly recommend the early books in Farmer's series, but was extremely disappointed in the conclusion -- a melange of cosmic bushwa.

Re:Sony Had Good Reason

[Kalak451]

The problem is that people are making bad account transfers Verants problem. when this happens they call verants customer service line to complain. So verant has to do something to make it clear they aren't the people to call. As well as removing any liability they may have. as far as randomizing things in EQ, its a problem. if everything is random it makes doing quests very hard since you will never know where everything is. NPC's can't even give you a hint cause everything is random. plus sometimes you want to make sure players have gotten past certain creatures before they get to things like dragons. and you really don't want dragons spawning in newbie areas.

Re:Sony Had Good Reason

[alarosa]

The problem is, 100% randomness makes the game lose a lot of continuity. Now, EverQuest DEFINITELY should have had a good amount of random loot distribution before it ever went live, but most people expect the Crown of the Froglok Kings to be dropped off of the (you guessed it) Froglok King. There's something to be said about making leeto storylines :)

That's what MajorMUD was invented for.

[Nick]

Everquest? Diablo? I don't need to graphics to be forced upon me to role play. I like MajorMUD, it is text based and I can use something that we all have (or some of it left anyway) and it is a brain, an imagination. I also don't need to be forced to buy whatever expensive hardware some corporation tells me to just to play their game.

Re:Karma

[whoop]

Heh, maybe I could put together some posts about Open Source and Columbine and sell them to ya. It'll have to be more than $1/point though. Slashdot is a virtual community, so why not?

Bah Everquest...

[zztzed]

I dunno about the rest of you, but I'm getting sick and tired of medieval/fantasy RPGs/MUDs. I'd rather see a nice, well-done futuristic, or -- and I am loath to use this term -- "cyberpunk" MUD. The last such MUD I played was Iconoclast, which kicked ass primarily because of the roleplaying aspect, which was very heavily encouraged (as opposed to any random fantasy MUD, where it's kill, eat, sleep, repeat). Am I the only person who wants to see such a game? It sure seems like it...

--

Re:MUDs

[Chris Johnson]

There's another parallel, though perhaps a bit controversial- in online multiplayer flightsims it's possible to have 'easy mode' in play. Warbirds spent much time with mixed easy and full realism in the main arena where everybody wanted to be- and it really got in the way.

It's like this. The idea of easy mode is that you can't stall or black out or red out, but also you don't have quite the turning ability of full realism. It would appear at first glance that this gives a big advantage to 'real pilots' flying full realism. But! A game like Warbirds is _very_ intensely modelled. Blackouts, redouts, stalls are significant challenges, quite demanding to cope with in heavy combat- you have to maintain 'situational awareness' of not only the enemies but also the state of your own aircraft or you _will_ blow your energy and end up unable to maneuver, or even crash.

To add to that, there are whole maneuvers entirely based on making the other person lose their SA, for instance doing a climbing spiral away from a Focke-Wulf (which has very nasty and violent departure characteristics). If you can get the FW hungry enough to get a shot at you, and you're maintaining the climbing spiral, you can get him to try to pull up, and snap into a really _nasty_ spin and fall, whereupon you swoop down and pounce...

...unless of course he is in easy mode, in which case you are meat: the entire point of your historically accurate defensive maneuver is negated. Same if you're taking off from an embattled field (like a silly bugger, but it's fun) and roaring about ten feet off the deck dogfighting with people- it's amazingly exciting to be doing this and fighting to hang on to the air in incredibly hostile situations, but when you know some of those people swooping around ten feet off the deck are in arcade-game mode and will _not_ have to worry about blowing E or pulling too many Gs, blacking out and digging in a wingtip, it really sours the whole thing.

I was never that great at gunnery but I'm a natural stickjock :) my love is the barnstorming, flinging a plane around madly and doing the unexpected. When I flew Air Warrior I had about a 50% chance of evading _anybody_ if I was freaked out enough, because I'd fly totally nuts and force them to black out trying to keep up with me! The whole mad-inverted-immel-to-ten-inches-off-the-ground routine. I'd also teach people how to fly and maneuver ("OK, we are at 10,000 feet. It will take you 20 seconds even to _reach_ the ground. Now turn real tight and keep the nose _way_ below the horizon, and this time you won't stall!" ;) )

There was this one time that I, in my dweebfire^Hspit, went after this cargo plane in Warbirds, figuring it was going to be a piece of cake. Well- wow! It noticed me and began flipping around like mad, sudden fierce maneuvers that I couldn't believe the guy didn't black out, it was all over the place and I, in my overpowered Spitfire, was clinging to the air by sheer force of will, wrestling the beast around about ten feet off the ground and staying on the guy for maybe ten minutes, pinging him repeatedly, basically putting in an amazing performance of virtuoso planehandling- and when he vanished over a hill and I lost him, I had to say over the radio, "Whoever was flying that Junkers- wow, man, good show!"

...this was just a few days _before_ I learned about the easy mode options that let him do what he did by merely yanking around the stick like he was playing Mario Party without ever blacking out or stalling... 95% of turning rate isn't as much as a full-on 100% full realism turning rate, but when you can slam into it without paying attention and throw the plane from -95% to 95% in a tenth of a second by just banging the stick against its stops, well, we're talking about a Situational Awareness advantage that will just break down the spirit of anyone still trying to play the game as a sim with the full demands of an aircraft.

Cheating comes in many forms, but the point is, it kills the fun of the game. You want to be playing in the same universe as your opponents. It's just as spirit-breaking if you were in EverCr^Hquest and went up against some guy who spent $10,000 on having a character that could stomp anybody- and goes around doing so. Or against some group staking out an item so they can sell it on eBay. *shrug* these things need to be dealt with one way or another...

still playing nethack

[hawk]

well, of course! did anyone stop?

That's the *real* reason that linux isn't unix, you know--nethack isn't part of the default install on any distribution I know of . . .

I had the amulet in an older version, and without cheating. I slipped and hit the wrong key, wasting a turn instead of wising for a scroll of recall (or whatever it was) and died instead. These days I'm marrieed with kids, and don't have that kind of time any more . . .

Re:Well, there's foolishness all around.

[Phil-14]

Hmm. What about Joseph of Arimathea? Wasn't he a minor figure in the legend of the grail?

Illusion?

[Eric E. Coe]

No. The correct word is agreement. Our entire social "reality" (including economics / value) is a matter of agreement.

On the other hand, there are many who claim that "reality" is an illusion (maya). Dreams / simulations / The Matrix :)
--

Re:Illusion?

[Fesh]

Not only that, but any agreement made between two parties is tantamount to the formation of a government. The parties' actions are governed by the agreement. In fact, I argue that everything we've accomplished since gaining sentience is pretty much based on the concept of agreement. Heck, language wouldn't have any meaning if we didn't agree about what the sound symbols mean.

Anyway, end rant.

--Fesh

Don't fight it, deal with it.

[Eric E. Coe]

So, the 2 problems with the current system is:

• "Camping" on a region to monopolize a scarce item.
  As others have said, sounds like a weakness in the basic game design which needs more randomness (or something).

• Account scams causing customer support hassles.
  Simple - a method is needed for someone to unambigously and irrevokably assign an account to someone else (even if both people are anonymous).

On a larger note, this should be a lesson for would-be game designers - the built-in design of the system (i.e. "natural law") should encourage/enforce the desired play modes, including activities outside the game itself. Trying to apply external rules like these after the fact will probably be an excercise in futility.
--

Re:Don't fight it, deal with it.

[Steeltoe]

Selling or transfering your account to someone else is also "illegal" according to the EQ EULA which you have to agree to every time you start the game.

- Steeltoe

Re:hehe

[osu-neko]

while(horse == dead) {
beat;
}

Been programming in Pascal a lot? In C, even functions that take no parameters still require the parentheses, thus: beat(); not: beat;

--

Hee hee...

[Squeeze Truck]

What some people won't do for a game... I remember back when I DM'd AD&D games in high school, one of my friends bought 20,000 experience points from me for $40. I took the money, and put a "2" in pencil in front of his experience point total pn his character sheet. Easiest $40 I ever made. I think that was the day I decided people who get into AD&D are a little to wierd for my liking.

Real as life

[Pseudonymus Bosch]

if the games contained a real economic system which was open to player to player and player to NPC sales
Well, you could have an online game where you could be a hacker that goes every day to work and, every now and then, you would trance to a higher plane and do some things that, according to the will of some superior (and whimsy) beings ("moderators" would be a good name), would give you good karma. To spice up the game, there could be some trolls that would try to ruin your day. After that, you would go back to your normal state and see how your virtual economy shares fall free in the market (let's call it Nasdaqh-Ur-Nyse). Then you would put your character to sleep.
Next session, you would repeat.

My point, when a game is too much like real life, you always have real life, that is cheaper.
__

Re:Well, there's foolishness all around.

[cpt kangarooski]

I've actually never played any RPG (excepting maybe Sierra-type games) that wasn't pencil and paper. I can't believe that a computer can deal with the unforseen tangents that players always come up with. (e.g. "You see an abandoned spaceship" "Okay, I ignore it - let's go to the planet of the Green-Skinned Bikini-Clad Nurses")

At any rate though, why would that destroy an illusion? Obviously this is not the Roman Empire where they only had 20 or so names to go around, and women were frequently named according to the order of their birth. There's not a significant difference between Bob and Baughb, except that one looks kind of dumb. Do you really get upset when you interact with real people named Joe or Mike?

Me, I'd like to have a PC with no name at all - it worked for Clint Eastwood.

Re:Well, there's foolishness all around.

[cpt kangarooski]

Michael is a good biblical name. So is Joseph. I'd rather expect to see either in a medieval European setting. Of course, probably not in English - it was substantially different at the time. But those names were around.

Frankly though, the best solution i can see is peer pressure, not fiats from up on high. Refuse to interact with people who don't have names that you like. Or tell them that you're so sorry that they have to go through life with that name. Sooner or later, if enough people do that you may see some change.

Or you may be considered to be a royal jerk (excuse me, jerque) because you place such a high importance on an illusion which you feel is easily shattered.

ObSimpsons: Mine ears are only open to the pleas of those who speak ye olde English.

Re:Private/public ambiguities

[cpt kangarooski]

how about squatter's rights.

Sony had the opportunity to make some improvement, but didn't. You did. It's yours - earned by the sweat of your brow... er, mouse clicking finger and their unwillingness to do the same.

just because they could magically create gold or whatever is irrelevant - if they did it would devalue and defeat the purpose. sony can be hung by their own petard if they try to avoid this.

The real government still trumps the psuedo government in the game, when you involve them through some real world transaction (e.g. you can't defraud people when selling virtual property and expect to get away with it). I'd let purely game world transactions be subject only to the game rules, and let the buyer beware.

it took a long time to develop a rather trustworthy economy in the real world - if sony wants one they can put some effort into it.

Re:That gets me EVERY time

[cpt kangarooski]

I dunno. I've seen a fair number of ordinary names in fantasy novels and such. Sam from LotR, ferinstance.

Really about the best non-ordinary name I can think of both describes its' bearer (for a while) and makes fun of the use of weird names. This would of course be Schmendrick the Magician from Peter Beagle's "The Last Unicorn."

Re:Karma

[cpt kangarooski]

You can't sell that! Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos.

;)

Well, there's foolishness all around.

[cpt kangarooski]

Obviously EQ is going mad with power (obStonecutters) what with the earlier attempt to prevent people from firmly bashing on the rules, and now this.

Sure, you're a dope if you pay for potion or castle that doesn't exist, but why not let the dopes do what they like? Put a disclaimer regarding the fact that it's all Unreal Estate and you ought to be set.

What especially galls me though is the names. I've played characters in fantasy settings who had normal names. At the moment in the GURPS campaign I'm in, my character is named Mack. Another PC is Nate. Who came up with this stupid rule that all fantasy names have to sound like exotic chemicals and/or have apostrophes in them?

Re:Well, there's foolishness all around.

[radja]

It's not the people with characters named Joe, Bob or Pete who are the problem. These names may not sound all that medieval, but in medieval times there probably were people with strange names for the time.. what is a bigger problem is names like
fuckyouall, filthybastard, and GenericL33Tkid. The MUD I'm on enforces a name-policy (clearly stated at login, as these things should be.. then you can still choose another mud). Basically our rule is: Would you ever consider giving this name to your kid, or would it make a decent nickname? (a name like Smasher would be allowed)

//rdj

//rdj

Re:Well, there's foolishness all around.

[stonedogtomb]

What especially galls me though is the names. I've played characters in fantasy settings who had normal names. At the moment in the GURPS campaign I'm in, my character is named Mack. Another PC is Nate. Who came up with this stupid rule that all fantasy names have to sound like exotic chemicals and/or have apostrophes in them?

I've never played EverQuest or any other multiuser RPG, but I would be annoyed if someone told me that I had to change my name just because it didn't conform to certain rules. But at the same time, I wouldn't want people to be able to use ANY name, or you have what a lot of my friends would complain was wrong with Ultima Online. Many people would come up with names they thought were funny (I guess that was what it was), but really destroyed the whole illusion of the game, and made the experience less enjoyable for everyone else.

Re:Well, there's foolishness all around.

[stonedogtomb]

When I said "destroy the illusion", I was refering mostly to names like "pimp" or a whole Beavis and Butthead quote, that people would use just to draw attention to themselves. I don't know what the exact naming restrictions are in EverQuest, so I couldn't say whether they were unfairly restrictive. I assumed they were mostly for filtering out that kind of stuff.

