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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."
This sounds more like an issue with game design. The whole fact you're able to mug someone in-game makes this a non-crime. If the developers are worried about mugging then they should take the "looting other Player Characters (PC)" out of the game. It seems to me the only thing "wrong" this guy did was use a Bot (making his PC unbeatable). Show me where in the manual is says, "If you use a Bot you will be arrested." If they (Lineage II) don't want Bots in-game, then track down the offenders, ban their accounts and give the loot back to the rightful owners.
"Simplify, simplify, simplify!" Thoreau
What about vice versa? Because I would love to see someone wall hacking irl
do.what.promptcmds
It's pretty clever.
Mooniacs for iOS and Android
How is this illegal?
Certainly he broke the EULA by using a bot.
Certainly he broke the in-game rules by beating up and robbing people.
But.. it's a game. They didn't get mugged, their characters did. I can see how the company could, say, return the items to the original owners.. but charged?
twitter.com/gravitronic
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
Reminds me of an article posted about how MMORPG's will eventually take over the world. If the object has real world value and takes time and work to obtain, shouldn't it be a crime to steal it?
Didn't fall for the "PayPal" or "eBay" scams? Watch out for the "Lineage II" phish
"Please take a few moments out of your online gaming experience to buy the Sword of Invinciblity"
Ignorance is not a crime; neither should it be a way of life
Congress control $ = inmates run the asylum
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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Just miniaturize http://www.baytoday.ca/content/news/details.asp?c= 6657 that and you're set.
I never spellcheck and I freely admit it. Save your karma for more worthwhile "lol erorrs" replies
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's next? Will a man be sentenced to community service for turning over cards in Solitaire? Arrested for playing Minesweeper in an airport? Sued for using the "Undo" feature in Spider?
if some guys buys a Real Doll, and he's married, has he committed adultery?
I mean, c'mon -- everyman just wants a girl who will let him watch an entire season of Stargate in one uninterrupted sitting.
From the article: "By performing tasks within a game repetitively or very quickly, bots can easily outplay human-controlled characters, giving unscrupulous players an unfair advantage."
Automation is a force multiplier.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
There are three crime scenarios one could apply to this:
- theft
- mugging
- fraud
As far as I'm concerned, theft means to me taking someone's possesions without asking. Mugging is like theft, but instead of simply not asking you use or threathen to use violence against your victim or a objectafter all, there's fraud left. Fraud is to take advantage of somebody's missing or wrong information. After all- users of the game propably didn't expect someone to bot 'em up... but who's betraying who here? I think they could possibly blame the author of the game, for not telling them explicitely that they could get virtually stolen.
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 ?
Guild Wars instances each area to each player (except towns and communities where you can't carry weapons anyway), making it impossible for cyber thugs to pull these ridiculous stunts.
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.
Case in point, I'm watching real police arresting real people who are protesting the real pullout of the Israelis from the Gaza Strip. Nowhere online will you find anyone so attached to items, parcels of land, or characters that they are willing to risk their real lives to protect them.
It is foolish to think that anything online is in any way reflective of real life. There is an offensive, yet quite insightful comic strip which shows a normal guy+anonymity+audience= a troll. Put someone in a video game where there is no real punishment for actions which would get them in trouble in real life, and you'll end up with a bunch of people willing to kill, rob, join gangs, and a host of other activities that are frowned on in real life. It doesn't help that the games themselves promote this sort of activity.
One of the obvious concepts that arises from that view is that online "crime" ought not be policed with real life authorities. This arrest is wrong, and sets a bad precedent. The game companies themselves ought to be up in arms against this action. It takes away their authority to enforce in-game rules, and gives excessive power to the police.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
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.
He was arrested for "hacking", not for mugging people in game.
I've read my comment and came to the conclusion that there could be a crime. The selling of property, virtual or physically present, you have no right to possess could be judged as crime under certain circumstances - and judications. (I don't know how it is for example in the US or here in Germany)
So if there is a civil process in which it is decided that the botter actually took advantage of the lack of ability / knowledge to do something against his bot (however that trial could work), it'd be a case of fraud. mmh..
It's unethical anyways-
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Be fair. Don't bite the hand that does not feed you.
Unbeatable? Those Lineage bots must be a lot better than the ones on FFXI. Those goofs can usually be outpulled/outskilled by a mental defective.
VOTE!
Now, where's my wallet?
It is not our abilities that show what we truly are... it is our choices.
Define actual.
Real people have a pulse.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
...the Flying Spaghetti Monster?
If not, He will bitch-slap you with His Noodly Appendage.
Look, we are now in a society where our virtual "possessions" can garner real-world cash. If I own something in a virtual world, and someone offers me $500 in real-world cash to "sell" it to him virtually, does that now make the transaction a virtual one or a legal one? I believe that it now makes it legal because actual money was involved.
Let say that a +2 jewelled sword of ogre beheading in the virtual world goes for $500 on eBay. The agreement is that after the payment takes place, your virtual buyer meet up in the virtual world and you give your virtual sword to the virtual buyer and virtually part ways. But you still have real-world $500 in your bank or PayPal account.
Someone else sees that transaction on eBay and decides to sell his +4 jewelled sword of ogre beheading. But before he can do that, some asshole comes in and steals that sword virtually. If in the real world that sword could have fetched $750, then stealing that sword virtually might be accountable as theft in the real-world because there is now a real-world precedence (of at least $500) that virtual items cost real money.
