GOA on a RAMPAGE

[Chimaira]

Kemor was weak and to professional

the new GM's of GoA is more hardcore and leet :]

Feel the power

Requiel <3 keep it up

 

[scorge]

Originally Posted by Code of Conduct
A DAoC account is personal and individual. You cannot open an account in the name of a company, an association or any other legal entity without express prior written consent from GOA. You are also not entitled to give, sell, lease, lend or exchange your account under any circumstances. No virtual object, character or currency in the game may be the object of a pecuniary transaction, under any form or circumstances. Any activity of this kind may result in the application of various sanctions, including termination of the account.

Its friday, am bored at work so thought i would yet again play devils advocate

lets look at the CoC from the point of someone wishing to buy plats for IRL money but not wishing to actually break the CoC. Can it be done yes it can.

Lets look at the CoC quickly:

The CoC is clear in this case, you are prompted to read it everytime you log in, you can have no excuse for not knowing that what you did was wrong and cannot possibly complain when you recieve a punishment for breaking the rules.

Firstly where is the CoC stored on your local machine or on there servers, in other words when you log on does the client machine grab the latests copy from GoA servers or does it reference a file on your hard disk. I cannot remember which one it does.

If it does the latter and references a file on your hard disk, what happens if i edit the file or just delete it? In this case i have been prompted to read a "file" when i log in but it is not the CoC. In this case because the CoC was not present on logging in, is it enforceable? You would like to think that GoA have some thing else in place other than reading the CoC on Login. There are other arguments you could use.

Now to the Core of the argument, selling plats for IRL money is against the CoC, it does clearly say this in the CoC:

. No virtual object, character or currency in the game may be the object of a pecuniary transaction, under any form or circumstances.

With the case in most legal documents, or enforceable documents (in this case between the player and GoA), it is all in the wording. We can see that selling plats for money is bad and will get you banned/slapped or the money taken off you.

So ths answer is simply dont give IRL for ingame plats/items, do it this way instead.

Donate/give some money to whoever you want to be generous with the platinums,In this case you want them to be generous with 50p. Now you are not giving IRL money for plats but for there consultancy, this has nothing to do with the DAOC, as is a tansaction between two parties. Consider it buying influence.

Next On your Consignment merchant but an item for sale, in this case we will use a ROG drop, the cost of the very precious ROG drop is 50p.

Or you can meet up with another player and sell this very precious ROG item for 50p.

Have you broke the CoC, well it is a matter of perspective. If we take the wording of the CoC we will see that your have traded an item for 50p, which is not against the CoC. The money you gace the player out of game, is only for there time.

Which brings me to the final point:

No virtual object, character or currency in the game may be the object of a pecuniary transaction, under any form or circumstances. .

No object, character or currency in the game.. what abouts if you are paying for a players time to talk to you, using DAOC as a medium of communication. Is "paying someone" to talk to you against the CoC?


anyway think i might have some work to do now.... discuss if you wish..

 

[Dwali]

this was good reading...then i think goa should ban all that farms plats and gives to there alt maybe....becuase they don´t know if giving cash to a alt is your alt or a real players alt...if so i should be banned for farming deep volcanus and selling the scrolls!

 

[eggy]

this was good reading...then i think goa should ban all that farms plats and gives to there alt maybe....becuase they don´t know if giving cash to a alt is your alt or a real players alt...if so i should be banned for farming deep volcanus and selling the scrolls!

You really have no clue.

This isn't about trading plats in-game, this is about eBaying and selling plats for real money.

It doesn't matter what the CoC says...the servers belong to GOA; if they wanted to ban you for dressing your char like a hamster..they could.

 

[Devilseye]

nice post scorge

and erm..
what if:
you pay some1's subs.. and he/she gives you a few plats for that in-game.

could that also result in a ban/warning?

 

[Awarkle]

have to agree with everyone

yes there isnt enough time in the day to go out and farm money so it would be nice to buy funds easily and then go off and do rvr.

On a side note it would be nice to buy money off the internet to do exactly the same thing.

however when i used to play ultimaonline aaaages back you couldnt actually place a house anywhere within the game because all the ebaying bastards bought up nearly every available slot and the only way you could get a house was to buy it from the internet.