I can't really say how this would apply to a generic fantasy like EverQuest, but it would seem to me that if you are trying to simulate a world based on a medieval one, or oriental, or something else, you would want the names to reflect that. I think that adds a lot to the illusion (whether or not the names are strictly ACCURATE to that time period, but as long as they appear to be). If I saw a name like Joe or Mike in a game I was playing that was medievalish, it would jar me back to the real world and defeat, at least in my mind, part of the purpose of the game. I can't say I would be upset.

Re:Well, there's foolishness all around.

[stonedogtomb]

Michael is a good biblical name. So is Joseph. I'd rather expect to see either in a medieval European setting. Of course, probably not in English - it was substantially different at the time. But those names were around.

This is exactly what I meant when I said that they appear to be accurate. I don't know much about naming conventions during the Middle Ages, but Joe is not one that I associate with it. And of course I am probably wrong, and I am being completely stereotypical, but in a game like this, historical accuracy is not always the most important thing.

Frankly though, the best solution i can see is peer pressure, not fiats from up on high. Refuse to interact with people who don't have names that you like. Or tell them that you're so sorry that they have to go through life with that name. Sooner or later, if enough people do that you may see some change.

This is probably a better way to handle it than having a few people in control of everything. Maybe it would have worked, and maybe it has worked. I don't know.

Re:Well, there's foolishness all around.

[scromp]

The naming policy is clearly stated in the rules before you ever create your first character. It's been that way since Day 1, and Verant reserves the right to change names that don't meet their rules. (from 'Suckmyballz' to 'Gandalf'.)

I personally think it's a shame the GMs are spread as thin as they are - they rarely actually get around to changing anyone's name except the very worst offenders.

When I'm playing a fantasy game, a tosser running around with name like daPimpDaddyMack ruins the experience. EFNet is free, he can go be a wanker there.

Re:Well, there's foolishness all around.

[Fishstick]

I had a friend who went by the name 'mobius' when he played online and he told me when he started playing EQ they changed his name to 'modius' to make it fit more with the genre. I can't figure that one out. Is it because it's a historical figure? Seems like it sounds D&D-ish enough?

So don't play

[jjoyce]

"I don't like Sony. They won't let me pay for things that don't exist."

So don't play.

"Sony's game won't let me use a name I like!"

So don't play.

Mankind has always dreamed of destroying the sun.

(a) Take gun (b) Point at foot

[Anarchofascist]

How dumb can you get? In an e-world where the purse-strings are about to be tightened, how can any online game server ignore a revenue stream like this?

I reckon the best model would be:

• Client - open source, free
• Server - closed source, free access, plus very high price to buy (like a few thousand) REVENUE STREAM A!
• Game objects
  • Let players buy and sell objects
  • Let the server operator sell objects REVENUE STREAM B!
  • Objects cannot be transferred to other servers
  • Add an auction engine inside the game!
  • Players auction items for real cash, work out payment between themselves

I haven't patented this business model... it's public domain. Hop to it, all you developers!

Re:(a) Take gun (b) Point at foot

[JamesKPolk]

Having a closed server, and an open client, makes it more likely that one is FORCED to design the protocols well (i.e. not trusting the client with the time of day, let alone game information).

Re:(a) Take gun (b) Point at foot

[Graymalkin]

How about a closed client and open server? That makes more sense to ANY game company, stop whining because stuff isn't free as in beer. I would rather pay 40$ for the game and get a free server included with it. Then I could set up my own special server on my T1, ADSL, ect for free. Having a plethora of servers means the users can be in charge of running the game without paying obscene prices for the servers et al.

Hysteria

[Des Herriott]

Sony (actually Verant) did not scan anyone's hard drive. They were planning on scanning the Windows running task list, which I don't agree with, but they backed down on that as well.

Verant are far from perfect, but this sort of hysterical exaggeration doesn't help matters at all.

Wouldn't be much fun to play

[Des Herriott]

In a MUD like EQ, most of the fun of being a high level character or owning that special item is the (team)work you've put in to obtain that special item in the first place. And a lot of the higher level quests/items do require a large team of players with a lot of strategy/planning and high degree of co-operation.

What's the fun in playing a MUD when the people with the special items are those who a) can afford to buy them, and b) actually want to buy them instead of playing the game for fun?

Re:We have gone too far...

[jshare]

*sigh*

How do you not understand this? People spend real money to play the game. You have to buy it. It's the same thing.

Jordan

Mercantilism is alive and well

[Demona]

"The American...derived his right of cheating the Revenue, and of perjuring himself, from the example of his fathers and the rights of nature [and would continue to] complain and smuggle, and smuggle and complain, till all Restraints are removed, and till he can both buy and sell, whenever, and wheresoever, he pleases. Anything short of this, is still a Greivance, a Badge of Slavery."

Damn straight.

Private/public ambiguities

[Lemmy Caution]

Let's indulge the reverie that we may, indeed, migrate more and more of our social identities, including the economic and the creative, to 'virtual realms,' communities that are mediated in electronic networks.

Let us continue the conjecture that one has and develops property, wealth, reputation, relationships and so forth within these communities.

Now, these communities are privately owned, unambiguously. All property of Sony or AOL/Time/Warner or whoever. Does this make them the equivalents of the governments of these new 'places?'

Does a certain sort of political 'right' accrue based on the fact that you invest time and effort - perhaps years, someday perhaps the better part of a life - despite the proprietary nature of this virtual existence? Does this blur the distinction between private property and public space? How much of that is dependent on the ability to 'translate' between private realms? (ON one hand, we think of our physical world as more constrained, since it is harder to move from one country to another if one is disatisfied with the political structure than it would be to move from one virtual realm to another - however, in fact, in the real world, much of our wealth is *more* liquid - I can sell my possessions, earned by years of labor, and move to another place, but all my labor in one virtual world would be completely untransportable to another...)

That's the most interesting aspect of this sort of development to me - it challenges a lot of the basic political and economic ontology of popular wisdom.

Re:Private/public ambiguities

[gilroy]

Quoth the poster:

Now, these communities are privately owned, unambiguously. All property of Sony or AOL/Time/Warner or whoever.

Is it really so clear-cut? Oh, sure, there are licenses and such, but that's not an airtight case. One could argue, quite strenuously -- I'm not sure "successfully", but hey -- that the users of the online community become, in a sense, "authors" of the history of the community. And copyright law automatically grants rights to authors or co-authors. We might very well see an emerging conflict between different areas of IP law (oh, imagine that).

At some point, if the communities grow large enough and vibrant enough, Sony might find their ownership evaporating into mist.

Re:Property rights.

[Lemmy Caution]

That begs some big questions:

Is the 'property' of EQ ever your property, or does it belong to Sony? Do you actually have any rights to it that they don't explicitly give to you? Is the 'you' that 'owns' those objects the same as the you that is playing the game? If your character dies, you may lose those objects - just what rights do you have in that case?

More questions: what is the legal status of contracts made between two characters on EQ? Are they binding between the players? Are marriages? What civil rights do you have? Can Sony arbitrarily triple or quadruple the costs of a subscription? If you didn't pay, what rights would you have to your virtual property?

Re:Which multi-player RPGs work with Wine?

[Noke]

Does Ultima Online have a linux port of the client? It is officially unsupported, but at least it is an x86 linux native client.

Property rights.

[BrookHarty]

Does it really matter if the property you own is virtual?

If I paid Cash for an object, virtual or not, I should have the rights to do with it as I feel please.

5 dollars cash or 5 dollars E-Gold, its my property.

IMHO -IronWolve

Re:Property rights.

[Sloppy]

It's not your property. It's your character's property.

---

Re:Property rights.

[prizog]

EQ propoerty is your character's propoperty. Not yours.
Example from the pencil and paper RPG I play:
Rob the ork owns hundreds of pounds of plastique. (Or used to, before the explosion :)

I don't own any plastique. If I were to try to sell another player Rob's plastique for real money, my GM might allow it, but he would never play another RPG with me.

Sony is the GM - they have to let you play (you payed). But they don't have to let you do certain things - they're the GM.

Re:hehe

[Phexro]

love the sig. but, wouldn't:

while(horse == dead) {
beat;
}

be better? or, for the more efficient:

while(!horse) {
beat;
}

--

Re:MMORPGs

[Kris_J]

the majority of players didn't want to get stuck in a farming/camping/kill-stealing cycle

Nah, after all - that's what work in the real world is about.

Missing one subtle point...

[Kris_J]

...that it's a commercial software product - people have to pay real world money to get into it in the first place. What the software company is saying (amongst other things) is that they want to be the only ones that make real money out of their product.

Re:well...there is always Ultima

[einstein]

hehe...yeah...kinda... until the laws of economics kick in and well... in effect...

Rare items just aren't worth what they were in my day.

I guess you would call that the devaluation of the virtual dollar.

well...there is always Ultima

[einstein]

sigh. there goes my dreams of growing up, making a multiplayer computer game that has items that have actual cash value. From there I would establish trading and allow people to buy things for real currency. Then, I would go into the game, give myself millions in game currency, then sell it for real world money, then retire to a non extradition treaty country. it's s simple dream, really.

Re:well...there is always Ultima

[Wah]

if someone at Sony is reading this, realize that by banning the sale of virtual items (which you have the code for, hint, hint) you are damming an infinite revenue stream. But, heh, what do I know, I still play Nethack.

--

Re:well...there is always Ultima

[The Presence]

I played Gemstone III an online RPG for about 3 years, before that I spent my childhood years playing Magic the Gathering when it first came out. Yes I was a total dork as a kid, but what do I have to show for it now? Well I've made about $800 selling magic cards I bought for about a buck, and about $700 selling Gemstone items and characters, that I had fun acquiring. People buy characters because they don't want to go through the effort of developing little runt characters before they have a modicum of power. Simple need, and simple demand, nothing wrong with that. Where it gets screwed up is when GMs with huge power over the game create items use that to sell it for money, favors and sex. I've seen it all done. I can't blame Sony for passing a law like that, it probably won't stop behind the scenes transfers, but it'll curb it. I'm just glad I took the money and ran. To think the only thing I might have had to show for my childhood was a moldy old football jersey and jockstrap instead of this nice new Dell laptop.

Karma Bidding War

[Byter]

I'll pay $2.20 per karma point.

(New Zealand dollars. :P )

Why there are no modern age muds.

[mattc]

The main problems with this type of gmae are:

• Realism - in a medieval mud it is believeable that you could have a lengthy sword battle and take a number of hits without dying, provided you are wearing some armor. For a modern age mud to be realistic if someone shoots you once with a gun you're going to be on your knees.. twice, you're dead. So the battles are extremely short and much more deadly, meaning that combat is basically out of the picture in this type of game. Since a majority of MUDs center around combat as the main method of advancement (It is certainly a lot easier than having the administrator code hundreds of quests), this is a big problem.
• 2nd aspect of realism - Computers have to be simulated in some way, but every simulation of 'the net' on MUDs or pencil & paper RPGs is really lame. You can either completely ignore computers in your MUD (not very realistic) or be stuck on the 'post-apocolypse' theme.
• Work Required - ALL mud codebases today are either pure fantasy or "sci-fi with mana" crap. TO make a modern or futuristic mud you'd basically have to code it from scratch... and since no one gets paid for working on muds I don't see this happening any time soon. This of course excludes MUSHes and MOOs, but lets face it, the audience for pure roleplay isn't that big.

I've also played Iconoclast a few times and it was pretty cool, but now it seems the administrators have abandoned it in some sort of "no combat" mode. There are also a couple of other modern age muds out there, but they are all lame or too full of bugs to play.

I've tried to create sci-fi MUDs in the past, and it is way too much trouble and too time consuming.

rules vs reality

[Blue Lang]

Anyone here who has mudded or run a mud knows what EQ is about to find out - rules do not define reality.

If they want to stop ownership transfer, the only way they're gonna do it is by coding around it.

Also, I think it's very unfair to frame the article in terms of 'Sony' doing something. Do you REALLY think anyone from the parent corporation has a clue, or gives a shit, about what anyone's user name is?

No. This is the result of some pedantic fuckwad GM enforcing their idea of 'role-play' on the only people who define rp - the PLAYERS.

Heh, same shit, bigger mud. Idiots.

--
blue

Re:rules vs reality

[Steeltoe]

As an experienced mudder and somewhat experienced in administering a mud with more than a few players, I totally agree. I've also played Everquest for the last week, alas I'm not familiar with higher level playing on EQ.

