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Players Seek 'No Man's Sky' Refunds, Sony's Content Director Calls Them Thieves (tweaktown.com)
thegarbz writes: As was covered previously on Slashdot the very hyped up game No Man's Sky was released to a lot of negative reviews about game-crashing bugs and poor interface choices. Now that players have had more time to play the game it has become clear that many of the features hyped by developers are not present in the game, and users quickly started describing the game as "boring".
Now, likely due to misleading advertising, Steam has begun allowing refunds for No Man's Sky regardless of playtime, and there are reports of players getting refunds on the Play Station Network as well despite Sony's strict no refund policy. Besides Sony, Amazon is also issuing refunds, according to game sites. In response, Sony's former Strategic Content Director, Shahid Kamal Ahmad, wrote on Twitter, "If you're getting a refund after playing a game for 50 hours you're a thief." He later added "Here's the good news: Most players are not thieves. Most players are decent, honest people without whose support there could be no industry."
In a follow-up he acknowledged it was fair to consider a few hours lost to game-breaking crashes, adding "Each case should be considered on its own merits and perhaps I shouldn't be so unequivocal."
Now, likely due to misleading advertising, Steam has begun allowing refunds for No Man's Sky regardless of playtime, and there are reports of players getting refunds on the Play Station Network as well despite Sony's strict no refund policy. Besides Sony, Amazon is also issuing refunds, according to game sites. In response, Sony's former Strategic Content Director, Shahid Kamal Ahmad, wrote on Twitter, "If you're getting a refund after playing a game for 50 hours you're a thief." He later added "Here's the good news: Most players are not thieves. Most players are decent, honest people without whose support there could be no industry."
In a follow-up he acknowledged it was fair to consider a few hours lost to game-breaking crashes, adding "Each case should be considered on its own merits and perhaps I shouldn't be so unequivocal."
...are Hello Games and Sony. They both knew they had a steaming turd of a game, they released it for full price anyway and expected people to just put up with it.
At least Valve has the integrity to do the right thing, refund players their money for a game that is broken, has none of the features its now-secluded big mouth Sean Murray claimed and if it were fixed, if it were bug free, it would still be a title that would normally go for free-to-play for PSN subscribers.
Really starting to re-think whether or not I'll be buying a console for gaming in the future...
http://www.breitbart.com/tech/...
A walking simulator on 18 million planets.
It's not surprising anyone wants their money back. It's also kind of hard to see how anyone "Stole" the content unless it was the same planet 18 million times.
There are some scam games on Steam that are designed to last two hours to get past the refund limit.
No Man's Sky is one of these.
Thanks for reminding us all why we should never buy Sony products.
If you don't want customers demanding a refund, maybe you should consider making better products instead of the half baked shite you seem to produce.
It takes about 50 hours to realize the features they promised aren't there. The "universe" is so big you continue to give it a chance, thinking you'll come across the things they promised later.
With that kind of game supposedly based on exploration, you have to invest quite some time to find out that no, there's nothing to do here. 50h might be stretching out a bit, but even 20-30 hours of gameplay should not be enough to find everything if the game was not as empty as it is.
This guy left Sony in december 2015. Why lie and say "Sony's Content Director Calls Them Thieves" ?
I don't particularly care for Sony (read: I think they're miserable bastards), but come on!
It doesn't take 50 hours to figure that out in NMS. Granted, it will take longer than the average game to figure out how misrepresented it is, but 50 hours? Not even close. I would have refunded at 5 hours, except I knew it was against Steam's official policy so I didn't bother to try until reports started to come out that Steam might be bending the rules.
Honestly I don't care too much about the money - I never spend money on games that I can't afford to write off. It's the principle of it.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
If you're refusing a refund to a player who hates your game after playing it for 50 hours...
You're the wrong person to be a decision maker.
- You made a game that someone hates after only two days
- After giving your game every chance in the world to live up to what the player expects, after 50 hours of play they can't stand it anymore and never want to play it again
- You defrauded (in the legal sense) consumers who bought your product expecting to get what they were told only to find they weren't.
This is not unusual for Sony https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... but it is just another example of a company that HATES ITS CUSTOMERS and wishes they would just SPEND MONEY AND SHUT UP.
I'm sorry, Sony. This is why I gave my PS3 away. This is why I will never ever buy your products.
