The questions are:

a) is there a chance that a gold advertisement appearing on a site like this will mislead people into believing that buying gold online is legal and therefore they cannot be banned from that game? The answer is: YES.

b) since so far none of the mmo's has sued a gold seller site for violating intellectual property, does this mean that mmo's forfeited/waived their right to protect their intellectual property? The answer is: NO.

The fact is: everything that is contained in a MMO (world objects, money, even your character) is owned by the game operator/developer. You are granted a license for your monthly subscription to use it. If the developer/game operator forbids the sale of in-game property for real money, it is entirely within their right, and they can sue you/ban you for violating this rule. If they decide for some reason that they do not sue such gold sellers (e.g. the local legislation at the place of business of the gold seller does not support enforcing such claims for damages on account of violation of intellectual property, because the issues around intellectual property rights are not regulated yet in conformance with the international standards and practices) , it does not constitute and cannot be interpreted as a waiver.

Making screenshots of a DVD movie and putting them on a fan site has already lead to situations where the fan site operator received "cease and desist" letters. One might claim that such acts do not result in any harm for the movie producer, in fact they are free advertisements, and so on, and it is difficult to prove how much damage it has done to the copyright owner, but the copyright law says otherwise. You are NOT permitted to use copyrighted content without the consent of the copyright holder. Period.

How does gold sale damage game economy? Inflation and easily obtainable epic items will reduce the time required for a player to reach various goals. Less time means a shorter period before the game 'burns out' and new content needs to be added to maintain interest. The companies may easily produce statistical reports that demonstrate the link between the amount of gold and in-game inflation, however, as I wrote, they do not really need to do it. The only claim they should submit to the court that their intellectual property right was violated.

Originally posted by Wumi

First of all i WAS a harcore player... spent alot of time in WoW everyday... made several lvl 60s

Only did random raids now and then call me a casual harcore player then. I did some PvP but lacked the interest to get the big grind and have all the respect to all who did make it all the way to the end THE OLD STYLE! Today any 9 yr old newbie can get same stuff within a week if he wanted to.

But worst of all (for me) the free epix killed crafting. Who wants to buy crafted gear when you can get it for free. With all my chars i got alotta 300 skill crafting in allmost all crafting classes. Stocked up MATs for a year and its all useless now. All the time and efford wasted over a night. Same story was told when SOE killed crafting in SWG and see how that ended up. (And everything else in the game.. i know)

I feel high end rewards/drops/gear in MMO are MEANT to be hard to get! Thats what so awesome about it. In SWG it took up to a year to become a jedi... it was "the carrot" most players where all hunting for and kept loggin on to get.

The people that whined, and in the end, made the developers change the game to please. Was the casuals!

I truly feel that if people dont wanna work for it... they dont deserve it!

Theres room for all of us, but changing a game for the casual "1 hour a day"-gamer, ruins it for everyone else.

Wumi - EU-Kazzak (Havnt been on since the free epix... but whats 1 guy with 5mill. players around *sigh*)

First of all, there is a general misconception about online games here.

A game is meant to be FUN. That is its primary purpose. I repeat: not WORK, but FUN. If you have fun because of the quests, the challenges you face while you level your character to lvl 60 (or 70), the diversity that PvP presents by throwing unknown enemies at you on the BG's - it does not really matter. As long as you have fun, the game is OK for you.

However, there is a conflict of interest here. Players want fun. Companies want income. So they invented time sinks and grind instead of coming up with creative ideas that entertain you in addition to offering a challenge.

Grind and raiding instances till your eyes bleed are NOT challenge. It's a time sink that was created to make you spend your money on the next month subscription. A dungeon may be fun until you figure out how to beat it. From that point it's nothing else but DKP grind, and ceaseless re-runs, unti everbody is geared well enough for the next instance levels.

If you want to get rewarded according to the time you spent in the game -why don't you play EVE? There you can increase your skill, even if you are offline.

You mentioned SWG. and Jedi as a big carrot for people. True it was a big carrot but why. Because - if you were not a crafter - all other parts of the game lacked content, and that was the only viable goal that drove people. And belive me, subscription numbers started to drop before they introduced the Combat Upgrade.

Unfortunately, designing time sinks like grinding and raiding for the slim chance that the boss will drop the item you want and you'll be lucky to have enough DKP or to roll the highest to get it requires much less creativity (and therefore it is much simpler and more cost-efficient) than desining fun, challenging - albeit difficult - ways of getting the same items.