You _cannot_ create a virtual world without interaction with the real world. The illusion is only as strong as the players agree to put effort in it. With so many players as Everquest has, over 1000 per server, there's always going to be degradation/dillusion of any RPG-playing agreements in the beginning. You cannot force players to RPG without being draconian and make unpopular/unfair decisions. When people pay to play, it only says itself you have to accomodate the majority. Everquest also has some other major problems commonly shared by MUDs:

* Too few good zones, they are overcrowded with people.
* No adventuring zones, they're all littered with meaningless monsters not doing anything meaningful except getting slayed by dozens of players. They lack real depth, you can't explore a dungeon for hours (like in nethack/moria).
* No randomness or dynamic changes, except wether you hit/get hit or not, but that'll converge due to statistics. The battles are very predictable, monsters spawn on top of you (litteraly!) if you're not careful.
* Little meaningful non-hack'nslash-ish interaction with the environment, except slaying monsters to gain exp or work on your skill at the guild (sounds like Diku huh?). There are perhaps a handful of locked doors in the _entire_ game. I've never seen one, but some I can't open without anything telling me why. You can't compare the level of interaction with even the most hardcore hack'n slash MUDs. The NPCs are too stupid, the quests are too arcane, clueless (without reading the solution on a WWW-page) and crowded (e.g some quest monsters give nice xp, typical beginner-mistake). There's no other attainable goals other than to make xp, eq and money and slaying is the best way to do it. For instance, you don't have titles, professions or anything - you can't become King ;-)
* Trains - It's too easy to be overcome by dozens of monsters when they help each other. As you flee, you meet more monsters that joins the chase. This leads to the infamous trains of monsters following the player to the rim of the zone. While this may seem cool at first, it severely hampers both RPG and hack'n slash gameplay since the monsters are acting very robotish to begin with. It's just a nuisance to die because of such trains.
* Inflation - If items don't degrade, there's always going to be inflation in the game. Now this again affects gameplay, as it will just keep getting easier and easier to buy good items instead of finding them yourself - resulting in even more powerplaying and less exploring.
* No support for RPG - There's nothing happening in the world, except when the GMs starts a rare event. There's no real story behind things, and you don't get background information (most importantly about yourself) to work on or anything. There's just lack of anything to make you get started RPGing (even guidelines). There might be some more RPGing on the anarchy servers (PvP), but I haven't tried them and I bet they're centered around killing as many |insert enemy race/class here|. Not really RPG in my book. You don't earn xp by RPGing in EQ.
* No support for wizardry/god status - In other words, this is not a free game. You pay for play per month, and they won't let you near a level-editor. It will never be *your* game. As they put it so truthfully: "YOU ARE IN OUR WORLD NOW!". And the only changes in the world you'll notice is the bugfixing, occational patches for balance and the next upgrade pack you have to purchase (Kurnak). For some reason I bet Kurnak got some nice xp/eq/gold ;-) Envy and inflation because of this will just magnify EQs problems further.

Many problems can't be coded around without heavily hampering gameplay interaction:

* Twinking - Giving your good stuff and money to your lower level player.
* Powerlevelling - Higher players helping out a lower level without sharing exp (e.g healing outside party)
* OOC - Used too much by "power-players" (they usually suck and whine quite alot) to get hack'n slash advantages in the game. People shouting OOC-info are even more annoying.
* Camping - Camping and hoarding is difficult to deal with also, and it affects other players as well as game balance and inflation. Randomness won't solve it all, and may kill the "feel" of an area if used too heavily.
* Trading - Trading RL money/services(?!) for advantages in the game. The problem is not in the rules, it's in the playerbase (and how you obtain that playerbase).
* Weak reactions to Whining - The customers whine when they get fooled by others players, resulting in the GMs making new rules (after you purchased the game!). Looting corpses, telling lies, deceiving and fooling, stealing, making trains (done all the time btw), whatever makes someone whine to customer support, is illegal. You risk dorky tells from GMs and have to submit or risk harsh reactions according to what I've heard. RPGing has no air to breathe in such an environment.
* Envy - A fundamental problem in MUDs causing whining. When someone finds out, or think they have found someone to be much more powerful than them at the same level or similar differences regarding to zones for instance. They start moaning and whining, and don't really see that it's all a game and life's supposed to be unfair (to make us learn live with it). Envy leads to more concentration on powerplaying and less on playing for fun. Somewhere in there, too many players lose all their fun and just play for the addictiveness.

To solve these problems require MASSIVE efforts, something I have doubts a company can pull off in this scale at this point of time. Economics have never promoted art on its own terms. The problems described here are usually shared by most MUDs. If you want a MUD with much RPGing, you need a small playerbase you can trust, a good set of guidelines/stories/background info and friendly admins who can help those who haven't got a clue. It might also help to have another server with the same game, but without RPG, so people who want can play there instead.

Despite all this Everquest is a fantastic MUD experience. You can really tell it has been created by experienced mudders/admins. The graphics are good, albeit not as good as the latest in 3D technology (bad lighting in Direct3D, small polygon count, although the textures are good). The zones are well made and must have cost a fortune to design. It's highly addictive, and fun to play (in the addictive sort of way). Sometimes you even meet people who try frantically to RPG (while camping at monster-spawn sites). It's pretty humorous to talk to them, but I don't find it rewarding since RPGers accounts for less than 5% of the population and you have very little to work with in terms of sharing a world-reality (except your using your own imagination).

- Steeltoe

Big online games

[Graymalkin]

I think the factor of people paying real money for virtual items would go away for the most part if the games contained a real economic system which was open to player to player and player to NPC sales. It would add alot of realism to the game's environment if you could auction off or sell something you had found or earned. But you say "then people can just get the same rare item a bunch of times and and make megabucks". To that I say give every character and item a 40-bit or so identifier tag. If two tags show up on the same server it maybe nullifies the item or doesn't let the person connect to that server. This would let there be LOTS of items and characters but would prevent people from getting duplicates. These tags could also be registered with the game's publishers on a secure server so you could check if a player had legit equipment. Diablo became a hackfest if you even dared to use a legit character. The ID tag could be enabled on the server level so it would be up to the server if they wanted to enforce legit items. Some people might complain about privacy but it's one of the few ways I can think of to defraud the frauders.

Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat

[Dredd13]

Everyone should read The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat.

Basically, it was a similar system, "back in the day", (although obviously nowhere near as interactive or as advanced). This paper documents some of the lessons they learned about how people interact in a "virtual environment". It will offer some interesting insight on why EQ people just "don't get it", and I recommend if any of them are reading this... hey, YOU .. go read that article.

For example, there was a situation where a normal player got a "DM only" weapon (a weapon that could kill anyone instantly). How they handled that situation was ingenious, inventive, and consistent with the rules they had laid out for "The reality". The EQ people need to understand these things before they go passing edicts like this.

Re:Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat

[Zurk]

some of the other MOOs and MUDs such as the now defunct cybersphere dealt with some problems well (i.e. players getting wiz only weapons would have those weapons degrade after a while) and some badly (i.e. i got kickbanned for exploiting the kill code ..when a char died via a kill with a non player object moving the char rapidly sometimes produced an invulnerable "corpse" which could kill but not be killed..very useful...posting a message up on the board proclaiming what i did after exploiting it fully got me kickbanned and toaded)..it all depends on the GM/wizzen and i havent seen even one virtual community with GM/wizzen who could maintain the illusion completely. i guess having infinite power is impossible to keep under control all the time.

Re:Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat

[MrWa]

Wow, I remember Habitat...it was the most time I spent on my Commodore 64, racking up HUGE credit card bills for my parents until they got sick of it and canceled my Quantum Link acoount. *sigh* Oh the joy of getting that 1200 baud modem - now that was blazing speed.

Re:BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA*breathe*HAHAHAHAH

[grappler]

Hehe, I just got squashed by the moderators. BRING IT ON!!!!!!!

Apparently, I forgot to attach the thing that always wins 'em over to the beginning of my message:

"I'll probably be moderated down for this..."

--
grappler

Re:BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA*breathe*HAHAHAHAH

[grappler]

Well, it's not like there's a law being made against selling these things. It's a company selling a game and people were basically ruining the challenge of the game and making it harder for other, more rational people to play fairly. Sony had every right to shut down such transactions in the game and ask Ebay to remove the items. From what I read, most participants were in favor of that move.

Of course, when we talk about legal rights, the game participants were not doing anything they "shouldn't have", and the legal system has no place in any of this.

But back to the original thread - I'm not really a bad slashdot poster, honest! But I'm also NOT A KARMA WHORE, and I will speak my mind. I only wish you could have seen the state this article put me into when I read it (hint: fits of laughter) and I really didn't care what others thought. These prices were HIGH - several "items" were going for over $1000! Also, I know people like this at my school, and they are weird.

I stand by my original comments. Moderators, go to hell.

--
grappler

OOC actions can ruin the virtual reality

[Sloppy]

Why on earth SHOULDN'T people be able to trade items, under whatever terms they want? What's the big deal? WHO CARES!

I have never played this particular game, but if it's anything like a mud, then there's a darn good reason...

Presumably, the game masters see it as a roleplaying game. Players should interact with one another in character and within the game. Otherwise, the game's virtual reality is violated (e.g. why did someone suddenly walk up to a peasant and hand them a magic cloak for no reason?) and the game's virtual economy goes haywire too (e.g. how is a gold coin worth anything if people transact in a "higher plane of existance" in dollars?).

If you're going to do out-of-character stuff, there's no reason to play a RP game at all, especially if it's a multiuser game where your OOC activities can warp the virtual reality for other players who are trying to stay IC. When I used to play Dartmud, one of the biggest disappointments was that just a few bad apples, who couldn't seperate fantasy from reality, could totally fuck up the game for dozens of real roleplayers.

You can say, "It's just a game" but if it's just a game, then cheaters have no reason to be get angry when they get kicked off.

---

Which multi-player RPGs work with Wine?

[crow]

So which of the multi-plaer RPGs run under Wine? I have Ultima Online running on my laptop (the only machine that still has Windows as a dual-boot option), but I haven't tried running it under Wine. What about the add-on programs? In my case, I use the UO-Auto Mapper, but am not addicted enough to pay for UO Assist.

What Verant said

[Chris Pimlott]

Here's what John Smedley, the president of Verant said in a letter to some EQ sites:

...

The first of these changes concerns the selling of EverQuest Characters andItems outside of the game (i.e. things like Ebay). Here is the text of this change:

"You may not sell or auction any EverQuest characters, items, coin or copyrighted material."

You may ask why we are doing this. There are many reasons, but first andforemost of them is the amount of trouble this is causing our Customer Service group. Simply put there are a lot of people out there who defraud others and we are being put in the middle of it, and we don'thave the time or the resources to assist people with these disputes when they arise. The next reason is amore philosophical one and that is that we believe people should have to earn their items and characters in thegame rather than from buying them outside the game. Obviously the second point can be argued from other perspectives that we do in fact respect, but we wanted you to hear ours.

Full letter is available on EQ Vault

Re:Hold on to your reality

[PieceMaker]

On one level, I think you are absolutely right. That anything has value at all is an attribute assigned to it via human perception. But, that perception is usually based on very real utility that a thing has for humans. Thus, gold has been held as quite valuable for many reasons: it is durable, malleable, attractive to the eye, its a good conductor, etc. Also, it is a commodity item and somewhat scarce. In an exchange economy, trading gold for other useful items makes sense, because its usefulness makes it desirable to have and its relative scarcity keeps it in constant demand. Further, it's durability means it won't just rot on you, like a bag of flour, and the ease with which it can be worked means it can be easily formed into appropriately sized pieces useful for exchange.

Gold isn't the only commodity with these qualities and it isn't the only one that has been used to back paper money.

I disagree that (paper) money has value because the citizenry says it does. If that were true, we should be able to manufacture wealth by simply printing more paper money and asking the citizens to agree that the new money is worth the same as the old money. But that doesn't work. The citizens know that the new money has devalued all money (i.e. is inflationary) because paper money is subject to the same rules of supply and demand as any other commodity.

Since we no longer are on a gold standard (or any other for that matter), I agree the value of money is derived from something more akin to a confidence game. Its value is still subject to supply and demand, but it does have value because people are willing to accept it in exchange for items of real worth. But, the present system is very precarious because we have no guarantees we can exchange our paper money for anything of real worth and, if the confidence should ever evaporate, most of us will be royally screwed.
---

Re:hehe

[RedGuard]

> while (!horse)
>
Is a horse of integer type?

Has been posted n+1 times I bet

[thefallen]

...but batmud for one has had rules regulating rl-mud trade for long time, as have many muds propably.

Yea, why bother with anything but BAT?

"Error: unable to clone /secure/typo! You better had provide some more fast!

Hey, Rob!

[Black Parrot]

Can I set my karma to -1,000,000 and sell the million points to him? I'll split the cash with you!

--

Not for them to decide. the REAL problem is...

[mindstrm]

The real issue is that the game does not work by itself. It's not elegant. They must enforce real-world 'rules' that are human-policed in order to make the game function. The design is flawed, and they are trying to make up for it.

Why on earth SHOULDN'T people be able to trade items, under whatever terms they want? What's the big deal? WHO CARES!

name changes?

[ywwg]

What type of name changes is Taco talking about? I'm just curious to see what type of names were forced to be changed to what "D&D-ish" names. I would suspect that there's not much to complain about if your current name is "buttfuck," or something.

Re:name changes?

[tycage]

Everquest has a set of rules that you agree to everytime you enter the game. Among them are the rules for naming of characters. Most of the time enforcement of said naming rules is pretty lax. Once and a while though, they decide to do a house cleaning on "illegal" names. The policies are pretty straight forward, so I don't really waste any tears on anyone who gets there names changed. Names like Ionic Bondbreaker and Random Task are kinda out of place in the world anyway. Oh, vulgar names are policed pretty regularly.

Re:No, they're not doing that

[double_h]

"Ronfar" is an excellent name for nearly any genre

Ronfar is a rather lame name - something one of my D&D characters in 6th grade might have had.

The GMs would get a much better reception with this name-changing business if they just realized one thing: any name becomes a valid fantasy name if you add an apostrophe or two at strategic locations: M'adbi'zatch, Slas'hdot, Nata'lie, B'ritney, etc. etc. This also works for generating Star Trek names.

I'm not familiar enough with EQ to know how stringent the GMs are being about this, but it generally strikes me as a bad idea. These players are paying customers -- if they want to call themselves Salt Shaker or Biilbo, so what? While neither of those are award-winning names, I think they are both preferable to the uninspired "Ronfar" (yawn).

