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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.
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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.
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Didn't fall for the "PayPal" or "eBay" scams? Watch out for the "Lineage II" phish
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Ignorance is not a crime; neither should it be a way of life
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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'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?
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
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 ?
...the Flying Spaghetti Monster?
If not, He will bitch-slap you with His Noodly Appendage.
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.
Okay, I agree with you up to a point. PVP means PVP, hack and slash, loot and plunder. I have no issue with that. Just like a poker game is PVP, and a good poker player can take my money without it being a crime.
That said, the bot was cheating. He cheated at a game to take things that had real world money value. If somebody cheated at poker to take things of value, that would be a crime. I don't see why this game would be handled differently from a card game. He didn't win the things, he cheated them. He sold the things he got by cheating, and made money.
I don't care about the "theft" angle. I care about the bot. That is what made it fraud. Online or card game, it should be handled all the same, IMHO.
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
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.
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.