I have not seen any statistics about the gaming habits of the 7 million WoW subscribers but I doubt that the hardcore gamers represent the majority.  So Blizzard's logic will work this way... we will rather sacrifice 1 million hardcore gamers to retain 6 million casual gamers. If you have issues with that approach, blame it on them and not on the casual players who love this game as much as you, but have different ideas about having fun.

The title says it all.

When I loaded one of the game specific pages, there was an animated advertisement in the right hand column, promoting gold sale for WoW.

Are you guys aware of these advertisements, or you've simply contracted an ad provider that feeds this stuff to your website?

Let me say it does not improve your reputation. Selling/buying ingame currency is a bannable offense in all MMO's I know, as it is against the EULA...

I hope you are not promoting such cheating.

Originally posted by Vinadil

I wonder what game you can name that gives an EPIC reward for anything less than an EPIC time commiment?

Take... Football.  What is the time commitment to win the SuperBowl?  Heck, what is the time commitment to win a High School championship... or even one GAME?

Basketball, Soccer, Baseball... yea just about any other game that is Multi-player is the same story.

Even games like chess require a large time commitment in order to achieve any sort of good victory or skill.  And some might consider playing chess a "grind", I mean you do just about the SAME THING every time you play right?

The term "grind" should not be defined by the task alone, but by a measure of a) How enjoyable the task is, b) How MUCH of the task you have to do to achieve the reward, and c) The reward being significant enough.

So, A + B = C means that I am not experiencing a grind.  That means I would be willing to do an UNenjoyable task for a SHORT period of time to obtain a GOOD result, or a semi-enjoyable task for a longer period of time to obtain the same result.  But, I would NOT be willing to do an unenjoyable task for a long period of time for said result.

If you are looking for some story-book ending where a hardy group of adventurers go out and slay the dragon in a 1 in a million fight... then I can suggest LOTS of good books to read, perhaps even some singly player games that might work for you... but there has not been ONE mmo that has done this, and I don't even know if it fits the genre.  If a game DID attempt it, then by default 1 million people would try the encounter and only ONE would succeed... giving them the epic story and the rest the natural defeat.  It is just not so EPIC if everyone can do it every time without any work.

Bad example.

In basketball, soccer, baseball.... you win because you are BETTER than the other team, and not because you invested more time. In chess, you win because your brain works better than your opponent's. If two teams are equally skilled, then of course the one that put more time into practicing will have a better chance to win. Those people and teams deserve their rewards because, yeah, they were actually better than the rest.

But also, many people do sports because they enjoy the activity itself and their goal is not necessarily the World Championship. I know many people who play football, basketball, table-tennis, volley-ball and so on just for the fun of it. In chess the game seems to be repetitive, because all they seem to do is pushing chess-pieces - in reality it is the mental challenge they crave for, the challenge of outwitting the opponent, to figure out from the moves he made what he is up to.  So the activity is rewarding in itself. Should not it be the same with MMO's?

With all MMO games, the developers are forced to make a decision early: which group of players they want to cater to? Those who say: skillz > time invested? Then they'll lose a bunch of players who say 'Bah,  I do not have the reflexes of a hyperactive 10-year old kid, gimme something to grind'. Blizzard opted for the time sink based gameplay (which is good for them business-wise). They thought if we gave epics only to those who are the most skilled then after a while we would cry over dwindling subscriber numbers because many people would quit due to frustration. What is our goal? To keep people going, to convince them that it is worth renewing their subscription month after month, to assure them that if they invest enough time they can get the epics they want.

However, such business logic does not make time sinks more fun. And fun is the reason why people are playing games. You brought the a), b) and c) examples. I say no matter how worthy the reward of "C" is, it does not justify forcing the players to do something that is utterly boring and repetitive. If a game start to evolve in that direction, it won't be very much different from real life, and most people do not want real life mechanisms in a game that is played for fun. Gaming companies should redefine the meaning of "work" - "effort" would be a more appropriate term, because "effort" could mean something interesting, something challenging. This is why I suggested epic quest lines for epic items that do not involve mindless reputation grinding and such. I say putting hundreds of hours into grinding does not justify your getting an epic item, and does not represent any kind of achievement. A bot program can do the same.

Getting epic items should be a rewarding experience in itself. They could do it - but it requires creativity. They could do it as an option - they could keep the grinding for those who prefer getting them that way. I say, epic quest series that present an epic challenge and epic fun could be an alternative.