I've been playing pencil & paper RPG for going on 20 years now (yikes!) and have always had a penchant for absurd names. I once had a character - a pompous, headstrong baby dragon in the game "Rifts" - by the name of Therion Quasathorne Vengohopfdengodongo, and I roll-played the HELL out of that character, constantly having him get in arguments with people who refused to address him by his full name.

I guess the bottom line, as far as I'm concerned, is to hell with pay-for-play RPG. It's only a matter of time before tools and bandwidth get good enough that people can start running their own homebrew realtime persistent-world games -- an evolution of the MUD/MUSH ethic.

Re:Rationale

[jennis]

Unfortunately, it IS Sony's problem, because people selling accounts choose to deceive those who buy them. It has become an all-too common occurrence for the "seller" to wait for a period of time after the sale, then call up Sony and give his original information, saying he forgot his password or whatever, and get the account password changed. Naturally, the buyer calls up Sony pissed when he can't login to his account anymore. The bottom line is, Sony shouldn't have to waste a bunch of their resources due to people trying to pull off scams.

Free speech issues?

[jennis]

I think CmdrTaco's side note actually brings up an interesting issue worth discussion. Is Sony's naming policy fair, or does it unjustly restrict one's freedom of expression?
Take a look at the naming policy as posted in the FAQ on Sony's site.
First off, I don't think most would really argue that having a profanity laced name would be considered inappropriate. However, their naming policy goes well beyond that.
Verant's goal is to keep names within the genre of the game. To quote their opening sentence:

Character names in EverQuest should reflect the genre of the game. Original, high-fantasy names are desired. These guidelines apply both to first names and to surnames, and also to the combination of first name and surname. (For example, Luke and Skywalker are acceptable names, but Luke Skywalker is not.)

Should Verant be mercilessly bashed for wanting to keep the game in as much of a roleplaying spirit as they can by establishing their ability to change people's names (to, as was so succintly put, crappy D&D names)?
And another issue is how well these rules are enforced. Clearly a number of GMs look the other way when it comes to names. Perhaps some of them do not agree with the naming policy and choose not to enforce it. But to the ones that do, does that automatically qualify them as "obnoxious"? After all, aren't they just doing their jobs, as stated by the rules?
And finally, where do you draw the line when it comes to deciding which names are appropriate, and which ones are not? Obviously there is a lot of room for interpretation here.

Re:Free speech issues?

[avelth]

How can something created by a private company have free speech issues? What if they just shut down the game...would this be a freedom of assembly issue? Would you file a lawsuit against verant for abusing your constitutional rights, seeking an order to FORCE them to run the game?

Re:Free speech issues?

[Keeper]

Having played EQ, it is really annoying to walk around a forest and have a guy named "suckmycock" walk up to you and ask you for stuff....and then follow you around for the next hour when you refuse.

I've seen the names the GM's let people get away with. If someone wants to complain about being forced to change their name from "willy wonka" to something less stupid, they need to get a life...

We have gone too far...

[weaver]

It is certainly a sign that virtual life has gone too far when folks spend real money for virtual items.

It's just a game! Turn off the computer, get out of the chair, and go outside.

Heck, even good 'ole pencil and paper RPGs didn't get this bad.

Mike

Re:We have gone too far...

[weaver]

Oh, I understand it. I've been computer gaming since the late 70's and have spent quite a great deal of real money to buy games over the years. I really don't want to think of how much I've spent in the last 20 years.

However, even though I computer game and role play often and fully, this just hit my tolerance level. I tried to think of it in terms of a single player game or a live RPG. "Send us $20 more for the UBERWEAPON!" or a DM saying "For a 5-spot, I'll set you up with the best sword!".

Ugh.

There is a difference in buying a game and selling magic items from the game on E-Bay. The former is entertainment, like buying an album or a video tape. The latter indicates far too much personal investment in a virtual reality for my comfort level.

Maybe I'm just getting too old.

I have seen some pretty bloody wars over MUDS or BBS games (Ahhh, Trade Wars!).

later,
Mike
(long time gamer, long time curmudgeon)

Re:We have gone too far...

[weaver]

Please be careful to note that I did not advocate the ban. I don't think Sony has any business in affairs of this sort. If folks wanna pay for online artifacts, so be it.

Rather I was expressing astonishment that folks would get that deep into a game.

Be careful dismissing the "It's just a game". Folks can take their games WAY too seriously. It is important to keep a perspective, regardless of whether one is winning or losing.

Later,
Mike

Re:We have gone too far...

[weaver]

This is, I guess, more of where I was heading. I understand escapist entertainment. Heck, I work at a University, how escapist can you get? I do think that this short of thing is a manefestation of obsessive/compulsive behavior and is unhealthy if taken too far.

Now, that said, I don't dare try to define what 'too far' really is. I think paying hard cash for a game magic item is 'too far' for me. I lost a friend to a MUD some years ago. She actually quit her job, blew off her friends, and flew across the country just to be closer to the MUD folks. It was scary to watch.

She's better now, but it was real spooky.

I've also noticed a tendency to do that with myself and I've fought it through the years. It is probably for the best that there weren't these high falutin graphical multi-player games when I was a self-absorbed, moody teenager. (As opposed to the self-absorbed, moody adult I am now)

Take care,
Mike

Re:We have gone too far...

[Vladinator]

Boy, that's no joke. I once had this great pair of characters. I was like 12. I'd spent every day playing them, like 3 and 4 hours at a time, a day. All summer long, a group of about 6 of us played nothing but AD&D, day in, day out. Then, I made a wrong turn around a corner. WACK! WACK!! My two hero's were very dead. Sigh. What can I say? No, I'm not mental, but I cried! Hey, I was like 12 ya know? It had become a MAJOR part of my life, playing these two characters. Relmord the Barbarian and Samasa the thief. Relmord was a Simian, which was a race we made up just for our own games. They got +2 to Con, Str, and Dex, but -6 to Charisma. They were Tall, and smelled like, er, apes. They were basically a taller, more hairy, more muscular version of the Planet of the Apes type of Ape. Actually, I'd say they were like the ORC's in WarCraft II, but with Hair ALL over, kinda like an Orc/Wookie/Ape. Samasa was a elf. Boy, did those two look funny together. See, it HAD become real to me, and it took me a few days to adjust to thier death. I know that sounds loony, but there it is. The DM eventually resurected them, but I wouldn't play them anymore - they died fair and square, and so I left them in peace. No, this is not a troll, this is the truth - I'm just trying to illustrate that AC's point - Yeah, it's kind of addictive, and it does depend on the DM - good DM's are hard to find! Chad Price was one of the best. So was Ron and Rich Oldhaffer. Man, I haven't seen any of those guys in years. I know Chad's in New York, and hell - I moved to St. Louis, but I think I'm going to look them up - maybe they'll want to play for old time's sake!

Hey Rob, Thanks for that tarball!

Re:We have gone too far...

[Raleel]

I was on a mud once, called LostSouls...it was a great mud, and put many many many hours into it. Anyhow, I was a wizard (developer for the non-mud-literate) on this mud, and at one point, it was suggested to raise money for a computer that we sell virtual items...personalized items...unique ones..and you could pay $$ for power.

Well, this worked fine for a while, but things soon got out of hand...it really threw off the balance of the game. It wasn't any fun anymore. People were not relishing in the challenge of the game, but rather the challenge of getting up $50 for a good unique item.

So then the powers that be decided to tone down the items...and the players screamed and moaned. They felt ripped off.

So where is this mud now? I really don't know. I have not been on it in two years. It was a good place, but in the end I felt it fell to too much political bickering and control freaks.

So, now you have it, a previous experience with the same thing.

Re:We have gone too far...

[MadAhab]

It's a sign of the power of these so-called "not real" worlds (ever set up a business? ever noticed that the paperwork and hurdles seem arbitrary and "not real") that a real company ignores the fact that they themselves are taking this stuf way too seriously, not their customers. If their customers get pleasure out of getting a cloak of flames or some junk, who cares? So why the need to ban it if it's "not worth taking seriously?"

Or put another way, would it make sense if Ty "licensed" the beanie babies instead of selling them, and then tried to ban the market in beanie babies? Who would you make fun of then?

"It's just a game" is typically one of those things rarely said by someone losing that game, and therefore isn't worth much.

Re:We have gone too far...

[Bemmu]

I don't see why virtual items would be
so much less "real" than real items.
Both real and virtual items can give you
an advantage in something, and virtual items
are often even edgier.

Re:We have gone too far...

[John_Prophet]

I have seen some pretty bloody wars over MUDS or BBS games (Ahhh, Trade Wars!).
KAL DURACK LIVES!
-The Reverend

Re:We have gone too far...

[DeepDarkSky]

I think that for some people, the persona they build in the virtual world is a heck of a lot better than their real one. That may say a lot about the sad state of affairs of some people's lives. Some people don't have the great jobs and great future that some of us (especially here) may have. Some people just choose to be in a different world where the rules are different. You don't find too many wealthy people spending a lot of time in virtual worlds, I'll bet, unless it's out of curiosity and/or boredom.

Re:We have gone too far...

[stercus]

the game costs what, $50? ok, not too bad. an account is maybe $10/month (i dont really know, im making these numbers up). both are reasonably priced. but obsessed people are spending HUNDREDS of dollars on ebay for a few virtual items.

Requiring AD&D Names - Completely Makes Sense

[Levine]

I was discussing EverQuest with the developers around two and a half years ago, when the game was in pre-alpha stages and still being tested by Charles Flock and Brad McQuaid. Even then, one of the major issues up for discussion was the use of names.

Face it: when you're adventuring with your guild or group, killing zombies and giant spiders, you absolutely do NOT want to walk into someone with the name 'WuTangMasta' or 'PuffDaddie' spouting rap lyrics and laughing at anyone who tells them to take it to the OOC channel, or whatever. Sony has created a Virtual World, and the rules that apply in that world - be it forcibly naming your character something that MAKES SENSE! or pretty much anything they want to do - are not subject to constitutional rights, as the poster of this comment would have you believe. You are voluntarily going to this world, and although you are paying for it (and thus expecting certain things to be there; for the hard core players, this is an in-character atmosphere, which they deserve) you have no room to claim that anything is unfair. If you think it's unfair, leave. No one's forcing you to stay.

In conclusion, Libya is a country of many contrasting ideals.

Levine

Re:what about ebay

[Pahroza]

According to the story posted in the header of this article:


Smedley said that he plans to ask eBay to pull the game items off its site. eBay spokesman Kevin Pursglove said eBay would likely agree to do so. eBay has a policy of removing items for sale that are identified as intellectual property that is being unlawfully sold.

Re:Hold on to your reality

[jonathanclark]

money paid for EverQuest cloak == real-world item

Since we have long moved away from the gold standard, I think the money paid is acutal a virtual item. It only has value because the government says it does. Substitute government for online-game as you like.

Make Our Own...

[Izaak]

What we need to do is make our own open source massively multiplayer games that no single corporation has control over. WorldForge seems to have potential... and I'm working on my own such project. Then it could be like Studio54 of old. Get through the door and anything is permitted once you are inside. :-)

Thad

I make a living off of Everquest.

[idealego]

Yep I actually make a living off of selling Everquest items on Ebay. I don't see how Sony can legally stop people from selling items but the way the legal system seems to works in the US is he who has the most money wins so who knows...

This definitely won't stop me but I will have to take some annoying precations.

Re:I make a living off of Everquest.

[ErikZ]

What do you mean?
You don't own the Charactor, you don't own the items, and with the UCITA you don't even own the software on the disk.

For 10$ you get the privilige of using a charactor you've been pouring enormous amounts of time into.
And they don't really need a reason to ban you.
So all the time and effort will leave you completely empty handed. You can't even sell your CD!

I quit EQ. I was amazed at how much time I spent on it once I got away.

Later
Erik Z

Re:I make a living off of Everquest.

[geekoid]

Do you relize eBay is going to stop allowing the sale of EQ items?

This is nothing new...

[ttyp0]

"...where players have been spending real dollars on buying virtual items. Isn't this what we do everyday by buying and selling domain names? This is just a slight variation. Let people do what they want, eventually it will reach an equilibrium point and take care of itself. ITS JUST A GAME FOLKS. --Brent my 2 cents.

A couple points

[/]

The only intrinsic value US currency has is that it's the only tender the US government will accept for payment of debts such as taxes.

For example, American dollars are the only currency that the Federal government is prepared to prevent the counterfeiting of (except perhaps for postal or food stamps). It's also the only currency you can expect to be paid in for winning a civil suit against the American government or anyone in its jurisdiction.

IMHO, Sony's being a bit too conservative on this point. Why not expand economics in this way?

Because quite frankly, there's nothing in it for them. It'd be a massive PR nightmare if Sony were seen as profiting from such enterprises, so they can't themselves get a cut. And in addition to the dearth of direct benefits for them, there is a massive amount of negative consequences, primarily in support. And keep in mind that they're likely just be covering their butts so as to make themselves unanswerable to angry customers. You'll find most companies in Sony's position hoarding a large measure of discretionary power in reserve so that when the stuff hits the fan, they'll be within their legal rights to do whatever suits the suits.

Garriott's new game may allow real profit

[Yogurt]

It sounds as though Richard Garriott's planned game "X" will allow participants to earn real money for adding content to the game. It's not the same as earning money for finding a +5 Sword of Camping, but it's an intriguing idea.

"Q: People can earn money playing the game? A: I believe that if [my secret game] works many people will quit their real jobs and live full time in the virtual world I am creating."

See this interview.

Yogurt

[ot] oops!

[prizog]

Oops! I can't type today... I do know the correct link... or at least I hope I do, as I am one of the webmasters :)

It's bad, yet it's good.

