Mythic Sued Over Blocking Auctions of Game Tokens

Lukenary writes: "Mythic Entertainment, creator of the excellent MMORPG Dark Age of Camelot, is being sued by BlackSnow Interactive, owner and maintainer of CamelotExchange - an online auction site for the exchange of in-game items, money, and characters/accounts. This could be a landmark case: if you spend (typically) weeks of playing time to garner 1,000 gold in-game, do you have the right to auction off that gold for real money? Mythic has not yet had an official response to the suit, but you can read BSI's press release at the CamelotExchange site above. Personally, I find it interesting that BSI is going after DAoC, calling Mythic a "software giant," while ignoring the more established compettion in EverQuest producer Sony, Asheron's Call producer Microsoft, and Ultima Online producer Electronic Arts. Mythic's only product at this time is Dark Age of Camelot, which was released last October."

Comments

You have to look at it from both sides.

[jidar]

A lot of people think that because you did all of this work for your item in game then you should be able to do what you want with it, and there is something to be said for that. Unfortuantely in the grand scheme of things it's not so simple. A problem arises when a lucrative market springs up, then you have people who use the game as a means to make their living in the real life.We call these item farmers. These people are a problem for the game system because they spend vast amounts of times gathering items and resources in the game beyond what their character could possibly want or need. These items are of limited availability (they all drop on spawn timers or on a rare percentage of monster kills) so this results in the actual players of the game being pushed out. This of course works for the item farmer because it helps to create the market.

Creating and then maintaining a sustainable economy is a very difficult thing to do in an MMORPG (indeed, nobody has done it yet) and item farmers just make it more difficult.

Re:You have to look at it from both sides.

[ShadowDrgn]

Mythic did a good job with items in the game in regard to this actually. All special item drops from quests, either NPC story quests or simple "kill the named monster" quests can only be done once per player. There are no spawn timers for uber items. The rarity of monster item drops is also pretty high; you can get any specific item you want in a few hours of killing the same monster type, or at most a day. Plus, Mythic designed items so that player crafted ones will be better than what the monsters drop anyway, so there isn't much real money to be made stocking up on monster drops. Also, items decay with use so if you buy some cool weapon, you're going to lose it eventually.

The site in question only does exchanges for gold and accounts. Buying an account in DAoC is a bad idea because most of the fun of the game comes from playing in a guild, or working with your realmmates in fighting the other realms. If you buy a high level character, people in your realm probably aren't going to like you that much, and thus you'll be excluded from most of the fun in the game.

Re:Crazy

[batkiwi]

You're missing the point.

They are not creating anything. All the action happens on mythic's servers. Mythic can decide what can and cannot be done on their servers.

It's nothing at all like typing a book in word. It'd be like you searching for pages on google, and then saying that you can sell those pages because you spent your time searching for them, and you're allowed to sell your time.

While you can sell your time, you can't sell something that doesn't belong to you.

Similarly, prosecutors go after the "scumbags" ...

[Ungrounded Lightning]

... (or at least the perceived scumbags) before they go after the good guys.

That's why they go after kiddie-pornographers first when what they really want to do is censor opinions they don't like.

That's why they go after terrorists first when they want to disarm the general population.

That's why they go after self-confessed promotors of the violation of copyrights first when they want to shut down competitive outlets for content.

And so on.

Getting a conviction of someone perceived as a "bad guy" - and the "badder" the better - is easier than going after someone who isn't harming others. Courts and juries, in their desire to make the "bad guy" stop dong "bad stuff", may overlook the fact that the prosecutor or plantif is using the wrong legal tool to go after him, or may overlook how the precedent could be appllied to a non-"bad guy". Once the precedent is established, it becomes a tool to go after people who are NOT "bad guys".

Additionally "Bad guys" also often have shallow pockets, leaving them unable to mount as effective a defense as the more affluent citizens. And that puts them in a similar situation to the "go after the little guy first" model in the previous post.

even if it is

[Trepidity]

It's also acceptable / legal for them to delete your account if you break their rules. Remember, they're not taking away any actual property from you, merely terminating your service because you did not agree by the terms of service.