I Shed a Tear... No... Really

[HaemishM]

Sob Story Begins Here

So, an outfit that makes its living doing nothing but selling credits in MMOG's gets ripped off thanks to a shrewd con man and the policies of PayPal and suddenly I'm supposed to be irate about this?

I love it.

What will it take to bring the other games back to the GOM exchange? Hale says that both PayPal and the online game publishers will have to rethink their policies. “The game companies need to recognize in-game commodification is going to happen,” said Hale. “They have to agree to work with us, and work with PayPal.” Until that happens, however, several hundred GOM users will have to take their business elsewhere.

Why the fuck should they work with you? You don't make them money, you leech off their game to keep from doing real work, you wookie rapist. If in-game commodification is going to happen, it isn't your job to make it happen, or to facilitate such commodification, you leeching opportunistic cockmuncher. FOAD Plzkthx.

They don't HAVE to work with you. You are doing something that is not covered in their EULA, something they don't want you to do with their product and you have no affiliation with them.

Keep in mind, I'm not against the developers of the game providing such a service, so long as they secure it and support it and make some dosh off of it. But I am against opportunistic 3rd parties doing so.

[geldonyetich]

I have to agree, it takes some pretty twisted logic in order to think the game developers owe them anything when what they're doing is basically undermining the in-game economy by providing a giant channel of out-of-game influence.

...

So that's where the Philosophy majors went.

[Furiously]

I think an angel just got their wings somewhere.

[schild]

The best part of that is the post he made on the Second Life forums. Apparently that $3,000 was 70% of his income from January. I posted on /. that he needed to find a new job (along with how stupid a business like that is) and got -1, flamebait. He must use Linux or something.

[Fargull]

Someone should sell him a house near Trinsic....

[Nebu]

That's great... I just wish that I had thought of it first.

[Ezdaar]

Yeah credit card fraud is rad, stick it to the man!

[geldonyetich]

Two wrongs don't make a right, as they say.   However, in a den of MMORPG gamers (or MMORPG gamers in denial) one would say that the former wrong outweighed the later.    A pity the courts wouldn't agree.

[Ezdaar]

I don't personally agree with the selling of items, but they don't deserve to be defrauded. They're providing a service that many people want and MMO companies for the most part won't do themselves. They didn't make the best choices and paid for that it seems, but sorry if I don't cheer on someone cheating people out of a legitimate transaction.

[Nebu]

Yeah credit card fraud is rad, stick it to the man!

I realize that cheating these people out of a few bucks isn't right either, but it does strike me as a sort of vigilante attempt at giving them a taste of their own medicine.  You must know that there are also MANY people that have lost money in these transactions by slimy sellers as well.  To date, I'm not sure any of the defrauded buyers have obtained a positive court ruling.

[Numtini]

They're cheating other players out of an honest game.

[Joe]

but it does strike me as a sort of vigilante attempt at giving them a taste of their own medicine.

No, it's just fraud. I highly doubt the guy who made off with an additional $3k gives a shit about his victim camping your foozle.

[Nebu]

No, it's just fraud. I highly doubt the guy who made off with an additional $3k gives a shit about his victim camping your foozle.

1. It's alleged fraud.
2. He didn't get away with $3k, he got away with some virtual credits.  

The monetary value of virtual goods can be easily established (anyone that followed Julian Dibble knows) based on buying patterns on various sites.  What's lacking is some legal precident that equates value in virtual currency to value in real currency.  I'm certan that this type of precident would create CSR nightmares for any game company and they'd like to avoid it at all costs (i.e. Player_x KS'ed the named mob I was camping and made off with the sword_of_1337 worth $50 on eBay...).  

What the guy did was shitty, I'll give you that.  Until the way that virtual items are obtained for real cash changes, each company entering into the practice will just have to assume some level of loss in their pricing.  This is just how the brick and morter stores have dealt with shoplifting for decades.

[ajax34i]

I've seen stories similar to this while playing EVE, a lot.  Not with real cash, but in-game "pirates" (a generally hated group of people) being scammed out of their in-game cash, and posting on the boards.

Reaction was about the same, too... "while on an intellectual level fraud is bad, I can't say I feel for the guy" type of thing.

[HaemishM]

Yes, this was fraud, and it was wrong. I'm not applauding the frauder, because personally, he deserves to have his testicles boiled in oil and served to Hannibal Lector with a nice Chianti.

However, this leeching merchant of virtual sweet nothings gets all uppity about it, demanding that the MMOG companies who DO NOT CONDONE his business help him protect his business. Not gonna happen, motherfucker, because you are not important to them. Just because your own self-importance outweighs your actual worth to the game does not make you important to the game's owner. You are essentially trafficking in gray market goods, like a pusher of prescription drugs, or someone selling bootleg CD's, i.e. What you do isn't exactly legal, but it ain't exactly ILLEGAL either. Ergo, do not expect them to call out the legal dogs to save your ass when you get defrauded by someone else. That is the cost of doing gray market bidness, my brother. The fact that most of the time you aren't completely scammed into the poor house is probably a matter of sheer luck.

Get a real fucking job.

[AOFanboi]

I am just waiting for the day one of these Ebay virtualistas go to the FTC or whatever and claim SOE has an illegal monopoly on the Star Wars: Galaxy "service", because they'd like a competitor with more respect for their leeching source of income, plz...