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Virtual Muggings in Lineage II
electro-donkey writes "A man has been arrested in Japan after on suspicion using a bot to beat up and rob characters in the online computer game Lineage II. The stolen virtual possessions were then exchanged for real cash, according to this report from NewScienist.com.
"I regularly say that every form of theft and fraud in the real world will eventually be duplicated in cyberspace," says Bruce Schneier."
Wow... I come into this discussion and only 1 post is here, which is the parent. I agree on every point. If it is possible to become 'invincible' in the game, its not the fault of the person who used it, its the fault of the gaming company for allowing it to happen.
The game involves real money and looting, this should be expected and the players know the risk coming into the game. No crime, IMHO, was committed.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
If he was allowed to steal from the characters, as it was part of the game, and then other people gave a value to the item, doesn't that cloud the issue? The items have no intrinsic value, yes they represent hard work and dedication, but really they can just be created out of thin air by the game designers. The items are not supposed to have real world value, and that is why they can be stolen in the game. It's an interesting collision of worlds, and might eventually leave a precedent for the value of goods in an MMORPG. Law is coming to the New Wild West.
http://www.pterrys.com
Hmm...If your could figure out how to fabricate the items that are so valuable, it could be a lot more profitable, than having bots running around stealing, just make 20 swords of death or whatever, and sell em. Wow, I'm gonna get to work, I'll be rich!!
What exactly was the crime here? The article is slim on details. Was it the fact that he was using a bot? Is that against the TOS (would be my guess)? Surely, it can't be the fact that the bot "beat and robbed" a player character. If it's something you can do in the game, then how can you be arrested for that? Or was it the selling of the items online? Was that illegal? It just seems to me the article doesn't say much to perpetuate discussion.
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This isn't the sig you're looking for. Move along.
I don't know if this falls under civil or criminal code. On one hand, its just a game. On the other hand, so is blackjack, but its a crime to cheat someone out of money.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
What doe sthis say about how advanced a country is when even their police departments understand cyber life well enough to grasp the thought of an MMPORG mugging . Can you imagine calling the Police in say Kansas City and explaining to them how Zoltare the Unmerciful is repeatedly muggin your character Meri the Fancy . I'm sure you get a few laughs or maybe just complete silence . Whats next ?
What kind of a game is this where the creators/admins can't just take the things away from him and give them back? How hard could that possibly be rather than spending the money/manpower to arrest him?
A man with a gun is called a citizen. A man without a gun is called a subject.
This should not be a matter for the law to get involved in, plain and simple. At worst, the guy is breaking the game's TOS (in which case it's an issue for the GMs).
Lineage II is a PVP game which lets you take items from characters you defeat. It seems to me that, aside from the botting aspect, there's nothing in this guy's behaviour that's wrong. The botting aspect, if a TOS violation, should probably be punished by the suspension of his account.
You shouldn't outlaw the theft of property, or even murder, in online *gaming* worlds. Some of these games, such as the Lineage series, EVE Online and World of Warcraft are designed specifically with PVP in mind. Some, such as Final Fantasy XI, aren't. If you don't want to take the chance of being robbed and murdered, don't play a PVP RPG. It's not as if any sane games designer is going to make a PVP MMORPG (or any MMORPG aimed at making a profit) permadeath anyway.
In real life, I am a good, law abiding little citizen. Hell, I don't even do software/music/video piracy, because I still believe in the ideal that if you justify spending money on something inessential, then you shouldn't have it. However, when I play games, which are ultimately a form of escapism and release, I sometimes want to be a bit nasty. I want to beat people up and loot their still-warm corpse. If you're going to bring the law into stuff like that, then you're taking the whole point away and soon virtual worlds will be as heavily constrained as the real world.
On point 1, yes, he broke the EULA by using a bot.
On point 2, NO, he did NOT break in-game rules, it's part of the game.
On the last point, agreed, if he broke the EULA, he should be banned and items returned, but that's it.
Does this mean I'm going to get charged with murder for killing someone in Battlefield 2? Or would those be war crimes?