[prizog]

Clearly, it's a form of censorship... or something... It's a corporation messsing with a community... And all that stuff.

BUT:

1. EQ isn't much of a community. Any Roleplaying community that I would want to be a part of would not have people doing the Out-Of-Character and Out-Of-Game stuff that goes on in EQ.

2. Selling game-items on e-bay is destructive to whatever real role-players still use EQ

3. If you view the company as a game master, then the game-master sets the rules. If you view the company as being system administrators for game servers running a game with rules only about how much damage stuff does, well, you're missing the point. A GM's job is to make the game fun for the players.

BTW, if anyone wants to create a real online community, join us at WorldForge (www.worlforge.org). Our servers, when we get them done, will be way beyond anything you've ever seen commercially.

Re:Back in the day...

[Bemmu]

Why bother with anything but batmud.bat.org?
"reilu peli on perseestä"

Selling items in games

[Bemmu]

A lot of people here think that the thing
wrong with selling game items, money or
power is in that it's sick. I mean, people
see it as going too far, that there is
something wrong with the buyers mind. I don't
see the problem being that.

The problem is this: it's detremental to
the game. Maybe I'm being pathetic, but for
me it would be important to be a known and
powerful figure in a game. It seems wrong
that someone can just buy that with cash,
instead of their character being proof of
how well and long they've played the game.
The game starts being less about playing,
and more about who has the most $$$ in
real life. Don't mix reality with games.

Re:MMORPGs

[Firinne]

Sony/Verant seem to be quite intent on alienating their player base with this sort of attitude - Origin, although they can be harsh, at least have the smarts not to play "Big Brother" too often.

This conveniently overlooks the fact that it was a majority of their player base that wanted the e-Bay auctions banned in the first place. It was only a few farmers and campers who protested, the majority of players didn't want to get stuck in a farming/camping/kill-stealing cycle, they just wanted to play the game.

BTW: I was one of those charter members in UO too, before I left in disgust a year later or so, but that is probably neither here nor there.

Economy and Spawns

[buzzkill]

I suppose this wouldn't be as much of an issue if Verant designed the game with a more functional economy, which has gotten better, but also it is still absurdly expensive to buy items from NPC vendors and some items are also impossible to get due to the spawning of the creature that drops the item. Verant has made attempts to fix this, but there are still many things wrong. I suppose my greatest peave is that there are many good solutions for these problems from the EQ community but Verant doesn't seem to want to implement them. Ultimately it is the player that decides how the game is run, but Verant seems determined to run things their way regardless of how people feel. While it hasn't cost them much, as soon as another game comes out that is better and pays more attention to the player, people will leave faster than rats on a sinking ship. Just ask anyone that came over from Meridian 59.

MMORPGs

[Manaz]

I've played UO now for... well, close on three years - since JUST after beta.

I had a look at EQ, I had a look at AC, Shadowboobs (sorry, Shadowbane, what *WAS* I thinking) just doesn't interest me, Star Wars Online could be good (especially if the rumours that Raph Koster and Richard Vogel, who were instrumental in the development of UO, have joined it's development team are true).

One of the big draws of such games is that you can pretty much do what you want within the game mechanics (sorry, the intentionally programmed game mechanics - find a fault in the programming and use it, and you're likely to be banned).

One thing that all these games have in common though is that to have posession of certain items (be they hard to come by, or rare) is a status symbol of sorts - in UO in particular, the "rares" market is worth a LOT of money, both ingame, and out of it.

Richard Garriott (and therefor Origin, at least before he left) supported the sale of accounts and items on E-Bay - not necessarily because they thought it was a good idea (if you sell your account, you can STILL get it back as long as you have the original CD case with the rego number on it, so the system IS open to abuse0, but because he/they realised that to try stifle this would just alienate the players, who happen to be the paying customers.

Sony/Verant seem to be quite intent on alienating their player base with this sort of attitude - Origin, although they can be harsh, at least have the smarts not to play "Big Brother" too often.

I hope for the sake of EQ players, and the game itself (which although it didn't interest me, doesn't mean it's not any good), and the MMORPG market, that Sony/Verant wake up very quickly, or they're going to find themselves with a slowly but surely dwindling player population, despite the pretty picture of the submissively bound, buxom female on the front of the game box....

Back in the day...

[Xidus]

Used to be on AOL (yes, AOL, stop looking at me like that) that you had to pay per minute. A text-based game called Federation built up a surprisingly large player base (peaked at around 1000 online at the busiest part of the day -- I think it hit more like 2000 when the link was posted on the Welcome screen to AOL). AOL came out with a feature where you could give someone else an AOL gift certificate -- essentially, a credit to their bill.

Enough background. Federation had to ban the trade of Federation cash (groats) for AOL hours, because people with Fed money were paying people with real money in order to support their habit. Almost the opposite of what's happening here.

There are a handful of text-based games out there that are almost free, but you can pay the administrator to get ahead (experience, game points, etc). Not completely related, but another trade between real and virtual worlds.
--
$ more ~/.sig
******** .sig: Not a text file ********

Re:Back in the day...

[boog3r]

if anyone is interested, there is a great (free) mud at den.mudservices.net:4444. based on circle and diku, this mud has undergone a complete change over 10 years of hacking the mud code. stop by and see if you like it :)

Re:Back in the day...

[piku]

"Enough background. Federation had to ban the trade of Federation cash (groats) for AOL hours, because people with Fed money were paying people with real money in order to support their habit. Almost the opposite of what's happening here. " That seems like it would be going in circles though. I mean you give 10000 credits for $20, then someone happens to offer you 20000 for $30, then you give 5000 for $15 ect.... Am I reading it right...?

Re:Sony - Verent mismanagement

[ronfar]

Ok, back when I was on Ranma MUCK, they solved things by having a proceedure. You'd submit info about your character, and if it was OK, fit in reasonably with the theme and if the name and character weren't already taken, they'd accept you.

There were problems with Ranma MUCK (as I'd be the first to admit) but I thought they handled this well.

Look if EQ thinks a players name is disruptive, that's one thing. They can ban a person who is disruptive or abusive. However, if they are going around forcing people to change their names, I don't think "D&Dish" nicknames is a good criteria. Disruptive vs. non-disruptive would be better.

But you know, know, that there's going to be a huge difference between a for-profit MUCK and a regular MUCK. The wizards are going to have to be careful to keep everything nice and homogenous. They probably aren't using their own judgement, they probably have a book of SonyRules that were dreamed up by some marketroid. This means that unlike wizzes (who ideally are the people actually in charge of the MUCK) they are enforcers for Sony. I think it is a big difference.

Re:I don't mean to be rude but...

[ronfar]

They outlawed ShowEQ, which is understandable but then they went on a rampage, similar to the DeCSS MPAA police.

Of course, the DeCSS MPAA police are another division of the same company....

They're doing WHAT!!!

[ronfar]

As a somewhat related side note, obnoxious GMs are roaming the worlds and forcing people to change their nicks to crappy D&Dish names. Really ticked off friends of mine who spent months building up charachters only to have their identities forcibly stripped from them

Ok, first of all I have to say "Bye-bye karma points, as I am about to majorly knock Sony."

To continue, you know this is the most despicable thing I've heard of on a MUD. The reason why is, "What's a D&D nickname?" D&D is a RPG that steals from multiple sources, and then there are the tons of D&D-like RPGs (computer and others) out there. I'm betting that they don't mean D&D nicknames but "Ye Olde Renaissance Festival Nicknames." I mean would my nickname, Ronfar, be allowed in this new regime? Ronfar comes from the SegaCD RPG Lunar II but who knows if it would be D&D enough. Good God, it's like some kind of virtual orthodoxy test!!!!

Actually, the best thing they can do is rename it to Virtual "the Village" and assign everyone numbers. If someone says, "I am not a number, I am a free man!" they could laugh maniacly at him.

Its official it's now EverAOL...

I've never been on one of these for profit MUCKs, but I've thought about it. Even if I weren't boycotting Sony over their many nefarious deeds, though, I would most certainly boycott them over this forced renaming garbage. I hope Sega cleans their clock when they start Phantasy Star Online provided they don't engage in any of this garbage...

With it's interest in MPAA, RIAA, Playstation and MMRPGs, it seems that Sony really is trying to take Micros~1's crown!

Well... that's the end of my post... mod away!

Rationale

[jinschoi]

I have heard that Sony's problem isn't with sale of virtual items for money, but the support headaches it causes. People will buy an EQ item on eBay, send the real money, get gipped, then complain to EverQuest's customer support.

There is also the subsidiary problem of people "farming" creatures who have attractive items to sell for real money.

Re:Rationale

[Steeltoe]

You just have no idea of the work involved in such multiplayer games do you?

- Steeltoe

Re:Rationale

[DeepDarkSky]

If Sony wants EQ to be really big, it should just let it go - don't try to regulate it. After all, real cash changing hands just means that the game is THAT popular. Quite frankly, Sony should just say that they are aware of such occurrences, and they do not condone it, and that it will not be their problem if users decide to do this.

fantasy names

[The Queen]

Exactly - your fantasy involves a sorceress named Arianrhod and mine involves a ninja thief named Geek Meat, so what? What does it hurt?

Is this the same brand of anal retentiveness that makes some members of the SCA wear their home-made leather jerkins to LUG meetings?


The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk

Randomization vs Linearity in MMORPGs

[Stickerboy]

The source of the problem (the major one anyway) is that the most powerful items in Everquest only appear with certain unique creatures in a set location.

People have pointed out that massive organized camping is taking place right now on Everquest, where conniving (or entrepreneurial, depending on your personal preference) players hoping to make a quick buck get together and deny the lesser folk a chance to get them for free.

So what kind of solutions are there to this really?

• Randomization
  
  A lot more have pointed out that randomization would solve all the camping, and that the people at Verant were idiots not to implement it in the first place.
  
  Just to take Verant's side for a moment, the way Everquest originally was designed (gameplay wise) pretty much eliminates any chance of real randomization. What fun is it, really, if you buy the game, start off with a level 1 character, kill some peon in the countryside, and Wow, look I got a Sword O' Instant Death! Everquest was meant to be played a whole lot like the original Diablo, except in a much bigger world - build levels by killing scrub, go on quests, kill bosses, and get the mad loot. Randomization eliminates any need to kill bosses, and by inference, any need to build up levels and abilities. How much incentive is there to spend weeks building up a level 30 character when some level 5 newbie could kill you with a randomized Sword O' Instant Death he got off a Pink Bunny Rabbit? Verant is protecting itself and its investment by making people earn items the old-fashioned way.
  
  
• Get rid of ultra powerful items altogether
  
  I find this solution a lot more intriguing, if somewhat controversial (not to mention pissing off everyone who did spend weeks getting these items). If anyone's played the old Legend of the Red Dragon or Trade Wars back in the day (way back in the day =)) you'll know that this works in its own way, even if it doesn't provide a whole lot of game interaction. If you get rid of the Monty Haul style of the RPG, you eliminate not only the camping but a large percentage of the online selling without messy GM interference. Quests (and a lot of the linearity of Everquest) would have to be dropped or massively redesigned. Virtual status could replace power, like granting nontransferable titles or something like that. Heck, gimme a sign above me saying "Please Stare At My Massive Penis" and sure, I'll kill that Dragon. =) Instead of powerful items, you could have limited, powerful abilities that can't be transferred. Then again, that would simply encourage people to try selling whole accounts...
  
  
• Take legal action and virtual action by GM
  
  Well, gee, I guess we'll know how successful this route is in a few months...

Well, enough rambling today...

telnet://bbs.ufies.org
Trade Wars Lives


telnet://bbs.ufies.org
Trade Wars Lives

Re:Another Possible Consequence? (IANAL)

[CaptSwifty]

I am not a lawyer, but, it would seem to me that the games rules allow you to steal something from another player. When you started the game, you agreed to those rules. Therefore, the item is no longer yours. Plus, sony owns the game, your character, everything. So you probably couldn't sue.

Crappy D&Dish Names

[Chasuk]

...obnoxious GMs are roaming the worlds and forcing people to change their nicks to crappy D&Dish names.

Verant have had a strict naming policy since the very start: (http://everquest.station.sony.com/s_naming.html),
and I see nothing _obnoxious_ about harried GM's enforcing this policy. Further, when you have losers choosing names like _Analprobe_ and _Vaginalot_ is their really any question that it is inappropriate? I know, some will bitch about free speech violations, and others about anal retentives, but why should the majority have to tolerate the juveniles? Go play someplace else if you have never grown up.

Re:Sony - Verent mismanagement

[greysoul]

Ok, yes, so it's a thank;less job, we both know that...would you still do it? I would....it's not about the thanks in a world dominated by geeks thinking they're bad asses wiht a sword, no, it's about power, and of course, it comes at the price of being used for said power more often than you can use it to your own advantage,,but it's so worth it, to some at least...
I think Verents biggest problem is they went from being a 3000 player game to a like 100,000+ player game virtually overnight, and they just were not prepared or managed enough to handle it, and they still havent caught up.... what amazes me is now with the RoK exspansion they're gonna have another huge boom of new players....personally I play on CT and I've seen it locked with 2400 players on it.. it's really insane...
I think verent could do it, but they're in a race against themselves so they'll never win or lose, but it's so intresting we keep watching...
whee...hows that for a rant :)

Sony - Verent mismanagement

[greysoul]

On the topic of the "related side note" the GM's are not only doing their job, but thy're being very rude about it. I have posted complaints on the everquest message boards at http://boards.stat ion.sony.com/cgi-bin/Ultimate.cgi?action=intro to complain about the rude GMs and other game related problems. It's been pointed out many times "if you dont like it dont play" but please, the game is awesome, my complaints are about the overwhelmed su[pport staff that gets down right rude when they feel the least bit overstressed. The Everquest GM application is all about how well you can run around Norrath (the fictional world EverQuest is played in) and has absolutely no corelation to the GM's ability to deal wiht people outside the general role playing that is so scarce in the game anyways. Now it looks like Lucas is hiring this same..not incompetent..but already overwhelmed staff, to design and manage his starwars game of the same massively multiplayer style. To just finish this up and make my final point coherent... Please, everyone who is willing, read the everquest message boards, look at the number of negative complaints in contrast to the positive feedback, and please, I hope that if enough people flood lucas/sony/verent with comments,m and not just complaintys, to the effect that the public at large feels cheated, maybe things will get better? thanks -Doug

Re:Sony - Verent mismanagement

[chipuni]

I'm the 'wizard' of a fairly large, free, multi-player MUCK called Furrymuck . Although it's not necessarily the same as EverQuest, I strongly suspect that things are similar.

