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The Lawbringer: Q&A on Diablo's real-money auction house
Pop law abounds in The Lawbringer, your weekly dose of WoW, the law, video games and the MMO genre. Mathew McCurley takes you through the world running parallel to the games we love and enjoy, full of rules, regulations, pitfalls and traps. How about you hang out with us as we discuss some of the more esoteric aspects of the games we love to play? Since Blizzard dropped the Diablo 3 bombshell on us early Monday, I will post the second article in my series on micro-transaction models next week. For those of you who have been living under the proverbial internet rock (you are missing some awesome memes right now), Blizzard announced that Diablo 3 would feature two auction houses, one using in-game gold as currency and the other using real currency that would be deposited into a Battle.net account wallet and used from there. The whole system gets more intriguing when you take into account that sales made on the real-money auction house can make their way to your own very real wallet through an unannounced third party or deposited back into your Battle.net wallet for use on anything digital in the Blizzard store, including WoW game time. If you're a regular reader of The Lawbringer, you already know how excited I get over virtual currency. This is my wheelhouse. I feel like a master carpenter at Wood Con 2011, cosplaying as my favorite oak tree, quercus alnifolia. Pair that with real currency, and excitement levels hit the stratosphere. I may break through the atmosphere at some point. That faint sonic boom you hear will be me hurtling through the air in excitement and wonderment. Sure, the Diablo real-money transaction (RMT) auction house is not related to World of Warcraft -- or is it? Oh, it very much is. Faithful readers and not faithful alike (how could you, Debbie?) have been writing in questions via Twitter and email asking me to explain the auction house and talk about some of the potential legal and tax issues that could come around because of it. Also, many people want to know how the RMT auction house could benefit World of Warcraft, despite Rob Pardo's saying there are no plans to bring it over to WoW. Let's take a look at your questions.
Study suggests one in three gamers has purchased virtual goods
Let's say you're playing an MMO with two of your mates. They could be online friends, real-world friends, or some combination of both. According to a new study conducted by PlaySpan and VGMarket, one of you has used real-world money to purchase virtual items. The research was compiled last month and samples a pool of 1,000 gamers drawn from a VGMarket database. While the one-in-three statistic is interesting in its own right, even more compelling is the evidence that suggests 57 percent of participants purchase virtual items on a monthly basis. You might think that social networking games are responsible for the lion's share of these percentages, but VGMarket's data show console games with online play accounting for 51 percent of the purchases, with social titles claiming second place at 30 percent (MMOs came in third, if you're curious). The study presents quite a number of curious factoids despite its relatively small sample size, and you can check out all the findings at the official PlaySpan website. It's also worth noting that downloading the full study requires providing PlaySpan with your personal info via a web registration form.
Ask Massively: Go outdoors edition
Here is the salient piece of advice from this week's Ask Massively, right up front and in the intro paragraph -- go outdoors. Right now. Shut down your computer and go for a walk. Take a hike somewhere you've never been. Explore. Take some time to just walk around out in fresh air and sunlight, or heck, enjoy being rained on. But take the time to break from a routine in which you read a whole lot of words on the Internet and just go see what's outside for a few minutes at least. Really, this column will still be here after you're done. It'll wait. I'm hoping that the two or three of you that actually listened to that advice enjoyed your walk. For you (and slightly earlier for everyone who just skipped over that paragraph) we've got questions this week about gold farming and the consistent scourge of site bugs. If you've got a question you'd like to see answered in a future installment, just mail it along to ask@massively.com or leave your question in the comments.
What are the implications of a real-dollar auction house?
It was just revealed that Diablo 3 will feature a dual-currency auction house for in-game gold and for real currency, allowing players to spend real money for Diablo 3 items. Blizzard will not sell those items directly but rather will facilitate auctions between players. Players will receive real currency for their sales, and Blizzard will take a cut off the sales of real-currency items. Blizzard is entering some pretty crazy territory with the Diablo 3 auction house, and the implications may be even more huge for the massively multiplayer market than for the Diablo multiplayer experience. One of WoW's biggest issues that currently plagues Blizzard (as well as the MMO genre in general) is the existence of a gray market in which companies sell in-game currency to willing buyers against the game's terms of service. Many free-to-play MMOs and online games combat this market by selling their own currencies for use in-game, making the currency non-tradeable, or selling items in a microtransaction marketplace. Blizzard has not yet made a free-to-play MMO where these concepts could come to any kind of fruition, and WoW's virtual goods store is very limited in scope and price point.