Those players you've upset... they're not like me. They're fans of your products. They looked forward to this game.
Oops. Not any more.
Public corporations exist to improve shareholder value. Typically this is done with growth and sales. Good luck alienating all your customers and seeing those chickens come home to roost.
Ehud "Sony can kiss my arstechnica" Gavron
Tucson, AZ US
Sony did not develop No Man's Sky. It's also fairly accurate to say that if someone invests 50 hours into a game and then wants a refund...calling them a thief isn't too far off base. That's the same for any retail business out there. If you bought a game and want a refund after an hour or two of trying to get things to work right, that's perfectly fine. 50 hours? No way.
With that kind of game supposedly based on exploration, you have to invest quite some time to find out that no, there's nothing to do here. 50h might be stretching out a bit, but even 20-30 hours of gameplay should not be enough to find everything if the game was not as empty as it is.
What's going on is you start the game, you fart around trying to get the stuff to get off planet. Then you fart around trying to get the stuff to go to other star systems. There is this impression that the good bit will start once you get past these initial challenges. However it doesn't. The next start system has more planets with the same active items (buildings you can go in).
There are no instructions. So you don't know if you are missing something important.
It can easily take 50 hours to work out that it isn't going to get better.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
In general, when gamers buy a game, and like it, they don't request a refund. Even if it is a short game and they beat it within 8 hours...if that was their expectation and they liked the game, they usually put it aside and forget it.
SOME gamers are assholes who want to get everything for free, but the industry survives because they are not the majority.
This game got overwhelmingly negative reviews and significant numbers of gamers are all demanding a refund. These are the same gamers that usually don't demand a refund. They didn't suddenly become thieves, they felt lied-to and ripped off, and are asking for a refund.
No thievery here at all, neither legal nor social.
Bollocks.
1) If you buy a game you buy it for life (digital does not rot), so if at any time it seems to stop working properly - especially if it never works too well in the first few weeks after release - you should be entitled to a refund.
2) If you're a srs enthusiast, you'll be hammering the servers for a couple of weekends, which could easily add up to 50 hours of "play"time. That doesn't even mean you're getting a decent experience, just that you're putting up with it and waiting for an improvement that doesn't arrive.
3) A thief takes something away from the owner dishonestly without the owner's consent without the intention of returning it. Since any physical copy would have to be returned in order to process a refund, and nothing is being taken from the owner at all if the purchase was digital, there is no theft. Since there is no exchange of ANYTHING without consent when a refund is issued, there is no theft. Since there is nothing dishonest about asking for and getting a refund, there is no theft. A lesson in law or ethics might help u here.
There is a lot of grinding in this game. Mining, mining and more mining. 30-40 hours to realise there is no depth and it's all just the same seems reasonable. Lots of games need big time investments to pay off, and NMS needs time to see that the claimed features aren't there, especially if you started playing on day one.
You can never get that time wasted blasting rocks apart for nothing back.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
HAVE ANY OF YOU ACTUALLY ASKED FOR A FUCKING STATEMENT FROM STEAM REGARDING THEIR REFUND POLICY ON NMS?
Let me address this:
Firstly Slashdot is a news aggregator. No one here will go out and ask anything. They will find links and post them for discussion. Let me do that for you now.
Steam will refund a game owned less than 14 days and played less than two hours. With lots of people reporting refunds after many hours of gameplay their policy or statement becomes completely irrelevant, as the story here is that they aren't following their policy. And neither is Sony.
Feel free to do your own real journalism on a real journalism site. After you're done maybe post the story to a couple of news aggregators like Slashdot.
But before you do fix your capslock key, shouting makes it looks like your have tantrum issues.
This is another reminder on why one should not buy new games as they come out.
Things like:
Missing features
Huge bugs
A lot of the content moved to DLCs for separate price.
I stopped buying new titles quite many years ago and instead I just wait until they hit the bargain bin, preferably in an all inclusive version that includes all the DLCs maybe two years later. Also the biggest bugs should have been fixed by that time and so on.
In some cases it is hard to wait, but so far I have held fast. Fallout 4 was the recent "difficult to not buy" thing, but since they are almost done with the DLCs for it, I can likely get it some time next year for a more reasonable price for the all DLCs included version.