Like requiel says if they allowed in game trading of plats for money all that happens is mr/mrs x with 4 computers makes the perfect farming group and goes off and camps high level encounters/mobs

Just think if you couldnt get into a modern/fin/ac group because everyone in there was just farming money and you had to go somewhere else but when you got somewhere else there was another farming team just raking in money and you had to exp off greens or blues to hit 50.

OR if you wanted to get guard of valor but every time it was up it was killed by a single person who never moved, never logged.

Farming and selling of plats really does screw up game economies and ok its a bit shitty if you feel it sol but think about it. That 30 plat or what ever you got from it might not seem alot but think if everyone did the same soon enough people would hit 50 then instead of rvring would have to farm excesive amounts of gold/plat to get themselves equiped you would be better just buying a buffbot account making a lgm tailor and farming high level drops and salvaging them. Good book get in a chat group or teamspeak/vent server and chat away and lgm is easily obtained.

 

[Red HATred]

Correct me if i'm wrong but according to what i get, inside Europe there is a Law that states : earning money (real life money) via a virtual media , as in games and game contents is considered robbery and theft from the creator.

The main reason is that an uncontrolled ammount of real life cash is flowing inside a virtual media where real life society has no control over, as in taxes etc...

I've read something that there is a law in the making that would provide a controlled environment where virtual stuff will be tradable for real life cash.
Selling a game is not the problem here , it is the stuff that is created by that game that is the problem. So "big brother" will put his hand into this as well and make sure that all earnings, expenses will be dealth with accordingly. Another "black money" market dealth with and put in order to the wishes of society.

THis is also a form of crime, since most lazy farts out there, jobless ppl, ppl without a solid income , can and do exploit this medium to get some extra cash flowing in, an uncontrolled ammount of cash, untaxed, unchecked, black money, money laundry, can provide a verry high ammount of cash for a dedicated exploiter.

as in this case here , there is no real proof weather you did pay a certain ammount of cash toward a person, but it must have been that either in a chat log or a personal note towards rightnow you have made the mistake of telling them what happened.

 

[scorge]

It doesn't matter what the CoC says...the servers belong to GOA; if they wanted to ban you for dressing your char like a hamster..they could.

In that case why have the CoC in the first place if it doesn't really matter?, and GoA can do what they want anyway.

It makes a mockery out of the CoC.

 

[Tesla Monkor]

It really isn't that hard to grasp, is it? Paying cash RL, trading items RL is bad. Keep the game to itself, and you break no rules. Those rules are there to protect the game, you and GOA.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out what is allowed and what not, even if it isn't worded in the CoC. Hell, if you even have to consider the words 'Is this legal?', then you're already on shaky ground. ;P

DAOC is a game. Keep is strictly seperate from reality, please.

 

[Phoebee-v-]

if they wanted to ban you for dressing your char like a hamster..they could.

Think of all the poor zerkers..

 

[RS|Phil]

tbh, GoA people should google:"daoc money" or something. buy a plat and ban the user who logs in to give it to u ! hit em with teh banhammer on da face

They'd have to pay the seller though via Paypal which would be a financial loss as far as GoA are concerned - they probably don't care enough to spend money on it, at least not in those quantities.

Which is why it won't happen. You wll notice that the only people who have lost anything here are those who have bought things online - in violation of the rules they agreed to when creating an account and logging into the game. If we deleted every large one-way trade ever then I am sure you'd have heard about that by now.

How on Earth can that be proven? Unless you're just arbitrarily banning people that are being "gifted" by suspect players.

Either that or the buyer and seller are stupid enough to talk like this.

*Seller Sends* Hi. You James4175 from Ebay?
*Buyer* Yeh that's me? Are you DaoCPlats@Excal?
*Seller* Aye that's me. I see you've deposited the £25.00 into my Paypal account. I'll meet you in Aegir to transfer the in-game plats you just bought from my for REAL LIFE cash then, ok?
*Buyer* Yeah I will be there in five mins.


Asking for it.