No, now you're talking about the real world. Not a fake game. In a game, the programmers have complete control over how people interact with each other because they define the world in which they interact.
Congratulations, you win the daily Slashdot award for "Worst Analogy"! What you're describing in no way relates to what happens in a digital (simulated) world where every action can be centrally controlled. Spewing crap like this just devalues anything else you might have to say about the issue.
In the real world, it is your fault and you should go to jail.
In a fantasy world, the law should not be held up on virtual 'muggings'. If it isn't meant to happen, the developers should never have included. In the virtual world, you are not doing anyone any harm. Non of their assets are real, none of their gold is real and if the devs want players to be able to steal from other players that's up to them.
The one issue with this situation in particular is the bot. In this case, the bot/user should simply be banned. I don't agree they should go to jail though because all they have done is interact with non-real items and non-real god. These items are part of a game, not reality.
I'm a J2EE developer, actually.
Nothing is hack proof, but my main point is that when you play a game that requires you to use real money to buy things and you know it is possible to get mugged, then you are accepting the risk that someone will steal everything from you.
The developers, on the other hand, should be working dilligently to prevent the ability of bots to happen. They should have watchdog algorithms that detect bot activity.
What the solution should be is that the developers should ban the guy with the bot, return all the items to their old owners and fix the issue. Instead, they call the cops and claim its a crime.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
It's not even that complicated. Guild Wars only allows PvP in a controlled setting, with consent of both parties, and even then, you can't get mugged (well, as far as I've played anyway).
When you emulate a real world you get real problems. We play games to get away from real life, not to suffer the same problems (and usually sucker out ~$15 USD a month for it)
He should be sent to jail in the fantasy world, surely?
Assuming that the game has a rule saying 'if you steal things you will be imprisoned'. If there is no such law in the game, then he didn't break it, obviously.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
The article misses out a couple of important facts:
- He *wasn't* arrested for theft of virtual items, but rather for misuse of computer resources.
- He was running a large number of proxy servers (around 40, I heard) to allow people to participate in Lineage II from China, which was against the game's EULA.
The whole point is that games aren't reality!
The whole point of games and their virtual worlds is to be able to do something or experience something you would normally not be able to do in reality. If the devs didn't want PvP then they would not have implemented it. In a fantasy world , rules are differen't from reality and the laws of the real world (in most cases) should not apply either. Your character is not doing physical harm, they are doing simulated fictional harm. No real world people or property is harmed.
This whole story seems to me that people are really starting to not be able to seperate reality from fantasy and it is a sad sad thing.
Beating up an on-line character and taking away its on-line money in a game is not at al analogous to robbing somebody.
It's more like beating somebody at poker.
Lineage II is a game in which characters are allowed to compete with each other for assets that have real-world value, just as with an on-line poker match. Taking somebody's money in Lineage II is no worse (or better) than slow-playing a hand of Texas Hold 'Em until some poor sap goes "all in" against you, and then cleaning them out.
That said, there are two obvious conclusions you can draw from my analogy:
1. If you cheat at poker, even on-line poker, you are a theif and should be arrested. Likewise, they were right to arrest this guy.
2. Lineage II is not just a recreational game. It's a means of gambling, and therefore should be regulated as such by any country which chooses to regulate gambling.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I kind of see somewhat of a point in jailing this person. It isn't to actualy punish the person for sing a bot or muging someone in a game. It is the act of taking somethign form someone else for personal or monetary gain.
Sure the items are fictional but the article said he sold them for real money. The intent was to cheat at somethign for (real) finacial gain. The fact that he used fake items to achieve this process is just clouding the issue.
Granted, i might have agreed and said thats the way the game is played if it wasn't for the selling for real cash. If you bought those virtual items for real cash, there is some value to them. If i cheated to steal them from you to sell back later, i commited a crime or came real damn close ot it.
I guess a fine line is drawn here. It has the merrits of being a real crime while being fake. The problem is that there were actual damages and rewards.
