BigKid.com.au

I don’t see why mmo companies have to be such asses about this stuff.. if it is indeed "just data" then they can just restore it from a backup.. I guess they’re worried about cheaters more than anything.

I think it’s money and control - this sets a precedent. One person wouldn’t matter, but a significant number of your user base would cost time and money to restore (not to mention the time lost ingame they would have had to spend regaining lost resources; time = subscription money even if it’s unfairly gained - companies like SOE are experts at walking the fine line between gaining more time from playrs and pushing them to the point of quitting over it).

Also, as soon as players gain some sort of legal entitlement to their characters, the control and moderation of a game becomes a nightmare. If a company wants to ban a player for some sort of breach of the EULA, the player can then launch legal proceedings to regain his or her property. I imagine that sort of legal situation would make MMORPGs untenable. If companies have to start spending significants amount of money to cover themselves legally, the profitability falls through the floor.

These are the sticky problems MMO’s face in the future, and for which companies will have to find workable solutions if the genre is to continue to grow.

I think this is a good and… interesting thing to contemplate. It would be right to say that the person who subscribes to a MMORPG owns the elements that have been attributed to the character, and the game service would have to have some guarantees that the player data was not lost or tampered with. This is similar to having an online bank account, or share portfolio - these are real world items that only exist in a virtual environment. Sure, they can be traded for non-virtual, but that doesn’t have to happen.

… ooh what happens if an NPC steals an item from a player - will the game company have to prove that the incident was part of the game experience, and not an act of malice? Yeah- this could get ugly (unless you are a lawyer)

As for breaching an ELUA - property should be forefeit? Or the property of the offending player can be preserved (sent on CD) but without access to the account, no way to use it.

I don’t know the full facts of this case but in general, I can’t see how assigning players property rights to their in-game assets can ever be workable. What happens when the MMOG proprietor desides to cease operating the game - are they going to have to monetarily compensate all players for their "lost" assets? In the case of catestrophic data failure, if after backup some game time (ie any time after last backup was taken) has been lost, does the company have to somehow verify what each player had and restore that?

How is an MMOG any different from a single-player game, either? If the game crashes through no fault of my hardwre or OS, does the game proprietor have to restore my progress?

I just don’t see how players owning in-game assets could ever work. Don’t get me wrong though - I think companies shouls restore accounts on an ad hoc basis due to misfortune or worse, the deliberate actions of other players (eg stealing) or persons (eg hackers) but I can’t see how any legal compunction could work.

This is just my opinion, of course.

I don’t like online games thier s#!t.