Teenagers whine about getting their money back more frequently than they masturbate. If the server goes down for a few hours, money back. If their character dies, money back. If someone griefs them, money back. If Joe has green armor and John can't get some too, money back. If they're bored with playing this game after a month, money back. I'm not even joking here. If you've ever frequented any MMO forum all the way back to Ultima Online (literally just pick any MMO) they're loaded with these kids whining about refunds.
That depends. If they find out at the end that a killer bug means you can't complete it, or if you try everything figuring that killer feature they advertised has to be unlocked only to find that it just isn't there., returning after 50 hours may be perfectly fair.
The game is set up to strongly, strongly hint that you unlock content as you move down one of two content paths.
You don't. Everything can be unlocked on the first planet.
The only way you're going to discover that is by talking to other players or after many hours of grinding.
I personally broke Steam's two hour limit simply trying to get the damned game to run, primarily due to the horrible way the options menu is set up. (Eventually I discovered you can just edit an XML file to fiddle with options. That and a day-one patch probably fixed my issues - but also sent me past the refund time limit.)
I am one of those who bought the game on pre-order at day 1 from GOG. The reasons for pre-order were many, but to name a few:
- Hype.
- The ability to explore planets never-before explored.
- The shop variety, both as looks as well as role.
- Hacking mini-games.
- Procedurally generated space stations.
- Ability to participate to large battles and take sides.
- The mystery at the center of the galaxy/universe.
Out of all the above, only the first two were in the game at release.
Now, I am at 26h 41m clocked time according to GOG Galaxy and I am deeply disappointed in the game. I have done everything there is to be done except reaching the center (by the way, there's nothing there, the game throws you into a new galaxy with your ship crashed, just as if you start the game afresh). I have created a ticket with GOG asking for a refund as credit granted for buying other games from the same platform. The message is below.
Hi team,
I would like to start by saying this is the first time ever I am trying to refund a game. Never before has this happened, even for games I realized I don't like and stopped playing after a little bit. that is because not liking those games was not the developer's fault, but simply they weren't my type of game.
In case of No Man's Sky, however, my reason for asking for a refund is different. It's not me disliking the game. It's me realizing I was misled into buying something that isn't what was promised. The game simply does not have its advertised features. I realized (too late) that i was lied to.
So here's what I propose: I don't actually want my money back. What i would like to happen, if possible of course, would be for my account to be credited back a partial amount of what I spent on No Man's Sky, so that I would be able to buy other games from GOG up to that amount. The percentage can be as little as 75% of the spent sum, up to your decision, to amend for my game time. It's only fair to treat this game as a "second-hand" resale.
Please let me know whether my proposal is fine, and even if not, I would understand. I have chosen GOG for this game because I liked the way you handle your customers, and thus I hope my impression will be a lasting one.
Thank you for reading my ticket and hope to hear from you soon.
Best regards,
war4peace
Now, of course some here would say "but you played 27 hours of it". Yes. I could as well have played 2 hours, because after that it's the same thing repeating itself over and over. And yes, indeed, that is my first ever attempt to refund a game I played, and I own 176 games on Steam, half of which I never played but those were not developer's fault. No Man's Sky is indeed developer's fault - and morally speaking there's a very strong case for refunds for anyone who wants one.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Here's where the 50 hours come from:
Sean Murray, the CEO of Hello Games (tarnished be his name), said that at the "center" there's a huge mystery waiting to be unraveled. It would take players many, many hours of gameplay to get there. Many players actually attempted this, only to find that there is literally nothing in the center. The only thing that's there is some cheesy music and a cutscene of stars and then you're thrown out into another galaxy to start from scratch. This is arguably the biggest Fuck You sent a player's way I've ever seen in a game.
People have't played 50 hours while gaining enjoyment, they played 50 hours hoping to gain enjoyment. It's like going to work for a week + overtime only to be told your salary is actually the chance to come back again Monday and work some more.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Really, nobody comes out of this one looking particularly well.
No Man's Sky is a mediocre, so-so-ish game. If it had been a $25 indie title that slipped out quietly, it would probably have had a pretty decent reception. But it was hyped, by a developer who appears to want to be the second coming of late-career Peter Molyneux, to be a game that was both fundamentally different to and better than the game that was actually released.