Now, it is up to the government to decide if an in-game crime is a real crime or not, and THEN they need to decide if the company that built the game can be held responsible for using a rule-system that allowed for the crime to happen. Remember, these are suddenly real-world tax dollars fighting a problem that could be solved through changing the rules of the game. As a taxpayer, I vote for that option.
First we start with the idea that even if something is not "physical" or "material", it can still have a monetary value (see "proprietary software", a "patented idea" or even "money" which is nothing more than a number).
Then you have a definition of fraud that goes something like "using unethical means to deprive someone of something of value".
Then you have a rule (in the form of an EULA) that explicitely says bots are not allowed.
Put the three together : He used a bot (thus breaking the rules) in an unethical fashion with the purpose of depriving other players from articles that have monetary value.
The guy commited fraud. Fraud is a (real-world) crime. Therefore the guy commited a crime.
After 3 days without programming, life becomes meaningless
- The Tao of Programming
If the devs want to do this, that is completely fine if it were used properly in the sense of the game. If the devs really dont want PvP, they should take it out of the game. If they use 'virtual police' and such, I believe it should be done in such a way that the police are characters themselves and they would have to actually track you down and take you to jail through the game. This method could make you a 'virtual fugative' which might actually be sortof fun.
Maybe that feature should even be built-in already? duh!
This is completely false. This is not a sig.
Why exactly? I'm not supporting his actions but lets look at this realistically. Video games for there entire existence have been carefully created environments. We as players have always assumed that if a game allows you to do something you should because its a "feature".If it turned out that an ability was not intentionally created then it was determined to be a bug and fixed.
Does anyone play GTA and not carjack random drivers or mug passerbys etc? No, because that a feature of the game, thats why people play it. There might be consequences but they've always been gamespace consequences for gamespace actions.
To make a game where its possible to mug someone and then politely ask people not to do it or you'll arrest them (in meatspace) flys in the face of 30 years of game design. It might make sense at some point but we're not there yet.
My days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle...
Exactly.
If the game allows stealing, then they should implement an in-game way of handling theft. If they do not or people find a way of working around that and every attempt (patch) at fixing the backdoor/loop-hole, they still have the option of applying the virtual 'death penalty' in the form of account bans.
Games are only that, games. If this continues, online gamers will need a hotline to their lawyer(s) before signing on.
How many chips they give you for your money at a poker tournament is a matter of agreement, not obligation.
For example, if somebody wanted to run a "handicapped" tournament, in which everybody bought in for $100, but players who did well in previous tournaments started with fewer chips, they could do so. Anybody who played in such a tournament would be doing so of their own free will. So, in that situation you are buying your way into the tournament, not buying currency. It's still gambling.
In most online games, this is not the case - the real-monetary value in the objects comes from third parties
Where the real-world value comes from is irrelevant. The fact remains that they are playing for assets which have real value.
Allowing obsessed third parties paying for virtual objects to turn something into gambling is a dangerous precedent. Is online checkers gambling? What if some nutter pays me for captured pieces?
If there were an on-line checkers game which let you introduce your "captured pieces" from previous games as extra pieces, I'm sure IGN or somebody most certainly would set up a cash-for-checkers exchange, and yes. I would say under those circumstances that it should be considered gambling.
The same goes for any "Magic: The Gathering" tournament which allows you to keep the cards you capture from your opponent. Anyone who says that it's not a form of gambling is lying to themselves.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
When you perform unethical actions in a game, and these things are considered bad by the people controlling and playing the game, negateve in-game consequences can ensue, to discourage such actions For example, in L2, when you PK, your karma goes negative and you turn red. (Until your karma goes to -INT_MAX, at which point it wraps to INT_MAX, until they fixed that.) Thus, other players are warned, and as a result of the coded rules of the game, they can PK you without consequence. And if you run a bot, you are in violation of the terms of service, which specify a remedy - you are kicked from the game.