Global Chat: Broke and richer for it edition
Welcome to this week's Global Chat! We love hearing what you have to say at Massively, and we love it even more when we can share the best comments with all of our readers. Massively staffers will be contributing some of their favorite comments every week, so keep an eye out every Sunday for more Global Chat! This week we're looking at all things money: Who has it, who doesn't, and why it makes the world go 'round. Naturally, Massively writers are richer than seven kings of Arabia combined and aren't concerned with such petty matters, but it seems to weigh heavily upon some of your heads. Hit the jump and let's see what the buzz was like in the comments section this past week!
Scott Hartsman says gold farming hurts our games more than we know
Gold buying is one of those aspects of MMO culture that is seemingly universally denounced, yet enough people partake in the practice to keep the wheels of this grey market activity going. Scott Hartsman may be saying the obvious when he denounced gold farming and selling to Gamasutra, but apparently it is still something we need to hear. The Trion Worlds general manager shared a glimpse of just how hard these activities hit games, and how concerned he and other studio execs are about the proliferation of credit card fraud that results: "It's those kinds of things where people laugh and go, 'Oh, that never happens.' No. It happens. It happens a s**tload. To the point where, over the last three or four years, I would dare anybody to ask an exec at a gaming company how much they've had to pay in MasterCard and Visa fines, because of fraud. It happens a lot." According to Hartsman, the more these events take place, the more money studios spend on paying fines and dealing with them instead of reinvesting funds into the games themselves -- all because of the "jerks" perpetuating the crimes.
Lost Pages of Taborea: A history of Diamonds
It's been a long time since we've heard anything about Diamonds being reinstituted into Runes of Magic's auction house. Since that fateful day they were removed, a lot of new players have joined, veterans have left and some things that should not have been forgotten... were lost. Having Diamonds in the auction house is an important feature that was planned from the get-go. It allows for seamless trading and player-controlled price fluctuations that keep all items obtainable for everyone. It's about having the freedom to play multiple ways. Options are more numerous than simply paying and having everything opened up or not paying and being stuck. With RoM's cash-shop items being integrated into the title's gameplay, there's a grayscale that lets players have many more options in how they want to play. It's not an overly complex issue, but one worth looking back on. Getting Diamonds back in the auction house isn't a lost cause, but the issue has dragged on to the point that long time players may have given up all hope. This edition of Lost Pages of Taborea is all about looking back at the beginning and bringing players up to speed on diamonds in (or not-in) the auction house.
The Tattered Notebook: Looking back at RMT through a futuristic monocle
As I logged into EverQuest II this past week, I was greeted with a promo to redeem my free festive sparker. Sorry, make that my FREE festive sparkler. Anyway, as part of the promotion, I could visit the Marketplace, scoop up my sparkler, and then use it to participate in the lighting of fireworks at the major cities in Norrath to receive place-able fireworks for my house or guild hall. I have to say, it was an odd moment. First off, I had to pause to make sure I hadn't accidentally logged into my Free Realms account that I play with the kids because sparklers and fireworks seem more appropriate there. Second, I was trying to recall a time in EverQuest II when an in-game quest, tied to a live event no less, actually required possession of an item from the Marketplace. In EQII, we've come a long way when it comes to cash shops and microtransactions, and EVE Online's recent controversy surrounding the Noble Exchange really puts things into perspective. In this week's Tattered Notebook, we'll look back on EQII's RMT evolution -- through EVE's ill-fated monocle.
