Slashdot Mirror
Square and Blizzard Drop The Banhammer
Gamespot has the news that Square has banned some 2000 accounts from FFXI, and Eurogamer reports that Blizzard has banned 59,000 accounts from World of Warcraft. The bans come as game publishers continue to attempt to crack down on Real Money Traders in their titles. From the FFXI article: "The news follows Square Enix's crackdown of 250 accounts in June over money-farming and real-money trading, which is the practice of selling in-game currency for cash in the real world. Concerns over real-money trading prompted the Japanese government--particularly worried about large-scale money-mining operations in video games--to launch its own investigation last week."
In FFXI land not all the 2000 accounts where banned (most got 3 day suspensions) and most where not for RMT. The users in question had been using flee/pos/warp hacks and or engaged in MPK or other offences. A large portion of them happened to be endgame players who where using cheats to steal or easily beat high level monsters instead of playing fairly. SE is now flagging accounts for punishment if they are caught cheating and depending on the level of your offence you could be subject of a ban.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
Every time someone starts screaming about the game economics being utterly broken, I have to wonder about their actual evidence. I've played seriously on about 5 servers, and I currently play the auction house on two, and all I see are very predictable supply and demand fluctuations. Stuff goes up today, and down tomorrow. Prices run up on the weekends, and taper off during the week.
Sure you see items that are overpriced, and sometimes those get purchased. More often, however, you see the same item up for sale for a week or more, and get to watch its price trending gradually down until someone buys it.
It's not rampant inflation. It's exactly the sort of cyclical activity I would expect given variable supply.
So give me some data on this completely broken model, because I'm not seeing it.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I haven't played EVE in a while, and I've never played WoW, but doesn't farming have a different effect on the economy in Eve? Rather than inflation, doesn't it make things cheaper? If there is a huge influx of minerals, the price of them goes down and items get cheaper to manufacture. Where as in WoW you get raw gold coming in and devaluing the current gold that people have. Or am I way off here? What is the real problem with farming in Eve?
-matthew
The basic problem is the same, the devaluation of the currency. The farmers in EVE sell the minerals in-game for ISK, the equivalent of WoW gold. Then they sell the ISK for real-world money, thus de-valuing the currency in-game. The deflation of mineral prices (which adversely affects players who have chosen mining as a profession) is a secondary harmful effect of their activities.
No, DMCA has nothing to do with copyright. DMCA is about reverse engineering, not about duplicating or distribution.
Also, it could be well argued (not by me as I repudiate copyright entirely) that DMCA has not been enforced by "authors" nor "inventors" but by distribution cartels. Again, not within the meaning of the Constitution.
The DMCA has zero to do with copyright and everything to do with enforcing actions of others that any free thinker would deem legal. Figuring out how something works is part of making a new device that will be better (and not potentially disturb any patents). The DMCA prevents you from figuring out how something works -- it doesn't actually enable or disable copying.