Right now, the game is epic boredom while you are grinding for your epic, a short period of enjoyment when you grab it, and enjoy your improved skills, and the the epic boredom starts again for the next item. What fun it is!

Originally posted by Vinadil

Originally posted by MillaMerani
I don't PvP so where are my casual epics?  One might say it is not real PvP at all, rather a massive honor farming fest, but still...

There is no part of WoW that does not require farming... so yea that should be nothing new to you.  The issue here is what you have to DO while putting in your time.  For those whose brain's go numb and eyes bleed when they see the same instance for the 20th time... but who don't mind running PvP instances (as they are at least a TOUCH different game to game), well this allows a more palletable grind.

 

I don't know if there is a way to remove WORK from REWARD, even in a game... and honestly I don't know if I would want to play such a game anyway.  The important part is making the "work" side enjoyable enough to do and making the "reward" side worth the investment.

WORK  | GRIND =/= Fun

Many people justify the need for hard work to get an epic item by saying "EPIC means EPIC effort".

I say that's bullshit. EPIC effort should mean EPIC FUN! EPIC should be EPIC difficulty, but difficulty =/= grinding. Grinding is a simple time sink that the companies put into their games to keep you subscribed. Designing something that is based on grinding for honor/reputation/items does not require creativity.

Ok, they designed an armor upgrade quest. It could have been fun if the results were worthy of the effort, but the upgraded stats are just slightly better than those of the old items.

I guess Blizzard is aware of the issue because - as far as I know (I may be wrong, I only say what a guildmate and friend told me about his experience in TBC beta) - some of the Burning Crusade quest items/drops are actually better than T2 items so player like me who don't like the grinding/pvp'ing aspect of the game (I'm a questing freak so bear with me) will have a chance to catch up with the raiding guys.

Btw, I agree this was a positive patch.  The fact that it does not offer anything to non-PVP'ers does not detract from its positive effects.

Too bad, MMORPG's have not evolved to the point yet where dynamic content dominates the max level end-game, offering fun for all playstyles. Hell, people may argue that it is something that is nearly impossible to achieve, but the same could have been said about the MMO's of today just one decade ago.

I don't PvP so where are my casual epics?  One might say it is not real PvP at all, rather a massive honor farming fest, but still...

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Originally posted by Jd1680a
This is sounding alot like a witch hunt for Blizzard.  Anyone who they think is a bot is automaticly banned without question.  That is not a good thing if the customer is legitmate.  I just hope alot of these wrongly banned players were to get together to do a class action lawsuit.  Since they are paying customers and is following the rules, there is no reason for blizzard to kick them off.  It is Blizzards problem and something the need to fix.  EULA is pretty paper thin when it comes between a few hundred people and a good lawyer to sue Blizzard for falsely banning people from a service they paid for.

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That's not true. They are too slow to ban even the most obvious botters. Sometimes they ban a lot of botters at the same time and post an article on their website as a publicity stunt, but as far as I know from various sources on the net, if they don't ban a botter within 9 days, the botter is making profit, so they should do it continuously, and not as a monthly campaign. These gold farming bots are ridiculously easy to spot in WoW, and still some of them are still happily farming even though I reported them almost a month ago. I'm beginning to suspect, too, that Blizzard may have a vested interest in some of those gold farming companies as an extra - and covert - source of income.

Botters do not hurt anybody? Not true. Try to do a quest when four or five bots are farming the quest mobs!! Try to mine resources when automated bot miners mine them 3 seconds after they spawn.

Also, I think, any legal action against Blizzard would be useless, and the reason why there has been none so far is that any lawyer will tell you the same. Blizzard owns the game and makes you accept their terms for gaining access to their property. If they see it OK, they can ban you without giving any reason, they can suspend your forum rights... remember you are accessing their private property where they are entirely within their rights to set the rules.

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Originally posted by Onijin
Dunno about you all but I think that's a crock of horse-covered bull crap. 1) No other MMO states only you or a under 18 trustee or child can access your account. 2) You are paying their monthly fee for their services and mainteance of the server. 3) Your account to access the game is your own property.

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SWG's EULA also states that you cannot share your account. I had a few guildmates in the past in SWG who were banned for sharing their account.

Also, you are paying a monthly fee, but your account is not your property. You are paying fee for being able to access and play the game, so actually you are paying some sort of license fee. Just like software... you are not buying it, you are buying a license to use it.