CCP issues brief mea culpa, EVE CSM to meet with devs
It seems as if an olive branch has been extended in the escalating conflict between CCP and hardcore fans of the company's EVE Online MMORPG. Arnar Hrafn Gylfason, otherwise known as CCP Zulu, has issued an apologetic blog post as a followup to the controversial piece he penned last Friday. Zulu chalks up the confrontational tone of the previous post to the stresses surrounding CCP's recent data leaks and also advises fans that the company is flying the Council of Stellar Management to Iceland for meetings on June 30th and July 1st. More importantly for players chaffed by CCP's assumed about-face regarding game-altering microtransactions, Zulu finally answers the burning question regarding whether or not EVE Online will eventually see pay-to-win cash shop items. "There are not and never have been plans to sell 'gold ammo' for Aurum," Zulu writes, alluding to fan reactions to the Fearless newsletter leak. While CCP certainly isn't out of the woods yet with regard to this public relations nightmare, the fact that the company is acknowledging a serious breach of customer trust, coupled with the "no gold ammo" quote, seems to be having a calming effect on the community as it waits for details to emerge from next week's emergency CSM summit.
CCP addresses EVE controversies in new dev blog
As controversy burns through New Eden like white-hot internet spaceship exhaust, CCP higher-ups have at last reached out to the EVE Online community via a new dev blog. The piece, authored by senior producer Arnar Hrafn Gylfason, tackles the week's two hot topics in brief fashion. First up is an attempt to quell the brouhaha surrounding the internal company memo that leaked earlier this week and brought to light some of CCP's discussions regarding future microtransactions. Gylfason defends EVE staffers, who he says were simply following orders by discussing microtransactions in ways that were "exaggerated purposefully to draw contrasts and make points." He also points out that EVE's future RMT implementations are not contained in the memos, as much of the discussion was theoretical in nature. Finally, Gylfason addresses the hugely controversial prices in EVE's new item shop, and despite the public outcry, he doesn't seem too apologetic. On the contrary, he intimates that the prices will stay and that CCP "will gradually introduce items at other price points, definitely lower and probably higher than what's in the store today." Stick with Massively for more from resident EVE expert Brendan Drain as he talks candidly with CCP about Incarna and the week that was.
Chinese prisoners forced to farm MMOs for cash
Doing hard time in China may result in more than just back-breaking labor -- you may be called upon to join the country's growing legion of gold farmers as well. A report at Guardian.co.uk exposed an unusual side of Chinese prisons, painting a picture of gaming inmates who had to meet farming quotas in MMOs or be beaten. One prisoner said that this practice was more lucrative for the prisons than other products of forced labor: "Prison bosses made more money forcing inmates to play games than they do forcing people to do manual labour. There were 300 prisoners forced to play games. We worked 12-hour shifts in the camp. I heard them say they could earn 5,000-6,000rmb [£470-570] a day. We didn't see any of the money. The computers were never turned off. If I couldn't complete my work quota, they would punish me physically. They would make me stand with my hands raised in the air and after I returned to my dormitory they would beat me with plastic pipes. We kept playing until we could barely see things." However, prison officials denied that such activities took place. One official commented, "We do not allow our prisoners to have any contact with the outside world. If they were playing these online games they could easily communicate with other people. We would never allow that." Billions in revenue have resulted from China's virtual gold trade, which is largely unregulated. Guardian.co.uk estimates that the country holds 80% of the world's gold farming population.
Blizzard donates $800,000 from virtual pet sales to Make-A-Wish
Who says Blizzard plus microtransactions equals pure, unadulterated evil? Well, a lot of gamers, for one, but that hasn't stopped the makers of World of Warcraft from gifting a sizable chunk of RMT-related change to charity. Gamasutra has all the details on Blizzard's most recent involvement with the Make-A-Wish Foundation. Proceeds from the $10 Moonkin Hatchling pet that was sold during the last two months of 2010 have been donated to the long-running charity, with some $800,000 ultimately going to a worthy cause. Blizzard has also added another in-game pet to its cash shop, and 100 percent of the proceeds from the new Cenarion Hatchling will go to the Red Cross's Japanese Earthquake and Tsunami relief fund. There is currently no word as to whether the company will offer similar assistance to the survivors of the severe storms that killed over 300 people and caused millions of dollars in property damage in the southeastern United States last week.