Let's just say that being a GM -- or a wizard of any kind -- is one of the most thankless jobs that exists. Period.

Frankly, it's extremely hard to be a 'good cop' -- trying to find out whether a person who's breaking the rules is ignorant of them, or if that person is a jerk. Sometimes, both the person accusing and the person being accused are both jerks and liars. (This happened to me today.)

It's tough to be a GM, to constantly take abuse, and to remain serene and fair above it all.

In any virtual-world situation, just as in any real-world situation, if you're being abused, don't be abusive yourself. Move it up to a higher level, if one exists. If none exist, then move to another system or store.

The problem and an idea

[richc]

As an organiser of off line interactive games(LRP/LARP) I can understand the problem they are having, at least in part. The problem seems to be that there are many types of gamer who want different styles of game and in trying to cater for one style they are causing problems for all the rest. From my experience gamers break into a few general categories (OK these are not all embracing and have all the problems of all categorisations).

1) Hard roleplayers - people who want to play characters within a cohesive and realistic world, these people want the rules to be upheld in spirit as well as to the letter and for all characters to fit into the world designed for the game.

2) Powergamers - I want the big sword of everything death. Play the game with the objective of creating the most powerful character possible. In this category there are people who will do this entirely within the game world and also people who will do out of game actions eg. buying items with real world cash. to gain power.

3) Fun players - people who just want to have fun, play the game in a semi-serious to humourous way. In this category fit the characters with silly names etc.

The problem arises when you try to cater for all three categories in one game and, in this case, add in a few people who want to make some real world cash.
In the offline equivalent of these games most groups are much smaller and still contain a mix of these types of player BUT the wide variety of games out there mean that certain types of player tend to gravitate towards games that cater for their playing style.
I don't know this particular game at all but my feeling is that in order to cater for the different playing styles it would be better to run two or possibly three instances of the online game at once. One where the rules are applied solidly and rigorously and one which is much more open, this would provide a place for the hard core roleplayers (who I suspect are the people who have complained about this game) and a place for everyone else. With a bit of thought you could even work this into the game world....

That's what they want you to think (muhahahahaha!)

[Nehemiah S.]

actually you can. At least two ways. You can even moderate yourself, if you post as an ac.

WARNING: I have patented these methods; I refer to them jointly as 'one-click moderating'. Anyone caught using them will be severely beaten, then forced to endure 15 lbs of hot grits poured straight down their pants by my squad of trained ninja pancake tossers.

The first, obvious way is to log out completely after moderating, then post as ac. This is kind of lame and uninventive; call it the brute force method.

The second requires you to open 2 browser windows. The best way to do it is to right-click on 'reply' below the post you want to reply to, then select 'open in new window'. You then post your say. Then you go back to the original window and the mod menus are still active. Since the mod system only checks to see if you moderated anything immediately after you post, and prevents you from moderating a previously posted-in discussion by removing the drop-down boxes, as long as you post first and then mod you are ok. You just can't moderate any posts that come after yours; using browser tricks you may post as many times as you like, as long as you don't mod until you are done posting. This works in every browser I have tried: Netscape 4.x & 6, Ie 4.x, and mozilla.

The funniest thing about this is that if you have mod points and choose 'post as ac', you can moderate your own post. In the page that comes up saying 'there will be a delay before your comment is published', you get a drop down menu to select from. You can mod yourself all the way up to (+5) if you hit back, then moderate, then click 'y' at 'resubmit form data?'

(I have only used these once, when I wanted to test the effect of poor moderation on my karma. I posted a deliberately off-topic, rude remark, IIRC correcting a mistake in a 'devil's letter' troll, then moderated it 'insightful' to see if it would hurt me. Turns out that was the only time I have moderated in the past month that I didn't lose karma! heh. I'm not bitter...)

There also may be a way to get near-infinite mod points within a single story, but if there is I am going to keep that one secret for now. :)

Rev Neh (who will probably be eternally stricken from the ranks of moderator for exposing these. Please, oh great Rob, have mercy!)

Somewhere out there...

[gad_zuki!]

Right now there's a guy who quit his job to become a level 40 dwarf trying to decide if 'Online retailer of enchanted weapons/goods' really looks that bad on a resume.

That gets me EVERY time

[Duxup]

"Who came up with this stupid rule that all fantasy names have to sound like exotic chemicals and/or have apostrophes in them?"

I think part of the explanation is the fantasy aspect to the games. It would seem hard to draw up an elaborate fantasy world where everything is different, exciting, and fun to explore. Then you have to believe the main characters are Bob, Fred, and Jim, the same as in RL. I can see where that just doesn't work.

At the same time I have to agree that the names sometimes are terribly annoying. They should come with some sort of explanation how to verbalize these names. Nothing is worse than picking up a game, playing it for hours, then talking about it to your friends only to find you've been pronouncing the main character's name wrong in your head for the past 3 weeks. Ok, yes, that's happened to me personally. The game just never seems the same after that.

Somewhat like after I struggled with Linux for a few months only to be chastised for saying it "the wrong way."

Opinions from a player...

[jackstand]

I'm a casual EQ player (5-10 hours per week) and I have to think that Sony'sa announcement is a good thing. The market for Everquest characters and items on ebay is huge. This affects the game balance considerably. There are people who have NEVER played EQ who can go out and buy a nice Level 50 Wizard on ebay. All of the sudden, they can enter some of the most difficult zones in the game without a clue about what they are doing. Then they die and lose all their stuff and complain to the GMs. The GMs have to sort through so much crap everyday that those of us with real bugs to report have to wait in line.

On the names thing, I've seen plenty of stupid ones, like "Bandedforsale", "Saddamhussein", "Comenme". Its ridiculous. Verant has name filters that catch the really bad stuff when someone creates a character, but people get really creative and can slip some stuff past. EQ was designed to be a roleplaying game, not an AOL chatroom.

Eq is a cool game, and highly addictive for some people. I know people that play 50 hours a week. But there are plenty of inconsiderate jerks who play just as much. They are the ones ruining the game. Not Verant.

Yay

[Zagato-sama]

Oh dear god, more nonsense. While I personally don't play the game, it certainly doesn't take a genius to recognize that this submission is yet another podium rant as opposed to real news

1. In the article shown above, Sony clearly states it's decision for banning the sales of virtual items. It wasn't done to "Screw the players because we were bored one night"

2. Names changes: Now this is weird, what kind of names were revoked? Certainly the first thing that comes into my mind are obscene names. Why weren't any of these names shared with us during the submission?

3. "Yadda yadda the game crashes under Wine" Uh duh, and? The game's requirements clearly state "Windows 9x" Either get Windows to play Windows games, or petition the company to create a Linux port.

Re:Yay

[geekopus]

I totally agree with point 3! Why is it that the average slashdotter (and apparently the editors as well) is willing to throw out the baby with the bathwater? I refer to the fact that there seems to be this tendancy among most readers on this site to let their hatred of MS get in the way of what most of us have our computers for; namely to have fun. Listen, there are numerous "How-To's" on how to set up a dual-boot with your precious fscking "Linux" system! Don't be a dumbass.

Don't proselytize

[SideshowBob]

You're simply spouting off about how you think things should work with very little if any experience with the game, and without offering any constructive suggestions.

There is randomness in EQ. Its not 100% random because it doesnt make *sense* for things to be 100% random. Would you go to Washington D.C. and expect to find the president in a random location anywhere in the city? No, you would expect to find him at the White House. So now there is a pattern, and patterns can be exploited.

And the bit about account sales on ebay- what is Verant supposed to do? You can't prevent people from calling the tech support lines, even if their complaint is invalid. Once the person has tied up valuable tech support time it has cost Verant money. In addition, account buyers are generally very disruptive in-game, either through cluelessness or incompetence, or sheer obnoxiousness (i.e. their account got banned for some obnoxious reason and so they buy another one on ebay and resume their previous levels of obnoxiousness)

Ugh. Most of the players in the community asked for these changes. Verant was simply responding to them. And now they get flamed on /. by a bunch of people who know nothing of these things?

sheesh.

Re:Karma

[scumdamn]

Then slap me a scoop of it and I'll scoop you some next time I have mod status. Hey, it's about time for Jon of Katz to respawn. Who wants to join my party and smite him. I heard he has the Cloak of Pomposity. What do you say we camp him and sell the Cloak over Ebay?

Oh yeah,
I know I'll get moderated down for this but...

Re:Sony wants in..

[supabeast!]

They can't, it's illegal under laws designed to keep comic book/trading card companies from reselling their items on the secondary markets for high prices.

Problems with EQ

[Neuronix]

I spent a whole summer playing EQ, get my char up to lvl 21 (yes, I know I sucked that it took me that long to get to lvl 21) and then had a GM come along and say "Neuronix isn't a good nickname. Change it."

When I tried to argue, he changed it to Niriik and left. I had to find him days later, and got it changed top Xinoruen (Neuronix backwards).

About a week later I quit EQ entirely. I now play Asheron's Call and the GMs haven't been nearly as intrusive in game play (less needed for one thing, perhaps if you have missing items?) and they're a pleasure to deal with, not Mr. I'm a Big Shot like some IRCops I know... Makes me sick now that I have a game I can't play and they took all that money from me.

Talking about EQ, that whole expansion pack should be free. One of the reasons I bought EQ is because upgrades to the game and they said that they could do all kinds of wonders through their update system and EQ could be a changing world. EQ has been so stagnant, and now when they finally do make changes to the world, they're charging us real money for them.

Yeah right, ban selling of virtual items, how about banning the sales of that virtual expansion pack... At least Asheron's Call makes changes to their game world fairly frequently with a decent storyline so it isn't just a big monster hunt (at least for higher lvls).

SegaSoft encourages virtual/real trade

[jimmcq]

SegaSoft actually encourages trade between their virtual world and the real world. You can buy Jitter Packs (items) to use in their virtual game for real cash in their online store. The Jitter pack includes 2 Rare, 3 Uncommon, and 5 Common objects... you can only purchase 12 Jitter Packs per week... they cost $1.99

Sony wants in..

[MicroBerto]

Yeah, but I'll bet you that Sony will make a board where this can be done through them, and they get a small percentage of the profits.

ooh, Investors begin to turn heads at the sound of a new type of market!

Mike Roberto (roberto@soul.apk.net) - AOL IM: MicroBerto

Re:Sony wants in..

[InjunBen]

"I've found that people who can't even follow the basic rules of Fantasy(RP) life are even worst at real life." Yes, the five and a half billion people who don't RP live much worse social lives than the couple thousand who sit behind comp screens in an imaginary world for half their day. Duh, -Ben

Re:Karma

[MicroBerto]

LOL! The ironic thing is that this is so funny, you deserve to get some points...

Mike Roberto (roberto@soul.apk.net) - AOL IM: MicroBerto

Re:BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA*breathe*HAHAHAHAH

[MicroBerto]

I can't say that i disagree with you... it is quite pathetic, on our terms. At the same time, the people that moderated you down were probably the ones doing these transactions :)

However... if people are willing to pay money for it, and it makes them happy, then good for them. I think that the arguments for Sony here are better than those against, but yes, its all a waste of time.

Mike Roberto (roberto@soul.apk.net) - AOL IM: MicroBerto

psuedo-software piracy?

[rapett0]

This seems very much like the intellectual property rights of software programmers being broke by pirates, only in reverse. People should have every right to buy and sell virtual goods. Its like an ISP liek, oh I don't know, @home, which sells you a service and SHOULD deliver (but doesn't). Its only a virtual service to them, they route requested electrical pulses to me. Same for eBay Evercrack players. This is a very bad move being initiated by Sony, and they will pay for it in the long run. Whats the difference if I have some flaming nuclear sword that I bought of found? It doesn't effect the balance of the game because the person who I bought it off of could have simply used it themselves, and probably did.

If this is true, my friend just lost his job!

[shiwala]

If this is true, my friend just lost his job! But on the bright side, maybe now he can get a life instead of slaving away for months at a time in the hopes of making a $500 sale.

prices

[NachMan16]

one copy of Everquest: $50

one level 200 wizard: $2000

one kewl l33t magical sword: $2500

one Sony exec banging his head against a table: priceless

Another Possible Consequence?

[eth1]

Here's an interesting scenario that just occurred to me: I steal a very rare item from you in the game. I then turn around and sell this on e-bay for $1500. Now, how is this different from stealing a $1500 piece of jewelry from you IRL? Could someone possibly turn you in to the authorities for this? After all you essentially just acknowledged (by accepting the money) that you took something worth $1500 from them. If you just steal and sell in game, it would be logical that the only consequences would be in game, but when you start involving RL, then what? Any lawyers want to comment?