When you sign up for a game, you are agreeing, implicity and also probably explicitly in the terms of service, that you will sometiese virtually 'possess' virtual objects, which you might be able to buy and sell on eBay, but that at any time, you can be PK'd, there can be a server error, the admins can decide they don't like you - and your 'possessions' will fall to someone else or disappear, and there's nothing you can do about it. You agreed to this. There's no reason for meatspace governments to start protecting people who have made this kind of agreement from the possible consequences of such an agreement.
Played with little rectangular bits of cardboard imprinted with color images, each unit cost well under a cent to make.
Can you see where I'm going here. . ?
As it happened, these little bits of cardboard proved to be immensely popular. People were willing to shell out hundreds of dollars for single cards at the height of Magic's half-decade rule of high popularity. --Thing is, you couldn't eat 'em. You couldn't build much of a shelter with them. In fact, they were pretty much useless. . , except as a means of holding a little bit of information by way of printed text.
As printed text is worthless to anybody who hasn't got a functioning and integrated human brain, all the value contained on those bits of cardboard existed entirely because everybody agreed at the same time that those little bits of cardboard were valuable. It was an huge act of group imagination filling a dead artifact with pretend value. --But that by itself is interesting, because it creates the reality in which people were willing to shell out hundreds of dollars, (more printed bits of paper, BTW).
So what gives?
Simple. Imagined value is just as powerful as any other kind when everybody agrees to participate in the illusion. Heck, it has been said that the health of the economy is entirely, (100%) dictated by people's belief in what the health of the economy happens to be.
Thus, Cybercrime, if enough people agree that matter-less bits of coded data, (which you can't eat or build a shelter out of), are worth something, then yeah, people are going to go to dramatic extremes to acquire said bits of imagined 'property'.
Physical property is usually just a place-holder for imagined value. In the digital world, the place holder for the illusionary value just happens to be made of the same stuff as the illusionary value itself. Thin air and the spark of imagination.
-FL
If it is possible to become 'invincible' in the game, its not the fault of the person who used it, its the fault of the gaming company for allowing it to happen.
Same logic: If I stab someone, it's not MY fault, it's the fault of the government for not outlawing knives.
You can't take the sky from me...
"Worst analogy"? My whole point was that PEOPLE are responsible for their actions, not the game system that enables people to perform said actions.
Saying the game enables people to steal is like saying Smith & Wesson enables people to steal. They are using a tool, but they are ultimately responsible, not the manufacturer.
So... I don't get how it's the worst analogy ever. I mean, surely you wouldn't blame the Internet for rampant software and music piracy, you would blame people. Right?
Of course, a lot of morons on Slashdot blame Microsoft for viruses instead of the people that write them. So maybe you're one of those idiots.
evil adrian
I had to laugh out loud at that analogy. Can you imagine people going to jail for the acts of their virtual avatars in games? My god, you could put me away for life just for playing Vampire: Bloodlines. And that's not even including all the people playing Grand Theft Auto (even the TITLE of the game is a felony!)
If you ask me, the mistake is not in allowing people to be mugged in-game, it is when the game developer allows virtual items to be bought and sold for REAL MONEY .. that's when you give hackers incentive to wreak havoc and when the game quickly becomes less about fun and more about money.
It's not a lie. It's the truth with lossy compression.
It is a bad analogy, but not because the game mechanics are under the control of the developers.
In your analogy, you're saying Smith & Wesson would be at fault. But the Lineage II developers didn't write the bot; some hacker did.
I agree with your point about the players being responsible for their actions (cheating via a bot), but your broken analogy is distracting from our case.
In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there's a big difference.
That's not a bad idea. If the player wants to role-play a criminal, then, if caught, he should have to role-play the appropriate punishment. One problem with your idea, though: in all fairness, the "criminal" should have to be tracked down and caught within the confines of the game, and not via meta-gaming techniques (ie. using player logs, monitoring tools, etc.) If the punishment is to be carried out in game, then so should the detective work. After all, it shouldn't be a violation of the game rules to play a criminal, so long as you do it within the confines of the game (without external help).