When someone steals something in real life, a crime has been committed and insurance will pay for it based on its market value. If that virtual item has real-world, market value, is it still strictly a virtual value because there was no physical, tangible item? The theft of those items could have cost their "owners" real-world cash if they decided to sell.
That's really what the Japanese court needs to decide. The thief did sell for real-world money, after all, so the whole theft is the theft truly virtual? I would say that once it was sold for cold, hard cash, it lost its "virtual" status and was then subject to applicable laws - in this case Japanese laws and possibly the laws of the country where the victim resides.
Just my two cents. Convert that into your currency as necessary.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
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.
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).
The guy sold the virtual stolen items for real-world money. That makes the whole thing no longer purely virtual as it had real-world ramifications. That means that the real-world cash was earned by taking something without authorization from someone else, virtual or not.
If he simply took the item and left it with his character, I would agree with you 100%. However, he did not do that. He brought his virtual theft into the real world by getting real money. I don't see how real laws are not applicable in some way. It's now up to the Japanese court system to determine how/if real world laws can be applied.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
I have a Polaroid of what the burglar did with my toothbrush that says different.
"Made up/misattributed quote that makes me look smart. I am on
Or I like the idea of some Slashdotter that said to put the thief in a virtual jail. Make his character sit in a virtual jail and get virtual bread and water and get virtually pounded in the arse every day. If the virtual world is "real" enough to invest money into it, a jail in a virtual world is just as "real".
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
real world crime shouldn't be decided in virtual courts
virtual crimes shouldn't be decided in real world courts
so what is called for here is a virtual court
populated with individuals of good karmic standing from various games
and whose decisions should have one and only one real world punishment: banishment from the realm of the virtual
that is: a legally binding injunction against the offending real world individual from having any internet access at all for a period of time commensurate with their virtual crime
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Friends and I used to debate this all the time in Ultima Online. What if we sold someone a virtual weapon, say, on e-bay, exchanged it in-game, but had a gank squad waiting to mug him seconds later for the same weapon? After asking lots of pre-law friends, we came to the conclusion that, while definately a grey area, that it probably was illegal, and could be charged as racketering. Basically the problem lies in whether or not he intended to deprive someone of real world assets before hand. My guess is that was exactly his intent, and if so, I'm not sure he'll get off as scot free as we might think. Personally I'm suprised it took this long for such a well publicized case to come up.
Quoting the article:
The Chinese exchange student was arrested by police in Kagawa prefecture, southern Japan, the Mainichi Daily News reports.
I bet if it was a Japanse kid this wouldn't have happened. They're just using some Chinese exchange student as a scape goat.
I read this story, and the post on /. this morning, so I thought I would copy you guys on this:
a ge_ii
From: motherlessgoat
How did we become like this? Some guy in Japan wrote a bot for the game Lineage II and goes around mugging other players and taking their crap. Well, the guy who wrote the bot started selling his "winnings" on a Japanese auction site for real money. Then he was arrested for stealing!!! GIVE ME A BREAK!!!
It's time to get real folks. Let's start with the obvious problem with this situation:
Who on Earth would pay real money for pixilated crap? I know this is becoming popular now a-days. In fact, I recently read an article about this. How in these virtual worlds you could be a rich king and live the best life, even though you share a one bedroom apartment with your mother and her lesbian lover. Hi Dad!
Any takers for the "decline of Western civilization" theories here? Is this really what freedom is all about? Is this what we are all working so hard for? Is this something we should ignore? Is it like porn or drugs and we should just turn the other cheek when we hear about it?
Why are we having our public law enforcers tracking these guys down? The guy build a software bot and let it loose within the confines of the game. According to the game architecture this is completely legal. If this was such a big deal, why didn't the makers of Lineage II stop this from happening. Shouldn't they take responsibility for things like this? Why did the guy who built the bot take the heat? This is probably what upsets me the most. And we see this all the time. Remember when MP3s were the big rage? Or downloading movies from Limewire? Why should the government enforce a company's copyright? Don't you think that is a waste of tax payer dollars? Shouldn't those companies take responsibility for protecting their assets?
I don't know about the rest of you, but I actually care what happens to my tax dollars. And I for one can't stand to see it abused like this. This mindset must change. But how? It's called reform and there are plenty of people trying to change things. It is ok to question your government, your laws, and your traditions.
For any of you still interested, here is the article about the guy who wrote the bot and how he got arrested: http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7865
You can read motherlessgoat's post here: http://youvstheworld.com/virtual_muggings_in_line
Ehh, the people who do this kind of thing might very well have multiple machines and accounts (multi-boxing), with which they can power level whatever types of characters they need. And they study the minimax discussions so they can whip up that wizard who can slaughter a tank, and only a tank, in one shot, which may only be useful in, say, PvP invasion to knock people out of a valuable camp spot.
Hence, throwing their level 50 or whatever it is on Lineage II into a virtual "jail", or even banning that account, is, pardon the expression, virtually meaningless since they can powerlevel up another replacement in a few days.
Normal mortals will whine at the loss of such a high level character, but to them it's a minor irritant and just part of the cost of doing business.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Playing poker isn't illegal. I believe playing poker for money isn't illegal either, in an informal setting; I'm not sure about that though. Cheating while playing a game is crummy, but not illegal. Cheating while playing a game for money is fraud, and is most definitely illegal.
Player killing is legal in an online game, and cheating is crummy but also legal. However if cheating leads to financial gain then it is fraud, and is illegal. I wonder if this chain of logic can be used to discourage cheating in online games?