Impact on the Economy

[E_Let]

I wonder...

Even though these types of cash sales for virtual items aren't widespread enough to effect the economy, I wonder what kind of impact it would have if it was amplified by a great factor.

This type of transaction is especially interesting because if you do buy a magical item, you're not really buying anything but a few modifications to your user identity. I guess it's kind of like buying software addons, but it's somewhat different.

What do you, my fellow dotters think? Please reply, /. is my primary source of entertainment. :)

The Economy of Time

[theLunchLady]

What Sony/Verant doesn't understand is that Time is Time and is perfectly transferable across the virtual gap. People spend time in RL making money. They want to spend less time in VR making money. So they trade with people who are spending time in VR making money all the money they made in RL. (are you with me?). The true currency of economy in the information age is time.
But then again it's difficult to maintain game balance when there is a 1st lvl dwarf walking around in full plate, weilding a flaming avenger, wagging his butt at dragons and calling out, "/ooc you know, all this freedom is really brought to you by one company, that started with nothing but (my mom's 1.4mil) a dream to make computers better . . . and now the DoJ is on my . . ."
a General Protection Fault hits YOU for 666 points of damage.
-theLunchLady

Add the real/virtual we've had for years ...

[P_Simm]

To add another perspective, I wouldn't even see a real-world action here at all ... these days, money paid is far from a real-world item, even when it's sent in the form of a paper-based packet of information (a cheque). Likewise, Sony's legal notice is barely a real-world action - as far as I know, it isn't even an action against eBay itself. They've simply stated that to trade virtual EQ commodities in the real world is breaking the license agreement, leaving you with no rights to their virtual world.

In this light, this is more like an enforcement to keep the virtual segregated from the real.

I just moderated you up!

[athmanb]

You owe me 5$ now!

Uhhm, wait, where did my point go ???

Damn...

For $ale: Moderator Points

[dragonfly_blue]

For sale: 5 unused /. moderator points. These mod points are in mint condition and have never been out of the box.

These are the same moderator points that were found in Al Capone's vault and were also rumored to be stolen from the ship's safe of the Titanic! Elvis's mom strung these moderator points around her neck on a string for good luck.

Will consider separating, but would prefer to sell as a set. Please contact me for further details.

The real problem is that you get to keep NOTHING!

[Spy]

Think about it, UO all your toys *WILL* break and all your skills *WILL* atrophy. EQ, you *WILL* lose all your exp and levels from repeated death and you *WILL* lose all your toys when you die somewhere that you cannot recover your corpse from. It is utterly pointless. I thought a point of a RPG was to go on a long term trudge *forward* untill you can off anything without breaking a sweat but these games are 1 step forward 3 steps back.

Re:Karma

[zeck]

You owe me a dollar. At least as far as you know.

A Player's Bill 'o Rights.

[Domini]

As an old (-grin-) LPMUD Admin, the first thing I used to do was to set up a list of Rules.

It went something like this: If there is any infringement within the game, it must be sorted out in gamespace. (Even things like abuse etc.)

In this case the communication only happens outside the game world. What would Sony do if someone wanted to sell a song developed on Sony equipment? Hmm...

I say, leave the Real World out of this!

We do not reward deep-pocketed players.

[blueskyred]

(For those of you who have not checked out Chron X, head to our site on The Station. It's an online collectible card game.)

Chron X is a game of skill, not of money. Some of our highest-rated players have not spent more than $10 on the game. Ever. Over 3 years of gameplay for $10 is pretty darn good, IMHO.

We put out expansions, and we put most of the "must haves" at a rarity or common or uncommon. This means that players usually have extras to trade. While most people need to spend between $25 and $50 to compete, spending more than that will not really give you a better deck. It will give you more options on the type of deck you want to build, and that's OK.

I work with Genetic Anomalies, the creators of the game. Sony is the online publisher for it... while my word is not gospel and shouldn't be taken as an "official company stance," you can take it as the stance of the designer of the game...

- Anthony Shubert Game Design Guru:: Genetic Anomalies

Already Done

[retep]

Medievia, a mud, already does that. And to be honest I think those types of rules are a good thing, no sense unbalancing games by allowing people to buy their way to the top. That's for politics.

Re:Already Done

[spudwiser]

In Medievia, they're are quite a few mega items available for purchase. The difference in the two systems is that Everquest has a required service fee of $10 per month, while Medievia is completely free in every sence. No software to install, any Telnet capable system can already log on. Vryce (the owner of Medievia) gets all of his server finance throught the selling of the immensly powerful Mystical Talisman Of Medievia. He relies on these sales to keep Medievia running as smoothly as the players require. With sometimes over 500 users logged on simultaneously, massive hardware is needed or else the deadly Lagmonster attacks (brutally slay it!). Simply put, in free games, selling items to the players from the system is good. In pay games, any selling of items is inane and pointless. Almost all of the Hero characters in Medievia have almost if not every donation item. Totalling over $250 in real world cash or 250,000,000 medievia gold if baught off medievia auction.

BTW: telnet to medievia.com:4000
MudMaster 2000 rules.

Some ideas to handle undesirable names in EQ

[rsborg]

Instead of banning names or forcing ppl to change their PC's name, I suggest that Sony/Verant try the following:

1) There is a storyline, right? Why not allow only a fixed set of names to begin with, that "fit" in the world created? Too restrictive?
2) Make or allow players to create a list of "acceptable" names. Allow some sort of player/GM moderation of created names to be allowed. Make sure the rules for moderation are posted and understood.
3) Force players to get approval for their name when they join (from either a board of name verification consisting of both players and GMs), or allow the new player to submit this name to X colleages for submission.

Really, when you're dealing with a completely virtual world and the rules are generally fluid, banning seems like a pretty sorry solution compared to revising the rules as they stand.

Re:hehe

[friedo]

Ahh, but it could have been Perl....

Poor Friends of Taco

[Donavan]

Did your friends both to mention that there were clear rules for names?

If they had their identities stripped it's becasue they were breaking a known rule.

Verant has it's problems ( horrible customer service, the desire to scan machines, faulty design, bad QA, etc ) but the nameing rule is one of the things they got right.

Andover bans sale of slashdot moderator points

[yoDon]

I heard that CmdrTaco caught some guy selling slashdot moderator points on Ebay
and sent JonKatz to his house with a grenade launcher. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

-Don
Remember, friends don't let friends moderate drunk.

Another useless game.

[yerricde]

Or the little creatures you click on repeatedly, one after another, trying to make them not overrun you? That's Hampsterdeath.

No they don't.

[Shadox Tsurien]

If Sony really wanted in, don't you think they'd just sell the items themselves? It's a lot easier to get powerful items when you run the game itself, don't you think?

I say they are trying to stop camping and people getting cheated out of real money.

I don't mean to be rude but...

[billyt007]

This is kind of old news. Sony has been offically banned selling of all in game items a while ago. I really don't like Sony's customer relations much. They outlawed ShowEQ, which is understandable but then they went on a rampage, similar to the DeCSS MPAA police. Then they wanted to start scanning people's harddrives while they were playing!!! Thank god us players stood up and didn't let them just abuse us.

It ruined the game for me...

[Kobeyashi]

I was guilty of paying $50 for 1,000 Platinum Pieces a few months ago, and when I made the transaction, I felt dirty. I couldn't even use the money for my characters, becuase I had spent so much time with them. I wouldn't be surprised if other people who are intently devoted to role-playing and their characters, but were frustrated with the amount of time (or lack thereof) they could use towards building them up, did the same thing. All I know is, my foolish decision to buy that cash led to my distaste for the game, and I quit 3 months ago. There were other reasons, but the rampant effects of this small, new 'economy' made the game less fun. On a side note, I'm selling 1,000 pp and a 27th level Cleric at www.justkidding.com. Peace out.

The correct link:

[worth]

is www.worldforge.org.

Re:Hold on to your reality

[Dr. Scott]

You're right: nothing has intrinsic value, not gold, not paper money. But gold is not exactly as "virtual" as dollars or EQ tokens, because the supply is comparatively stable -- you can't easily print more bullion.

Obligatory "Me Too" post.

[kwsNI]

"Send us $20 more for the UBERWEAPON!" or a DM saying "For a 5-spot, I'll set you up with the best sword!".

You know. That's bad, but we're not talking $5 for a sword here. We're talking auctions going for over 4 figures. That goes way beyond "too far". That's up to "You're fscking nuts".

I kind of liked the way they did things with the old BBS games. In order to keep the game balanced and to keep people from getting too serious, things would be reset every so often. Games like Barren Realms Elite were great because every so many months (depending on the server) the entire network was reset to the very beginning. Other games, like Legend of the Red Dragon would reset individual characters when they became powerful enough to defeat the Red Dragon.

OK, so now you think I was getting way off topic. I guess my point is, would you pay $1250 for a Cloak of Fire if you know you're character is going to be reset in 5 more months???

BTW, does anyone know of a place on the interent to play BRE or LORD? All of my local free BBSs closed down out here...

kwsNI

what about ebay

[stercus]

does this mean ebay will start pulling EQ auctions?

Re:Hold on to your reality

[geekoid]

Demand. It is all abput demand. The Monalisa would be worth $1.00 if thats all they could sell it for. Gold is a rare comodity that makes pretty Jewlery, and conducts electricity fairly well.
Look into Diamonds, there is an area with artificial value. Diamonds are rare on the market because they are horded by certian groups, but diamonds aren't rare in reality.
economics is not an illusion. There has been economics longer then there has been money. Or numbers for that matter. The first time somebody had lots of something that was wanted by somebody else, economics was born. Thats the key. Money is the offspring of economics, and once money took the form of tokens(i.e. an item of worth that is backed by a real item) the illusion of value began.

Karma

[segfault7375]

I'll pay $1/point for some Slashdot karma :o)

segfault@bellatlantic.net

Anyone here play Magic:The Gathering?

[lowe0]

It's the same thing. People were selling Black Lotuses for hundreds of dollars, sometimes a couple thousand, just for one card. Anyone ever thumb through an issue of Scrye? How about nowadays? Those cards aren't worth so much anymore, huh?

The creator of Magic, Richard Garfield, had this to say about people who bought the game's powerful items using vast amounts of real-world cash:
"I think you'll find that if your rich neighbor doesn't play very well, his hundred-dollar box of boosters should be nothing more than a free source of cards for you."

If you buy something in game and don't have the skills to earn it, it will be quickly and judiciously taken from you by a superior player.

Preferably one who has been playing Thief.

not a totally crazy idea

[Wesley Felter]

That idea sounds like what Jordan Pollack was talking about during his recent Slashdot interview... But I'm not sure I like the idea of computer games that are covered by SEC regulations.

Tit for Tat

[Skald]

Funny, how life works. By creating a virtual world, a company is able to produce commodities or currencies which have real-world value, and can be traded for physical goods. They can produce more, but only at the risk of devaluing the commodities.

Of course, governments, like the one in the US, which maintain fiat currency do something very similar. The only intrinsic value US currency has is that it's the only tender the US government will accept for payment of debts such as taxes. And if they want more money, they print more.

IMHO, Sony's being a bit too conservative on this point. Why not expand economics in this way? People want stuff, physical or not, and barter's an inefficient way of obtaining it. I haven't played the game, but I would assume they have some currency, and that the game itself establishes some base value for the currency (I've played muds where the money was implicitly on the "food standard"). What'd be really interesting would be if you could get some currency trading going... Everquest money for more conventional captial. Could be a first step toward the electrification of cash and the (re)privitization of money...

Just some thoughts. :-)

Hold on to your reality

[Trollusk]

cloak == real-world item

EverQuest cloak == virtual-world item

money paid for EverQuest cloak == real-world item

Ebay auction to set up transaction == virtual-world interaction

Sony's action against Ebay == real-world action

That is, Sony is taking real-world action to prevent virtual-world interactions which lead to real-world exchanges of the "rights" to virtual-world objects modeled on real-world ones. Kind of beautiful, actually. And a very interesting study of the interaction and coexistence of real and cyber spaces.

Re:Hold on to your reality

[gilroy]

OK, I'm going to use my magic +1 Mouse of Moderation and raise this post a bit, because heck, it's funny and elegant at the same time.

Re:Hold on to your reality

[gilroy]

Quoth the poster:

It [money] only has value because the government says it does.

I'm no libertarian, but even I would argue that money has value only because the citizenry says it does. Money is backed by our faith in the economy. If a people decide the money is worthless, it soon becomes so (post-Communist Russia, anyone? For that matter, Communist Russia itself.) Look at what happened to Confederate currency: Richmond might have decreed that CS$1 had a certain value in gold, but that didn't mean people would trade gold for it.

In fact, even when the world was on the gold standard, money was virtual. It's time for people to clue in to this: Gold has no intrinsic value! Well, OK, it has some, because it can be used for wires and to make pretty things and so on. But these are far less than the value of gold on the specie exchange. Gold is only worth a lot because we all agree it's worth a lot. Gold is only stable because we all agree it is stable. In the end, gold is just as "virtual" as the current dollar or the EQ token (or whatever).

The key thing to remember is, economics is illusion. Seen in the light, the essentially contra-rational actions of people, corporations, and governments start to make more sense.

Slashdot says it's wrong, so it must be..