EVE Evolved: Eight years of EVE Online
In last week's EVE Evolved column, I celebrated the third anniversary of the column with a competition to win one of three prizes worth over 500 million ISK. Congratulations go to Uniqdragon, mdubs28 and Thorium88, who will be contacted via email to arrange receipt of their prizes. In a bizarre twist that I can't believe I haven't noticed for three years, it turns out that the anniversary of my column occurs just over a week before EVE Online's own birthday on May 6th. With that in mind, this week's column is dedicated to the game's anniversary and to looking back at another successful year. The past eight years have been a wild ride for EVE Online and its developer CCP Games. EVE has grown from a fledgling niche game with under 40,000 launch subscriptions to a global melting pot of over 360,000 actively subscribed accounts. The company itself has seem similar expansion, starting from humble beginnings as a small independent studio in Iceland and growing into a multinational monster with offices in China, Iceland, North America and the United Kingdom. In this huge two-page anniversary edition of EVE Evolved, I look at how EVE Online has kept up with the industry over the years and then go on to examine this past year in detail, from the highs and lows to all the scams and awesome events.
FBI raids University of Michigan apartment over possible WoW fraud
A University of Michigan student apartment became the focus of a recent investigation by the FBI, which conducted a raid on March 30th over "potentially fraudulent sales or purchases of virtual currency that people use to advance in the popular online role-playing game World of Warcraft." While the FBI did not make any arrests, it did confiscate several items, including computers, video game equipment, and credit cards. The Bureau is checking out whether one or both of the students were involved in a fraudulent scheme to buy or sell virtual gold, and the agency is looking for online transaction records with various online banks and websites. The two students who share the apartment claim that they do not play WoW and are confident that they are innocent. One of the unnamed students commented: "They thought we were involved in some kind of fraud. I'm pretty sure they have the wrong people, but they took all my stuff."
Global Chat: Dollars and cents edition
Welcome to this week's Global Chat! We love hearing what you have to say at Massively, and we love it even more when we can share the best comments with all of our readers. Massively staffers will be contributing some of their favorite comments every week, so keep an eye out every Sunday for more Global Chat! Global Chat this week is all about money. Be it real-world cash or piles of virtual gold, money is the foundation of much of our MMO experience. Ready to see what some of our best commenters had to say about all sorts of transactions this week? Follow along after the jump!
RuneScape: Sixth anniversary retrospective
When it first launched back in 2001, RuneScape was a primitive beast. Its blocky three-dimensional world was littered with hand-drawn two-dimensional sprites, and most of its sound effects could have been created by whacking random objects with a hammer. Only a handful of quests and skills existed, and there wasn't much land to explore. After over a decade of development, the RuneScape we have today bears little semblance to its primitive ancestor. The map is an order of magnitude larger, the list of quests has grown immensely, and there are countless things to do in the world. With several million actively playing free accounts and over a million paid subscribers, RuneScape has risen from its humble beginnings to be one of the world's most popular free-to-play MMOs. It's been a long road, with a few important milestones along the way. Today marks the sixth anniversary of the date that the RuneScape 2 beta was officially completed and the game's first major overhaul was launched live to players. Anyone who played back then will remember the beta fondly as the rebirth of a game they loved. Since then, regular game updates have added a huge amount of depth and content every year. In this retrospective article, I look back at RuneScape's past to see how it got to where it is today and what's new to the game over this past year.
The Lawbringer: Fighting the gold fight -- how the strategy must change
Pop law abounds in The Lawbringer, your weekly dose of WoW, the law, video games and the MMO genre. Running parallel to the games we love and enjoy is a world full of rules, regulations, pitfalls and traps. How about you hang out with us as we discuss some of the more esoteric aspects of the games we love to play? Last week on The Lawbringer, I introduced you to the world as it is, a battlefield littered with the corpses of stolen accounts, inconvenienced players, and a priceless reputation on the line. This week, we look at concrete solutions to actually helping the gold selling system wind down and remove many of the hurdles that instant gratification with purchasing gold sets up for Blizzard. You might have mixed and angry reactions to what I'm going to talk about, but do give me the benefit of the doubt. I think being open-minded might win this fight. So what can Blizzard do besides selling its own currency? Here are my suggestions for the first steps that Blizzard needs to take in the new war against gold selling.
The Daily Grind: Have you ever bought gold?