But the people asking for refunds after putting a serious amount of time into the game are also kinda jerks. Digital-purchase refunds have come on a long way in the last couple of years. Weirdly, we have EA to thank for this, as they were the first major party to take the plunge on it, via Origin (hey, credit where it's due). But refund policies set sensible limits. If you've put double-digit hours into a game before deciding you want a refund, you are probably doing something wrong. What's more, the gap between expectations and reality with No Man's Sky was widely known within 24 hours of release. If you got stung because you pre-ordered... then for the love of all that is holy, stop pre-ordering.
And a special de-merit here for much of the gaming media. Quite a few outlets have put more time into defending Hello Games, because gamers are angry with them (boo! hiss! angry gamers! they must all be sexists!) than they have taking them to task for some seriously deceptive marketing.
I did buy it myself. A week or so after launch (so I knew full well what it was like), I managed to get a fairly cheap PC code via cdkeys.com. At the greatly discounted price I paid, the game is more or less worth the money. I put 12 hours or so into it before I got bored and moved on. Mods might add some value to it in time. But I don't feel the need for a refund.
50 hours is a weekend of play. Hoping they'll find the content they were promised. Playing it for a weekened then wanting a refund after lots of play that wasn't as advertised isn't theft. Wearing a dress once to a wedding and requesting a refund is theft. Not because you got use from it, but because it's diminished the value of the object to the owner, once returned.
That it's marginally more entertaining than solitaire doesn't mean it's theft to return a game that isn't as was described when sold. Hell, VW is taking cars back *years* after they were sold and well used, because they weren't as advertised.
Apparently fraud to sell is OK in your world, but returning something when it's discovered isn't.
Learn to love Alaska
50 hours? No way.
You could spend 50 hours in NMS just looking for any of the 100 missing promised features. Sure it's not all a lie? Surely it's there somewhere? Dammit.
The marketing for this product was likely illegal under most nations' consumer protection laws - heck, it was so blatant that even under US law they probably crossed the line. When a product is "not fit for purpose", playtime isn't a relevant factor. If Sony's giving refunds, it's only because their legal team told them to stay clear of fraud. I'll give Steam credit for actually caring about customer trust.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The developers weren't just intentionally vague, they outright lied, straight yes-or-no answers to straight yes-or-no questions about what was in the game, just days before the release. Then even after release they continued to lie about it. When two players went to the same place at the same time to see each other (something the developers had continually insisted was possible), the developers pretended it was a bug - even though they knew damn well that it was physically impossible. The game has no real-time net traffic needed to support multiplayer and there is no serious player model included in the game files (there's a couple comical temporary development models in there, along with a monkey in a hat, the Fallout logo, and a bunch of other amusing stuff, mind you).
The reason that so many people played for so long before seeking refunds was because the developers kept insisting that things were in the game that most definitely weren't. And they put in this huge "grind" to try to slow everyone down, to drag out how long it would take for them to find this out. When a player playing nonstop for 20 hours managed to reach the center of the galaxy (the goal) on the same day as release, going through the relentless over-and-over clicking to do so, the developer's "solution" to the "problem" was to cut the distance you travel per warp by a third, tripling the clicky busywork. And they introduced a bug at the exact same time they did so.
And BTW, after being told that everything's at the center of the galaxy - that the creatures get weirder, there's more going on there, that there's a big exciting ending there, you know what's actually there? Absolutely nothing. You go to the center and the game actually punishes you. There's no ending, just an animation of you flying out of the center and it crash lands you in the next galaxy, which is no different from the current one.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
(Some of the videos taking on the subject are really quite brutal / amusing )
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
Not in English law (and some legal systems derived from it), matey.
TWOCing ("taking without consent") is a separate offence in English law, often used for vehicles which are "borrowed" but then returned, because the Theft Act 1968 requires a lack of intention to return.
There is a blatant ethical and social difference between borrowing something without the owner's permission, and depriving the owner of something permanently without their permission. In the former case, if the item is returned in as-found condition while the owner is absent, it might not affect the owner at all.
If you want to drill down further, theft is from someone that property "belongs to" rather than "owns", which covers both possessors and those with a proprietary interest, who might never be anywhere near the thing concerned. Temporary appropriation (assumption of the rights of the owner) is then blatantly far from permanent deprivation.
Also IAAL etc bla bla.