[Galaga88]

I think people are attaching too many freedoms and rights to an issue, that is a non-issue. Everquest is a /game/. Games follow rules. People have to pay money to play Everquest, and they're paying money to play by the rules. When people go outside the rules, to changing it where in-game progress is no longer tied to game performance, people who are paying money to play, are having their due services stolen from them. They can no longer play the game they're paying for, because other people are violating the rules. Verant, as the people running this game, have every right to change the rules as they see fit to maintain the state of the /game/. There's no grand freedoms or big brother or anything else at issue here. Would you exclaim people being denied their freedoms if somebody got suspended from the NBA for cheating? This is no different whatsoever. The items are not virtual property or real estate, they are aspects of a game, and you would deny the maintainers of the game the paying subscribers the right to keep it played as intended?

L.A. Times Weighs In With Front Pager

[xcedrinod]

The L.A. Times had a front page (!) article on the phenomena of people paying green money for virtual stuff. Not only are people pulling down some respectable dough, there is an interesting quote regarding the soon-to-be-released Diablo II:

"Matt Householder, the producer of "Diablo II," said he is still uncertain about how his game will deal with this phenomena. "These are relatively uncharted waters," he said, adding that he has considered creating some sort of "escrow" service for equipment sales on the idea that if you can't beat them, you might as well join them"

LA Times article: April 20, 2000 Virtual Loot

Security through obscurity?

[Green Monkey]

Sony's actions here sound like a sort of (in)security through security. Okay, playing Everquest may not seem to have much to do with encryption, but the philosophy behind what's going on remains the same -- Sony's trying to ensure that people playing by the rules by preventing them from stepping outside the game's boundaries, rather than thwarting the cheaters by making it pointless to cheat.

If Sony really feels that eBay auctioning of Everquest items is hurting the game world (personally, I can't see how it would), the real solution would be not to ban sales, but to tweak / redesign the game world so that such sales are no longer worthwhile. (Having never played Everquest or any other similar games, I can't really offer any concrete suggestions).

D'Oh! Mea maxima culpa

[gilroy]

OK, I know I'll be moderated down, but really...

I didn't mean to give my own post a +1 bonus. (It was sort of weak, after all.) I was trying to vote to give the original post the bonus. So if you're a moderator, feel free to moderate me down for stupidity, but consider moderating up the original, 'cause it's still funny.

Re:Hold on to your money

[gilroy]

Quoth the poster:

it's spelt ecu, not EQ

Um, I am 99 and 44/100 percent certain that the first poster was referring to EverQuest (=EQ) tokens, the unit of currency in the Sony EverQuest shared universe. From the context of the original post (with apologies to Arlo Guthrie, "Remember the original post? This is a song about the original post"), it's pretty clear that the poster was discussing EverQuest, not the European currency unit (ecu).

Believe it or not, this wasn'tYet Another Example of American Cluelessness.

i purchase items off ebay....

[l0s3r]

ok, read quite a bit of posts. seen people selling, people that left, people strongly against the sale of items, etc.... Yes it is a game. But its my money. No i don't have to play. I tend to trust everyone in life and the game. Trust is given, it is up to you to lose it. You say its a game. what is a game? according to the dictionary its : An activity providing entertainment or amusement; a pastime. so if purchasing something off of ebay makes my past-time more amusing. thats up to me. Now i play paintball, and no one cares if you go out and get a $2100 gun after playing one day. why should someone care if i purchase a SMR, or a FBSS off of ebay (test for you non eq players..hehe)? to the ebay sellers....keep it up, take it underground whatever.... to the rest of you /rude

more government regulation, please

[SandsOfTime]

What we really need is export restrictions on virtual items. "Sorry, you can't ship that magic sword outside the U.S., it's a matter of National Security . . . "

Pre-emptive strike because of SW Online

[Kinetic Kit]

I never actually played EverQuest but I did look into it pretty seriously this past summer. I had pretty much decided that it would become a huge time and money suck, and I never got hooked.

However, Verant and Sony are targeting the Star Wars Online game for 2001. I have a bad feeling about this. Right now, EQ has a subscriber base nearing 400,000 (someone can correct me on this) and while it takes all its ideas from the fantasy/role-play genre, it has its own "name"--no huge license, if you take my meaning.

Star Wars Online, on the other hand, could have an initial subscriber base approaching 400,000 and a much broader demographic than EQ, simply because of its name. Just think, in 2001, many will be going to see Meet Joe Black 2 simply to see the trailer for Ep II. The hype will probably be enormous (for the movie and the game). So, this move on Sony's part against the EQ real-life cash market can be seen as a pre-emptive strike against anything like this happening with SW Online, which would be a much blacker mark on Sony/Verant than anything dealing with Everquest. Be certain that this figured into the equation.

As for myself, if I am unmarried when SW Online comes out, I'm buying it. If I'm married, I'm sure I'll find some other pursuit. But who am I kidding, I'm posting to Slashdot...

Re:Pre-emptive strike because of SW Online

[DrTomorrow]

EQ has just over 200,000 subscribers. On an average evening, 50-60k players are playing at once.

Better solution for games like EverQuest

[Bladetooth]

I think a better idea would be to have the wizes take players who "farm" like this, beat them until they can't get up, and then have newbies PK them for experience. Now THAT is justice! Then again, if PK-ing was on, this wouldn't happen so often; people would build their characters up enough to thrash people who farm like this, camping in order to get a certain item when it appears in the game (if they wanted it that badly). What should be allowed (EverQuest may not have this functionality) is to have weapons and items that you have crafted/created yourself be sold. If you made it, it should be yours. For example, buying land and then building a castle on it to sell later should be completely allowable. You earned that land. But items that you can casually pick up, or get for defeating characters that materialize, they should not be sellable.

Re:Better solution for games like EverQuest

[alarosa]

You can make your own armor and weapons, the problem being is that they, well, suck. The usefulness of banded armor and forged weapons stop being effective after level 15 or so, and well, I made level 15 in two weeks of playing. Now, there IS a rather large market for magical jewelery. The richest people I know are enchanters (only they have the power to efficiently make the good jewelery). You can also bake and brew stuff, though those skills are pretty much for atmosphere (people seem to get a kick out of getting 10 shots of vodka for giving me SOW or other good buffs :) Now as for selling them outside the game, I really don't approve, though I wouldn't mind some magical armor being sold on ebay, as much as I mind some lame farming asshole selling the swords I want so much on there.

Re:Better solution for games like EverQuest

[alarosa]

Oh I forgot to add, a lot of trade skills are getting revamped after the upcoming expansion. Here's hoping to magical forged weapony and armor :)

maddness?

[ren-tzu]

I know many who have spent upwards of a thousand dollars for a set of golf clubs or tennis equiptment (accompanied by only the most stylish apparell). It could be argued that it is no less pathetic, obsessive, or legal to spent outrageous amounts of money to aid yourself in those "real world" games as it would be for an online RPG. So why the ban of one and not the other?

too far? that's nothing...

[mortenal]

Back in my mudding days (ok, 2 years ago), a few friends of mine and i were gods, or had higher level characters, or both. A few people saw us playing, got interested, and joined us. Some we invited, some we didn't. One idiot decided it'd be cool to join, and watched a friend of mine sign on, thus figured out how to get in. We let him, after all, it was an open mud and all...
btw, if you don't know what a mud is, go to circlemud.org.
back to the story... well, he was a nuisance... he died a lot, so we rescued him/his stuff... then he started to cheat, and we repremanded him a few times. After about 2 months of putting up with his cheating (we were fucking LENIENT), he watches my password (not hard, it was "enter"). Mind you, i'm a god. i can go anywhere, kill anything, make anything... if he knew how to wield a god, he'da been able to do a LOT more than he did... anyway, he went around to all the hardest monsters, killed them, and put on the equipment. then i tried to log on, and couldn't, because he was already on. so i got on with a mortal, to see what was up. he sees me, and changes my god's password. lucky me, i know how to snoop passwords too. so i use his password, and change it back to an old favorite of mine that nobody knows... (22 characters and bitchy)
i email the implementors (the people that own the server, thus the game, and make all decisions), and tell them what happened. they post on the god's bulletin board that the guy is a "god target". see him, hill him, sack his shit.
So i do this. every time you die, you lose experience. i killed him until he had zero experience... he was 2 levels from the top... that's about 3 months of good, solid play.
he begs and pleads, and begs, and pleads to get his stuff back... he acts like he worked really hard for it... of course i don't give it to him.
two days later, he comes into one of my classes, and says "lets go out onto Alder" (alder street is where lotsa people hang out). i look down, and he's got a gun in his pocket pointing at me. This is not an overactive imagination seeing a finger as a gun... that was a gun. i grew up in the ghetto, i know a gun when i see one. being the cocky bastard i am, i call his bluff, turn around, and walk to my seat and sit down... fortunately, i gambled right.

you think people spending money on these games is taking it too far? nay, i hardly think so... if you are wondering, yes, this IS a true story... if this sounds like a story that'd hit the news, it wouldn't, because the only people that i told for 6 months were a friend of mine in the class (about an hour later), and my girlfriend (2 weeks later)... i'm a paranoid bastard, but i'm alive.

MUDs

[colindiz]

Ah, does no one remember or play MUDs?

On every DIKU mud, it's the standard to have in the policy helpfile that you can not trade real goods for virtual goods.

Why?
a) Get a life. Go buy some food (no, not a 'roasted lizard's tongue', something you eat in real life)
b) We all need to game to relax. But it's not very relaxing when you spend a long time getting your social status in the game, only to be superseded by someone who has bought his way into the game.

It may not happen very much, but just the thought of it kills the fun of online games.

Would you like to play a game of Quake against someone using all the cheats? Because as any multi player game gamer (w00+, weird sentence) can tell you, that's what this is: Cheating.

hehe

[Jim Haskell]

I've always laughed at those people who bought Ultima Online characters for >US$10,000...

Sell Items

[E|dolon]

EQ Player 1: "Hey did you that someones selling the dragon sword of lighting for $100"

EQ Player 2: "Really I got to buy that, screw getting a G400 I'm buying that item for my dwarf"
Friend: "Hey you guys want to go to the ISP's lan party tomarrow we get to us one of there T3's"

EQ Player 2: "No I have to level up my character and try out the item I just bought!"

Friend: "Aren't you ever going to quit playing EverCrack!"

EQ Player 2: "We can quit any time we want to"

EQ Player 1: "Yes I'm level 15 now I can use cool stuff and level some more. Alright!"

(Friend Leaves)

"EverQuest or EverCrack has dominated the minds of people for too long"

Economics and social dynamics

[Rademir]

When I first logged onto the first TinyMUD, I really appreciated the elegance of the economics as a barrier to people mindlessly adding pointless stuff:

If you wanted to make stuff you had to have money.

Wandering around you would occasionally find pennies. If that didn't add up fast enough for you, you could solve various puzzles. The puzzles were created by players and were very creative, as varied as bruteforce logic and linguistic intuition. They generally had some prize at the end, which when sacrificed at the Temple near Town Square would result in a modest bounty.

So you had to not only be willing to learn how to build things, but you had to be somewhat patient and/or willing to get involved in other people's creations.

At least, as a newbie that's what I thought.

Then I learned the many "tricks" that others had, such as pairing up with someone and creating successively more valuable easily accessible prizes (you couldn't sacrifice your own prizes). Of couse the simplest was simply finding (or making!) a friend among the old-timers and having them hand you a few thousand for starters.

So in the end it was another lesson that economics is in large part a social phenomenon. What looked like a beautiful unambiguous system for granting power only commensurate with involvement turned out yet again to be a set of official rules with plenty of the usual real-, er, virtual-world human loopholes.

Life,
Rademir

Last Chance!

[Rhesus Troll]

Before Sony really begins enforcing this rule: Character for Sale! High-level Ranger, character name is "Aradune". Comes with some weird-looking green armor, but I could probably get you some banded if you prefer that look. Character also has a cool flaming sword, which more than makes up for the tacky armor. Also, tonight only, I will throw in a free BONUS CHARACTER with the winning bid. This is a Priest I started a few weeks ago, but I tired of him after a few levels. Name is Wally of Discord; but I usually go by his surname when RP'ing. He has a few decent items, including a PUNCH CARD redeemable for 5 FREE TRIPS on the boat. Act now, this auction will be hot! Bidding starts at $1.

Stop playing that awful game

[Un Sane]

I used to beta test Everquest in phase 4. It was fun; this big huge world, strange places and monsters, and many many quests to go on. After a month, I changed my mind. First of all, combat is awful. You might as well role dice and wait 5 minutes to see who won; there is no skill involved. Second, the game is buggy, months after beta ended, I was still being chased by flying sharks, still falling through mysterious holes in the world, still crashing, spells still not working. What the hell is this? The head people of the game only enjoy playing it more than making it, and you can never ever find a GM on a crowded server. Ever. I know they worked hard on it for 3 years, and it does take a lot to manage a game like that, but deadlines are not more important than quality. If Everquest was being launched right now in perfect shape, it would still be a big hit. Any real geek would have droped that sorry beta game by now. Only a gamer would stick with it. And as far as having your nicks removed, I say good. (Please don't smite me, explanation coming up). I say for an online role playing game, you shouldn't be running around with a name like "Buttpirate", "Everquestsucks" or "Dbzman", all of which I have seen. That just shows a lack of creativity, and it takes away form the quality of the community. Maybe the only reason I hate the game is because how its played. It isn't about "Let's explore" or "Let's quest" or anything role-playing like. It's about "Let's level" or "Let's go get more items". I can't tell you how many times countless people have complained because they died. And what about so called "exploits", that is taking advantage of rivers and obstacles to confuse AI. Anyone using that to an advantage is against the rules. What kind of crap is that? A lack of smart AI on your part, and my exploitation of it is against the rules? That is why Levelquest should die.