Slashdot Mirror
Virtual MMO Currency Trading Crippled By Fraud
Thanks to Terra Nova for pointing to the Gaming Open Market website, home of "the next generation of [MMO] game commodity trading", where there's an announcement that: "Until further notice, Gaming Open Market will be closing its doors to all game currency trading except Second Life." There's more information in a post at the official Second Life forums, where Jamie Hale explains: "Yesterday, I had a user breeze through spending over $3000 USD on [EVE Online] and [Star Wars Galaxies]. Immediately after taking delivery of the ISK and credits, he reversed all the payments, claiming he never received the goods. This is a well-known loophole in PayPal's seller protection policy. Basically, I have no recourse at all. PayPal accepts no form of proof of delivery except physical waybills (UPS, FedEx, etc)."
I heard recently that the "virtual economy" created by the world of MMORPGs is larger than the Chinese stock market.
Who's going to start the first escrow service for gamers..
No offense, but $800 dollars in a MMORPG game is not that much money.
Castles and rares in UO sold for THOUSANDS at a time, I was too young to know what the hell was happening or how much money was actually changing hands. However, there were cases of people in Asheron's Call made upwards of 50k a year selling (duped) items and pyreals, and one character in September 2000 sold for $5000. I never played Everquest, so I don't know the numbers on that game, but even in the "non-major" games there has been lots of money floating around.
And although it may seem like a lot of money to a college student, $800 is nothing to someone that has been around the scene for a while.
Well, someone had to spend the time ingame to get the money or goods to sell, so it shouldn't really matter one way or the other who currently has possession of the goods. You may not care about time arguments, but for many people, time is valuable. Leveling treadmills aren't very enjoyable for many people, but playing as a powerful character is. So they trade their money for someone else's time. Doesn't seem like cheating to me. I could pay a friend to play my character for me for a month and it would be basically the same thing. Still doesn't strike me as cheating though, at least not anymore than having 16 hours a day available to play is cheating.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
On the surface SL looks a lot like There and Active Worlds, but the difference is that SL is more geared to giving everyone tools and letting them create the content instead of feeding you with content created by the company itself.
There are a lot of amateur and professional coders and 3d modelers in SL. I know of at least a few people who have admitted to me that they currently work with big 3d game companies and have shown me their real-life professional portfolio.
The tools are actually surprisingly good too for such an environment. Most technically-minded people seem to be impressed by what they've created.
- Building and linking models using 3d primitives
- Scripting objects to interact, move, or exhibit certian behaviors. The syntax is much like event-modeled C and the API has over 200 function calls.
- Custom texturing where you upload arbitrary TGA/JPG textures which you can place on any object or wear as clothing
- Custom sounds where you upload arbitrary WAV files and can script them to play however you want
- You can now also upload custom "poser" animations you can script or apply directly to your avatar
Of course with a lot of amateurs there will be varying degrees of quality for different builds. Some people are content with sticking with the default "plywood" texture that comes when you build, and others seem to remind me of the days of the netscape (blink) tag as they like to try to use every feature in the toolbox on their builds. But for the most part it's a trip to explore the world and quite easy to make things.
Admittedly the name of the world is quite cheesy, but the technical achievement is fairly impressive and worth taking a look at.
My sig contains a referral, but if that offends you, click here instead to go directly to the website.
Ignore the crappy screenshots and BS marketing crap on their website, it doesn't represent the in-world well, and you'll find it's a lot more impressive once you log in than the website will lead you to believe. =)
Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
Let me see if I understand this correctly. On the board (link in the article) Jamie Hale admitted that he knows why Paypal won't do anything about this. Namely because there was no physical shipment. Well, why don't they throw that step in? Ship out something the user has to recieve as verification, and talk to paypal to verify that it would count as "goods recieved".
Or how about actually creating a working relationship with the company that produced/developed the game? Then he could have re-couped all his loss, but because he didn't workt hat step out, he's out of the profit.
It all sounds like personal problems to me...
I'm one of those people that occasionaly buys money online. I've done it in the past an Anarchy Online, and just a week ago on City of Heroes.
My reasoning is that the money provides a slight advantage to me for what is a trivial cost to myself (roughly $20). It lets me enjoy more of my limited time playing the game instead of chasing down money. On the other end of the deal, I look at it as supporting a college kid who just paid for ramen for the week.
Its all good.