Practically every MMO ever made has some kind of currency-based trade system, and if that currency takes time or effort to acquire, you can bet someone somewhere will pay hard cash to shortcut the process. Although most game EULAs forbid the practice of buying currency for cash, players are often unaware that they could be banned if caught. Websites selling virtual currency are often linked to shady dealings such as harvesting credit card details, key-logging buyers' computers or even just not delivering purchased goods. The effects are often felt in-game too, as methods used to generate currency for sale often include abuse of exploits, farming limited resources using bots, and hacking accounts. Developers of subscription MMOs have fought against the RMT (real money trade) business using a variety of strategies. In late 2009, CCP Games banned 6,200 accounts linked to botting and RMT in one day as part of operation Unholy Rage. RuneScape developer Jagex took an even tougher stance, putting severe restrictions on the movement of gold between players. This week, we heard the news that a leaked client database from an EVE ISK-selling organisation had named hundreds of EVE Online characters as buyers. While many of the characters named were temporary accounts created to receive ISK anonymously, life has been made very hard for all characters named in the leak. So have you ever bought gold, ISK or any other MMO currency? If so, what were your reasons for buying it, and what would you do if your character were suddenly exposed as a buyer or banned? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
The Lawbringer: Fighting the gold fight -- the world as it is
Pop law abounds in The Lawbringer, your weekly dose of WoW, the law, video games and the MMO genre. Running parallel to the games we love and enjoy is a world full of rules, regulations, pitfalls and traps. How about you hang out with us as we discuss some of the more esoteric aspects of the games we love to play? The Lawbringer has in the past been used as a personal launching pad for some of the more out-there or esoteric ideas that I have in regards to the World of Warcraft and virtual currency in general. You guys seem to love it, and there's always plenty of great discussion about these ideas. For the next two weeks, I want to introduce you to my thoughts on how Blizzard should be attacking gold sellers and, at the same time, working to remove some of the content gates that gold has erected in the MMO we all love. This week, we will set up the story and the history of it all, and next week, we will talk about hard conclusions. Gold selling isn't going away as long as fungible and liquid currency exists in MMOs. Gold is "fungible" because it can be exchanged for something exactly like it, at a 1:1 ratio -- gold is gold. Gold is also liquid, as it can be used and exchanged for other goods or services. Short of Blizzard's getting rid of this type of currency altogether or selling its own currency for a cheaper price than gold sellers can furnish it, people will sell gold and items that can be traded. Blizzard has shown that it has the guts to go after gold selling as an industry but has so far failed in scope to bring down the snake that slowly poisons everything it has worked to build. As sellers become hackers, and as hacking chips away at the good will, reputation, and stability of the game we love to play and the company we love to patronize, there has never been a more urgent time to fight the gold fight. The strategy needs to change from focusing on the people who sell gold to a combination of those that sell and the gold itself.
EVE introduces "Hours for PLEX" reactivation scheme
In today's subscription MMO market, EVE Online is in the unique position of allowing players to pay for their game time with in-game currency. To help cash-poor players afford a subscription and to aid in CCP's ongoing war against RMT, the company introduced the 30 day Pilot's License EXtension (PLEX). Cash-rich players who want a little extra in-game ISK would ordinarily be tempted to buy from illicit sources that rely on destructive botting and hacking practices to obtain their currency. Instead of putting themselves at risk of being keylogged, banned or just outright ripped off, players can buy 60-day game time codes and convert each of them into two in-game pilot's licenses to sell on the in-game market. ISK-rich players can then buy those licenses from the in-game market and activate them to add 30 days of game time to their accounts. If an account is expired but has the funds to buy a PLEX, players can even ask for a temporary reactivation so that they can buy one and apply it to the account. Until now, reactivations have had to be processed manually, with players filing an in-game petition through the EVE website. In a devblog yesterday, GM Grimmi of CCP announced that a new automated reactivation scheme will give players access to the game for four hours to purchase PLEX and apply them to their accounts. In addition to reducing GM workload, this scheme will allow people who have previously quit the game to temporarily reactivate their accounts and attempt to pull together enough ISK for 30 days of essentially free game time. The service has been temporarily taken offline to resolve a conflict with the current CSM voting procedure, but once it's back online it will be accessible through the account management page on the EVE website.