The reason they're so eager to give refunds is likely to avoid false advertising lawsuits. Even on release, many of the collector's edition boxes had a sticker over the ESRB/CERO rating. Why? Because even after the game went gold, the ESRB and CERO both believed that the game had online multiplayer. The sticker had a replacement ESRB/CERO rating that was different because the ESRB and CERO now understood that there was no online content whatsoever.
At the same time, there are also "online features" in the game which don't appear to actually do anything. People were reporting earlier this week that the game doesn't save any of the names you give to planets or creatures - once you've named enough stuff, the older stuff starts getting deleted. I don't know if anyone's been over the game with a network mapper to see if it's sending out packets of any sort, but I'd guess not.
The companies are probably giving refunds so late because they don't want a class-action lawsuit on their hands. I'm sure a class-action attorney could find plenty of people who bought the game on the reasonable belief (given the interviews the lead developer did with various media outlets) that the game had multiplayer.
Allow me to fix the analogy for you:
This is akin to Hugo Boss advertising a suit that is guaranteed to get you laid at one out of three times. You buy it, you wear it to three dates and go "Hmmm... Well, it could be date number 5 and six out of six, right?"
So you go on three more dates. Still haven't been laid. So either you bring it back now, already MUCH too late to return it with any semblance of it being unworn, or you go for three out of nine. Some people are optimists, others desperate...
So who is the sleazeball in this scenario?
"The developers weren't just intentionally vague, they outright lied,"
By developers, you mean Sean Murray, yes?
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
As soon as I got into space, and landed on the 2nd planet, and saw it was pretty much the same as the first planet, I knew what was up. That was about 6 hours in. (4 hours past Steam's 2 hour refund limit).
You might think 6 hours is a long time to get to that point, but I played a few minutes at a time, and loading time counts. At least an hour of the first 6 was loading screen, because I played in 5 or 10 minute increments. 5 to 10 minutes is about how long it would take the game to bore the ever-loving shit out of me, and I'd go do something else, thinking "I'll come back to it later when I'm in the mood, and it will be better when I'm in the right mood for it". It never was.
First 6 hours also included multiple false starts. One crash, and multiple instances of alt-tabbing out, and can't alt-tab back in...... all of this before I discovered how saving works, so every time, I started from scratch. Save file I'm currently in didn't even START within the first 2 hours of gameplay. No exaggeration.
I've abandoned the game at this point, with 13 hours of gameplay. I'm done with it.
Also, Atlas reminds me of the 'Tet' from Oblivion. Are we an effective team, Hello Games?
"Prediction: within 10 years, Windows will be a Linux distribution." Me, 7-6-2016
I have heard costco has a legendary refund policy. That they will take back things after years of use.
Those are physical things that use real resources. No mans sky can be copied and deleted a billion times effortlessly, but only a 2 hour refund window? Why can't we have refunds whenever the hell we want on intangible property?
-
If you bought a game and want a refund after an hour or two of trying to get things to work right, that's perfectly fine. 50 hours? No way.
You're forgetting the part where the developer, lying, told users 'There's lots out there you just have to explore and find it!' - Some were more trusting of this than others and spent more time exploring trying to find these things that, it turns out, don't actually exist in the game. Spending 50 hours being naive doesn't mean you're a thief while the person who clued in after 8 hours isn't. Both are victims of fraud and deserve their refunds.
Turn the game on Friday night, and turn it back off Monday morning.
Steam will count in-game pause as "gameplay". I learned that the hard way when I tried to return a game. Steam counts the executable being open as "gameplay". Someone who walks away in a long load screen and doesn't come back until after a leisurely dinner may have never seen any gameplay, yet be out of the return period.
Learn to love Alaska
SPOILERS! Hype delays the suckage finding. After all the hype and *PROMISES* it takes a while to find out it's broken. You have to complete the Atlas quest before you find out it sucks. It takes a while to visit all five planets to find out they are all so similar. It takes a while to discover flying to the center of the galaxy just boots you to the next one. It also takes a while before you find out multplayer IS MISSING! If they had said "sorry guys but we had to take it out" but the developers have been tight-lipped about that. It takes more than a couple of hours to realize it doesn't deliver what was promised.
Experience isn't physical, yet it's something you can buy. When you purchase a game, beat it, and then return it after spending dozens or hundreds of hours playing the title, you've enriched yourself with that experience -- an experience you wouldn't have had otherwise.
