This has got to make you giggle...

7

7th

Guest
but.. do you think there might be a market for hired vigilante gangs?

"send me £50 by paypal... and i'll bring you the head of the one who stole your level 10 sword of doom... and i get to keep 75% of whatever jangles free from his pockets once i've killed him..."

and then.. if they refuse to pay...

"well then, i'll be seeing you around.....*uses menacing stare level 5 potion*....."

you could make millions. maybe.

7th
 
D

Durzel

Guest
Dr Roger Leng, a lecturer on criminal law from the University of Warwick, said the law has no problems treating the intangible as valuable.

"It's certainly possible to steal intangible property. It's possible to steal any form of property right which is not represented by tangible objects," he says.
The line is blurred somewhat by the fact that in most cases the company who makes the game/provides the service has ownership of the intangible items. The player invariably only "owns" the time spent in developing their character - but the items, credits et al remain the property of the company.

I'm not sure how the regular premise of theft would apply in these cases, in both meaning and Law. Given the victim never actually owned the intangible item(s) stolen to begin with, the thief is effectively stealing from the company... to give to the company.
 
W

Wij

Guest
Thank da lord3h I MMPORG on DAoC where all rare drops are rendered far less valuable due to the ease of getting someone to craft you something better :)
 
D

Deadmanwalking

Guest
Hmm i take it that Mike from alien pants, is infact Mikeybear?
 
M

Munkey-

Guest
i only laughed at the captions beneath the pictures. Obvious pisstakes.....

or perhaps i'm just wierd :(
 
B

bigfoot

Guest
Originally posted by Munkey-
i only laughed at the captions beneath the pictures. Obvious pisstakes.....

or perhaps i'm just wierd :(

Yes DMW it is.
 
D

Deadmanwalking

Guest
haha biffy nicely quoted :)

Anyway cheers thought as much.
 
X

xane

Guest
One of my main problems with the MMOG I played years back, Asheron's Call (the original), was how more and more content and development time was being put on high-level characters and blocking out "shortcut" gameplay.

When I started playing I remember seeing a gang of Level 40 characters being paraded and everyone gasping at the mass of high level before them that must have taken months of continuous playing to achieve. About 3 months after that a subject on the forum was "how high can I level up from start in 24 hours", the answer was to Level 38, a few hours more and he'd have been 40.

The developers started reacting to player complaints about the lack of high level content, at first it was "well just start again with a different character", but that didn't wash. So now less of my subscription fee was being diverted to content I'd enjoy (as a casual gamer) and more towards the powergamers. To make matters worse, many powergamers had starting selling accounts on a regular basis, i.e. making a profit on the backs of all those subscribers, and then starting again as the developers originally had proposed !

If AC hadn't provided such extensive high level content then those characters were worthless apart from bragging rights, or perhaps in PvP combats.

I remember seeing on eBay a guy selling literally hundreds of mid-level magic items for $5-10 apiece, stuff you can pick up anywhere in bulk with a mid level character, I estimated he could easily make $400/month, and he was levelling and selling accounts too for around $100-500. For him AC was a money making exercise, again all on the backs of content paid for by subscribers.

There is a copyright issue here, but companies are not going to enforce it now, they'd lose their dedicated core players to other games.
 
C

.Cask

Guest
Funny that, I've been playing EQ again since about March and just recently heard a couple of interesting stories.

One of my old guild leaders, who about 2 years previously had given up his leadship to become an officer in the local uber-guild, had just stolen approximately 50 million platinum from the guild coffers and sold it on some auction site. That sum of fictitious currency equates to an enormous amount of man-hours to the guild that earned it, and there's absolutely nothing they can do to get it back or punish the guy that stole it. I expect his account was banned but it wouldn't be too much trouble to get another account set up if he wanted to.

Another guy in my old guild (same one as above) found an exploit in the game and was farming it for a good few months before he got caught. In that time he managed to accumulate $20,000 in hard currency and paid off the deposit on his flat. He didn't even get banned when he was caught, they agreed to let him stay on if he gave them the details of all his exploits.

There's a hell of a lucrative trade out there to be made in MMORPG's by unscrupulous individuals. Of course, there are already in-game police forces employed by the games company who are meant to protect the game, but their powers do not extend out of the game. So when someone steals all the money out of the guild bank and takes it to some dodgy auction site there's not a single thing anyone can do about it except ban their in game account, by which time it's too late. The only real solution is to improve the in-game security mechanisms to stop thefts like that happening in the first place. Transactions from the guild account should require authorisation by other members of the guild and that would solve the problem.

It's a weird subject, could probably write an essay on it :)
 
X

xane

Guest
Asheron's Call had an exploit that took about a month to become known, even then it went on openly for a month before the next content update "fixed" it.

The exploit allowed continuous magical enhancement ("buffing")of items that never expired, consequently you could use a high level character to cast a high level enchantment on an item and give it to a low level to go powerlevelling with.

A lot of the people I know who used this later sold their accounts for large amounts of money ($500 minimum), the rapid levelling was done mainly on the back of this exploit.

The "fix" was just an expiry of all "perma-buff" spells, nothing was done about the zillions of x.p. that was gained from it, mainly for real-world financial reasons.
 

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