On the whole I personally don't think it matters enough to put effort into catching people for this small crime, at least not the way it stands at the moment. I don't see it doing enough harm really.

I've seen the economy change massively over the last three - things are always getting more expensive but that's just the way it goes. Whilst I would never resort to buying plats online I can appreciate why people do.

I'm in agreement with the people that say there are more important things to be working on right now - speedhackers, radar abusers, all the miscellaneous cheats out there - are a far, far higher priority that seems to be getting the least level of attention :|

 

[scorge]

It really isn't that hard to grasp, is it? Paying cash RL, trading items RL is bad. Keep the game to itself, and you break no rules. Those rules are there to protect the game, you and GOA.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out what is allowed and what not, even if it isn't worded in the CoC. Hell, if you even have to consider the words 'Is this legal?', then you're already on shaky ground. ;P

DAOC is a game. Keep is strictly seperate from reality, please.

I agree if you start saying "is this legal" you must be doing something a bit dubious in teh first place.

still explain how it harms the economy, tell me what is the differance someone farming plats to sell or farming plats to give away or trade with. people will still farm plats.

If MMORPG makers were so worried about ingame economys then they would implement a better economic systems. It would be a lot better if for instance the game decided due to demand what price the item was worth on your CM and priced it accordingly.

 

[vintervargen]

If GOA had even and ounce of common sense they'd realise there's a market for money, levels, items etc and start selling them from thier website like many other MMORPGs are doing (christ UO have been doing it for 5 years successfully).

Rather than clamp down on subscribers that do it, why not actually offer an alternative other than spending 50hours camping for an item you then have to spend 50 hours leveling.

I'm not justifying Ebaying stuff but I know for a fact I'd rather buy something off GOA for £10 than have the boredom of camping it for even 2 hours. I'm sorry but yes I do think my time is more important.

its like government fundings to find people sharing mp3's, instead of making a good service out of the oppertunity T_T

 

[Nausilus^^]

Quite a few arguments as to how it's harmful for the ingame economy have already been posted. Try to read them and ask for more when you've given them thought and still don't understand.
At first I said that catching bug-abusers/LoS abusers etc etc would be more important to me, however, I do still think that catching the people who DO trade RL cash for ingame cash/items is a good thing. I played EQ some time ago, and I remember the "crash" of my server when the online ingame cash trade exploded. Prices on ALL items in the bazaar went sky-high and only the people who had actually bought cash for RL money could afford decent items. The casual player suffered from this and a lot of people quit the game.

When people have more money available, they will push prices up because the value of the money decreases. When they push prices up, the next person will do the same because he needs more money to buy the stuff already risen in price, and so on and so on.

I don't know if this is how it would actually turn out, but I do agree with Requiel, that if the money farmers are given an opportunity to control the market, they wont hesitate to take advantage of that opportunity, and before we know it, the value of gold will have decreased more than ever. Just how I think the outcome will be of course, judging from previous experiences with previous games.

Couldn't agree more with Tes, about the CoC etc. Follow the rules and you'll be on safe ground, and if you feel the need to "cheat" and bend the rules, then probably you belong in D2 or in a single player game with cheatcodes.

IMO

 

[Sollac]

regardless of the buying plats issue,

how can ingame sellers CM/ME justify 17plat + for a scroll, that may have dropped twice whilst on a raid?

I personally dont have time to stand around battering stuff all night as i like to rvr, quest and chat.

The game economy is screwed due to greedy sellers wanting more plat ingame to make them selves uber.

they are out pricing the casual players, whom may have to loofk at other ways to fund there characters.

Sort out CM pricing, hackers and radar users imo

 

[Alan]

regardless of the buying plats issue,

how can ingame sellers CM/ME justify 17plat + for a scroll, that may have dropped twice whilst on a raid?

I personally dont have time to stand around battering stuff all night as i like to rvr, quest and chat.

The game economy is screwed due to greedy sellers wanting more plat ingame to make them selves uber.

they are out pricing the casual players, whom may have to loofk at other ways to fund there characters.

Sort out CM pricing, hackers and radar users imo

Theres only one way to sort out the greedy CM sellers, and thats dont buy the item - farm them - sell them cheaper.