Of course, if the player violated the terms of service by using a bot, then his account should simply be terminated.
There they were, sitting in the van with all those dials, and the cat was dead. -V. Marchetti, CIA
As long as he didn't cheat (which a bot might be, even if it doesn't voilate the game mechanics, unlike setting your Spirit of Wolf speed to 255) then he acquired the items legitimately within the game mechanics and game design.
So if selling in-game items is not illegal, nor obviously "stealing" them, since that activity is possible and part of the game design, then I don't see what they could hold him on.
And using a bot, even if disallowed by the agreement, would be a violation of the agreement, not a crime per se. Violations of contracts are civil things. Even if this was some kind of criminal action (like a Dr. contracting to perform a heart operation, then walking away in the middle of it) what has been "stolen"? Lineage can flip a few bits and recreate the items. They may be too lazy too, or even claim they don't have to because the items were moved from one character to another via legitimate game design means.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Lint / dirt is worthless to most people. Just because some people like it enough ( MMORPG nerds ) to pay for it doesnt make it have a real actual value.
UHHHHH. OK. That is the very definition of financial value, genius. "Will people pay for it"?
Gold would be worthless if people didn't want it, weren't willing to trade real-world things for it. If people suddenly get a craze for collecting something stupid...say.... beanie babies and their street price goes up by $500 they are, de facto worth more. Just because you aren't willing to pay for them does not decrease their actual sale value. How do you think they value homes, cars, anything?
Don't confuse worth with usefulness.
(And take a basic economics and/or business course too...or at least read up on it a bit before you start posting about real world economic value, jackass.
when you play a game that requires you to use real money to buy things and you know it is possible to get mugged, then you are accepting the risk that someone will steal everything from you.
I accept these same risks everyday when I walk out of my house. But I also know that if somebody stole money from me, I can expect the police to do something about it.
What the solution should be is that the developers should ban the guy with the bot, return all the items to their old owners and fix the issue. Instead, they call the cops and claim its a crime.
You really think banning an account would have stopped the guy? He was making money! How could they prevent him from simply opening a new account and starting all over again?
If the criminal in question had not taken ill-gotten virtual goods, and sold them for real money, this would be different. Then the whole issue of punishment could be carried out in the virtual world. But he did cross that line from virtual crime to real world crime, and now he must face the courts.
Must... think up... something... clever!
No harm done? He had virtual objects worth *real* money, and now he doesn't. Your credit card balance, your bank balance, hell your identity are just numbers in a database somewhere. Is it OK for someone to take them? How is someone hacking your credit card number different that using a bot to mug someone? Both cases someone has something of real value taken from them. What if the guy that was mugged had just purchased those items for real money on eBay? *If* the mugging had been done without a bot, and mugging by a "real" person in the game was an assumed risk that everyone took, then it'd be OK. The people running the game are no more capable of keeping every bot off than cops in the real world are at preventing every mugging.
If the developers of a banking system did a diligent job but still left holes that allowed someone to take your credity card info, who should be punished? The thief? The bank? Or should nobody be punished?
What they *should* do is tag the items with non-forgable IDs. Stolen goods (at least, stolen out of the proper context of the game) could be returned and the person who bought the stolen goods could go after the thief for fraud, because in that case there would be misrepresentation.
The fact that these items get sold for cash in the real world only further reinforces how MMOGs are simply being taken too far.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
Try pulling an ace out of your sleeve in Vegas and saying "Whoa, games are only games, people" when you're bodily ejected from the casino. World of Warcraft grosses more than probably 80% of the casinos in this country. There are items in Lineage II worth more money than the maximum hand at many places -- we're talking hundreds of dollars. When there is that much money on the line, the game isn't a game anymore, and the company, the government, and the players have a vested interest in making sure everyone plays by the rules. Can you imagine someone saying "Hah, you forgot to search my sleeve! Now give me my money, I stole it fair and square!"?