You may not be returning something physical, but our concept of property isn't solely tied to physicality. That's why intellectual property is a thing. Now, I suppose if you're fundamentally against the existence of IP you can argue that theft doesn't exist -- but I find this a limited definition that doesn't really match reality. If playing a prerecorded song for hundreds of people at an event can count as infringement (and it does) despite the fact that nothing physical has been stolen or removed, then clearly property has more than a physical component.
No, the devs are thieves. They've lied about what they're selling customers then trying to get out of the refunds by victim blaming. If you sell me a shoddy bill of goods, then you're a fraud no matter how hard I try to make your garbage work. And I deserve a refund after seeing that I was lied to.
Hectice, baby, Mercator says hello to you
this is why you never preorder anything sit back a bit after launch to see if its shit and today thats the case with most stuff. but like good sheep whatever is next on the hype train everyone will be smashing that preorder button.
Not in English Common Law (as exercised in the US, and most of the former British colonies). Theft requires intent to deprive the owner of something permanently.
Like most FTFY, your "fix" is less correct than the original.
Learn to love Alaska
> The developers weren't just intentionally vague, they outright lied, straight yes-or-no answers to straight yes-or-no questions about what was in the game, just days before the release
Sadly this is correct. Summary of the all the things promised but not delivered, along with things that did make it:
http://www.onemanslie.info/the...
I'm sorry to be the one to point it out, but you are wrong.
Someoen spends 50 hours on Peggle or Tetris and asks for a refund? I would agree that's a suspicious request.
But 50 hours is an arbitrary number. There are games for which 50 hours is a trivial drop in the bucket of the overall playtime value of the game. I'm sure you could fill a phone book with players of WoW that have a thousand plus hours in it. NMS was promising a universe so vast that it sets a far higher expectation of playtime where 50 hours is trivial.
What justifies "giving a game every change to live up to it's promise"? Seems to me that the people with 50 hours (which can be done in just a couple of days) have given the game every possible opportunity to shine and the game has failed. They were coming at this with expectations set by the developers of a universe so vast that they could spend thousands of hours in the game world. After 50 hours they have had enough and found the vast array of missing features and at that point are actually UNIQUELY QUALIFIED to call BS on the game and ask for a refund.
To me, the bottom line is that the developer failed to deliver what was promised. Users paid for what was promised. Therefore it's fraud and asking for a refund is the least that the developer be worried about.
Warning: Teh poster of this messaeg is lysdexic
That you don't understand the law, isn't proof that your misapplication of it is appropriate.
Learn to love Alaska
Intellectual Property is a thing in order to allow companies to own ideas without explicitly owning ideas (forbidden by copyright law).
I don't see how your conclusion follows from your argument. Yes, doing something illegal can count as infringement even if nothing has been stolen or removed. What does that have to do with property? Not all crimes are property-related.
I did not say that taking a mobile object without the consent of the owner with the intent to return the item was legal. I only said that it is not stealing.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The law puts a lot of emphasis on your intent. This is hard to prove and even harder to disprove in most cases, but intent makes a huge difference, not in the way whether something is legal or illegal (usually) but in the way how you'll be punished.
Most strikingly this is visible in laws concerning the killing of people. Your intent, and nothing else, is the difference between murder and manslaughter.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
What matters is the intent, mens rea, the will to steal, and the intent to permanently deprave the rightful owner of his use of the item. This is critical. Without, you could become a thief without even wanting to steal anything, by mistake and accident, and I hope we can agree that this is not the intent of the law!
Allow me to show a counter example.
You are in a meeting and you have the habit of putting your cell phone on the table because it's uncomfortable in your pocket. After the meeting, you pick up your cell phone and go back, only to notice in your office that you forgot to take your cell phone along, it's on your office table, and you swiped the cell phone of someone else who just happened to have the same habit and the same phone model. Are you a thief?
According to your original statement a few postings up from this one,
"A thief takes something away from the owner dishonestly without the owner's consent, regardless of whether or not they plan on returning it."
you would be.
Maybe that's why they don't let you word laws.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Taking something without permission with bad faith, the intent to keep it and the intent to deprive the original owner of its use.
Depending on what is missing from that list it may be a different crime or no crime altogether.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.