Respec stones have dropped from over 20 plat to under 10 now, and more dragon raids will drive these down further With the scroll's now dropping more frequent maybe we should consider farming them, rather than raising the cash to buy,

 

[Fana]

regardless of the buying plats issue,

how can ingame sellers CM/ME justify 17plat + for a scroll, that may have dropped twice whilst on a raid?

I personally dont have time to stand around battering stuff all night as i like to rvr, quest and chat.

The game economy is screwed due to greedy sellers wanting more plat ingame to make them selves uber.

they are out pricing the casual players, whom may have to loofk at other ways to fund there characters.

Sort out CM pricing, hackers and radar users imo

Well, there is simply too much gold on the servers atm, since the game is getting old. There isnt much that can be done about that really, but buying gold for irl money only makes it worse. Only real solution would be if GOA deiced to remove say 9/10ths of all gold from all accounts, to make gold valuable again - i.e. if the average oldtime player has 50plat and the average new player has 5plat and both can make 1plat/week (just an example) then removing 9/10 would mean they had 5p/500g respectively and after 10 weeks 15p/5.5p which isnt as large a differnce.

 

[Shike]

They'd have to pay the seller though via Paypal which would be a financial loss as far as GoA are concerned - they probably don't care enough to spend money on it, at least not in those quantities.




How on Earth can that be proven? Unless you're just arbitrarily banning people that are being "gifted" by suspect players.

Either that or the buyer and seller are stupid enough to talk like this.

*Seller Sends* Hi. You James4175 from Ebay?
*Buyer* Yeh that's me? Are you DaoCPlats@Excal?
*Seller* Aye that's me. I see you've deposited the £25.00 into my Paypal account. I'll meet you in Aegir to transfer the in-game plats you just bought from my for REAL LIFE cash then, ok?
*Buyer* Yeah I will be there in five mins.


Asking for it.



On the whole I personally don't think it matters enough to put effort into catching people for this small crime, at least not the way it stands at the moment. I don't see it doing enough harm really.

I've seen the economy change massively over the last three - things are always getting more expensive but that's just the way it goes. Whilst I would never resort to buying plats online I can appreciate why people do.

I'm in agreement with the people that say there are more important things to be working on right now - speedhackers, radar abusers, all the miscellaneous cheats out there - are a far, far higher priority that seems to be getting the least level of attention :|

or, GOA create toons and sell plats, then take the plats and keep the cash

Requiel doing business on the side eh? ^^

(THATS A JOKE, before you hammering me hehe)

 

[Deepflame]

There's too much money? Must be all on one or two people's accounts then as I have none.

I have always been wondering where on earth people gather insane prices such as 130p for an Erinys charm from.. I want to go there too!

 

[Sollac]

however before toa you could get full rspecs for 2p and realm for 1p,

TOA HIKED PRICES .....give classis server with no TOA then

 

[raid]

Sure it's nice to punish ppl who break coc...

However I'm pretty sure most players would much rather see the resources used on things like cluster/XML atm

 

[Nausilus^^]

You know Sollac, you earn money while rvr'ing as well.. That's my main income most of the time (apart from the odd dragonraid I have time for). Besides, how people price their stuff on CM's is hardly anyone BUT the sellers' responsibility. If you don't like the price, then don't buy it, but please, stop bitching about it, cos that helps noone. Do as Tears, says, go farm them yourself and sell cheaper, or go for an item less expensive obtaining.

Yea, before ToA, respecs could be purchased for 2p on a good day, but that's maybe because back then, there weren't that many raids. Less mobs to farm, less dungeons to clear, less items to obtain and less pve'ing to be done. On mid/pryd there were, and "always" have been weekly dragonraids, which has kept the price rather reasonable. When I did the raids, they were usually 2-4p in housing, after ToA 7-10p, which really isn't that bad still, considering people have more cash and items available for trading with ToA, than before ToA. The prices mostly just follow the market.