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Do you remeber those (worded)math questions in grade school were it talked about a car driving 60 miles an hour and a train goin east at 40 mpg,the store being 5 miles away, two dogs barking and jack has 3 dollars in his pocket. Then askes how many times jack could buy somethign that costs 50 cents?
This is one of those problems. You are so facinated with two dogs barking that you are skipping that some guy cheated at some activity for personal and finacial gain. If durring normal play, the guy mugged these people (as the game allows) and was succesfull because he had more experience or somethign, nothing would be an issue here. What makes this an issue is that he basicaly defrauded the gameers by using a bot with abilities far better then human players for the express purpose of capitolizing on the virtual goods he obtained.
These virtual goods could be actualy worth somethign in real life because they have a monetary value at some auction sites. Your lawn was probably planted before you bought your house. The actual land is what is worth money but if i drove thu your lawn and tore it up, there would be actualy damages i would be liable for. most likley in excess of the cost of grass seed and someone to scatter it. This excess is the same as a virtual item having value in the real world.
The problem isn't that he did somethign that is commonly done. The problem is that he cheated at the game (think playing poker with chips instead of money and the winner gets a prize) for the express purpose of cashing in on the rewards. So what you actualy have is a fraud commited to enrich himself. Absent of the idea of it hapening in or around a game, could you agree that these actions are bad and possibly ilegal when apllied to any other situation (like banking or invesments)?
You have bought the fiction that pieces of paper have power. Perhaps it is because without that fiction modern society fails. Thus the fiction has become invisible to our minds as the alternative is too horrible to contemplate. I find interesting is that you can believe that paper is "real money" (even though most of the worlds "money" is stored as bits today), and yet refuse to believe that in the future possessions in a virtual environment will be ruled to have value.
Yes, the game companies will go to extreme lengths to protect themselves from being liable for anything. Companies that take thousands of dollars in consideration for virtual property (which is occurring *now*, not in some hazy future) are creating that liability today, and in the near future I expect someone will screw up and the law will contemplate this issue.
The fact that you only are taxed on gains when you convert to "real money" seems an awful lot like some investment instruments to me. Likewise, some of my retirement investments could tank in value, and (excepting a suit alleging fraud, but lets assume they just collapsed due to economic forces) I'm without recourse to my lost "real money".
To take this to an extreme, but practiced today example, imagine that I'm running a "farm", extracting virtual property from the game and auctioning it off for "real money". There are several articles about the boom of Chinese and Indian based operations of this nature. Are you arguing I don't have to pay taxes on the gains I make this way? If no, then good luck with that tax audit. If yes, then where does the money come from? How is it that I'm able to extract "real money" from "virtual property" unless that property has value. Economic value is simply the price someone will pay to acquire a piece of property. There is absolutely nothing in economic theory that excludes virtual property from having value, and quite clearly markets have developed that do value that property.
So I'm not sure what you are arguing in your last post. Yes, banks are more likely to honor obligations than game companies: is that the big revelation here? I say "more likely" because as pointed out earlier they don't always do so. One of my old companies worked with Mexico quite extensively, and I must say that your reliance of regulations and obligations would have been considered quite quaint in 1980's Mexico.
As far as "rule of law", all that represents is the structures that those in power have decreed acceptable. When the winds change, the rules change. Pieces of paper, bits that represent "obligations" and everything else that is a representational version of value become suspect. Yes, in a Mad Max world someone can take my property by force, but I would say that is simply demonstrating that such things as land, homes, vehicles have *intrinsic* value, beyond any value they have as a representation of wealth. Nobody is going to steal my stack of cash, my stock certificates, etc, in that scenario because they have no intrinsic value.
But you keep believing in the intrinsic value of *obligations* based on *rule of law*. I'm sure it will help you sleep at night. Meanwhile a multi million dollar trade in *imaginary money* will continue. Try to ignore it and it probably won't keep you up at night either. I personally will consider economic value to be economic value, no matter what odd places it crops up. Remembering, of course, that some forms of economic value are more risky than others.
Mad Max, this one is for you.
Sig under construction since 1998.