Game Worlds and The Law Collide

jnguy writes "Forbes points out another business boom due to video games: lawsuits. With all of the crimes being committed both over and within video games, lawyers are finding a new customer. Incidents cited include a man in Shanghai who was sentenced to life after killing someone for selling his 'dragon sabre.'" Update: 11/07 22:42 GMT by Z : Fixed hilarious dress-up typo.

Comments

Re:M.M.O.R.P.G. = B.A.D.?

[egburr]

Blizzard, and most of the others, do have a policy against using real money to buy virtual stuff from others in the game. They enforce what they can, which is probably only a small fraction of what's actually occurring.

The problem with that is that Blizzard makes things artificially scarce, which drives up value. People will use whatever method is available to obtain something they want. Almost all will stay within the law, but most do not agree with the prohibition against using real money (and it's NOT illegal).

Between artificial scarcity and extremely hard (impossibe for many people due to contigous time chunk requirements), a lot of people figure it is not possible for them to obtain certain items through the game and have no objection to purchasing it externally.

After all, it's just another "pay to play" option. You're paying Blizzard to play the game. Blizzard intentionally reduces your ability to enjoy it. You're paying someone else for their efforts to get you an item that you think will help you enjoy the game more.

I see nothing wrong with this, either morally or legally, except that it violates a ToS that you don't see until after you have already paid for and cannot return the game.

Like many others, I have not purchased anything externally, primarily because I am not willing to dump even more real money into the game than I already have by the monthly subscription. (I finally woke up and cancelled that even, and went back to other games where I only have to pay once to play as often and long as I want.)

Gold (resource) farmers are only viable because the resource is so ridiculously scarce. I never minded going out to mine resources. What I minded was never being able to find any because they were always cleared out by the farmers.

The solution: reduce artificial scarcity of resources and make similar equivalent items available to people who are willing to put forth similar effort (but who cannot commit to a single large unbroken chunk of time).

Yeah, the power gamers won't like it. Screw them; the rest of us paid the same money they did. Let them power play all they want; I don't care. But when two friends and I play for seven months, getting multiple characters up to high levels, and we only see one rare "purple" item drop in all that time (yes, we did some raids), it's a little ridiculous. Then we regularly see people who are completely equipped with purple items. We didn't want all that; we just wanted some ability to get a few items that had neat powers. Instead of going to spend real money on external purchases, I just lost interest in the game and eventually quit playing.

It all just depends on the person. Prohibiting use of real money for virtual items is not the answer. Adjusting game economy/mechanics so more players are satisfied or even happy will drastically reduce real world value of those virtual items.