 

[Shike]

~~how people price their stuff on CM's is hardly anyone BUT the sellers' responsibility. If you don't like the price, then don't buy it, but please, stop bitching about it, cos that helps noone. Do as Tears, says, go farm them yourself and sell cheaper, or go for an item less expensive obtaining.

agree 100%, its up to buyers to buy, and sellers to sell, at whatever costs they see fit. Ppl whinging about prices should really stuf and go farm themselves instead of whinging about it.

 

[Alan]

agree 100%, its up to buyers to buy, and sellers to sell, at whatever costs they see fit. Ppl whinging about prices should really stuf and go farm themselves instead of whinging about it.

The problem is some people dont understand how some encounters work or are simply to scared to try one. I can only relate to the latest dragon raids - everyone has followed the instructions and ran from glares we havent wiped (yet) so the skills and knowledge are there - but yet no one ran one before.

If you are unsure about running an event, just ask your guild for help - or look at the /advice list : if you play Hib/Excal drop me a /send im always happy to advise.

 

[Shike]

The problem is some people dont understand how some encounters work or are simply to scared to try one. I can only relate to the latest dragon raids - everyone has followed the instructions and ran from glares we havent wiped (yet) so the skills and knowledge are there - but yet no one ran one before.

If you are unsure about running an event, just ask your guild for help - or look at the /advice list : if you play Hib/Excal drop me a /send im always happy to advise.

huh?

guess you really didnt adress this to me? Or something

 

[Deepflame]

I think the first bit was, and the second bit is more aimed at people in general.

 

[Krakatau]

The game economy is screwed due to greedy sellers wanting more plat ingame to make them selves uber.

they are out pricing the casual players, whom may have to loofk at other ways to fund there characters.

Sort out CM pricing, hackers and radar users imo

Economy lesson 1: Demand and supply

Assuming you're demanding too much ?
Don't go for uber items if you can't afford it

Supply:
You posted earlier that you played for 2 years and didn't wanna leave your friends here....
2 years played time and friends...
And you still can't get the scrolls you need because they're to high priced ?
Should be able to supply it yourself with the help of the friends.
And especially now, when scrolls are easier to get than before.

Either you're just too lazy or you don't have any friends to get the supplies... or both


As IRL, you gotta work to get paid. I'd get pissed if I worked my ass off then some comes along and get paid without doing shit.

Yes, they should sort out hackers and radar abusers too, but that doesn't mean it is wrong to go after the e-bayers.

And sorting out CM pricing ? :touch:
I bet some prices would be lower if people couldn't boost their ingame plats in some bad ways
It's your "friends" in your realm that set the prices, and it's working like economy lesson 1

 

[Krakatau]

Its friday, am bored at work so thought i would yet again play devils advocate

lets look at the CoC from the point of someone wishing to buy plats for IRL money but not wishing to actually break the CoC. Can it be done yes it can.

Lets look at the CoC quickly:



Firstly where is the CoC stored on your local machine or on there servers, in other words when you log on does the client machine grab the latests copy from GoA servers or does it reference a file on your hard disk. I cannot remember which one it does.

If it does the latter and references a file on your hard disk, what happens if i edit the file or just delete it? In this case i have been prompted to read a "file" when i log in but it is not the CoC. In this case because the CoC was not present on logging in, is it enforceable? You would like to think that GoA have some thing else in place other than reading the CoC on Login. There are other arguments you could use.
anyway think i might have some work to do now.... discuss if you wish..

Editing/deleting the file is altering the product - so it's a nono
And yes, it's in the gamefolder as a textfile, but not gonna try and delete/edit it

"No reproduction (with the exception of a single copy solely for backup purposes), distribution, surrender either free of charge or for a fee, lease, loan, modification, creation of derivative works, adaptation, translation, broadcast, subletting or transfer of the Licence is permitted"

 

[Deepflame]

If you edit or delete it, the patcher will just re-download it.

 

[scorge]

Editing/deleting the file is altering the product - so it's a nono
And yes, it's in the gamefolder as a textfile, but not gonna try and delete/edit it

"No reproduction (with the exception of a single copy solely for backup purposes), distribution, surrender either free of charge or for a fee, lease, loan, modification, creation of derivative works, adaptation, translation, broadcast, subletting or transfer of the Licence is permitted"