Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
How to make Gold/Item/Hack Selling Illegal in the US?
Dauzqul
Member RarePosts: 1,982
Old, yet semi-recent news: Gold / Item / Hack selling has been made illegal in Korea. The punishment for breaking the law will be a 50 million won fine (£27,612) and a maximum jail sentence of five years.
I don't know... is it even possible (with enough of a following) to get this done within the US or any other country?
Even though I don't buy gold, it still greatly infects my gameplay.
- Gold farmers pump out so much gold that it destroys the virtual economy. The value of each piece of gold rapidly goes down. This makes it much harder for legit players to compete.
- Constant /messages, ads, and spam. It doesn't end. /ignore is pointless, as new bots or characters appear hourly to spam.
- Cheaters are the worse. However, almost every cheater has no idea how to program a bot. They buy them. Korea made this illegal as well. I see nothing but a positive here.
- Constant paypal and real money scams.
Gold/Item/Hack selling is just all around shitty for every legit player - millions and millions of legit players.
How can we come together to bring attention to this? Is there some legal petition one can create? lol. I don't know.
thanks
Comments
There will always be a black market, if there is a demand.
The solution is simple .. a RMAH. Real money won't de-value like gold. Problem solved.
That does nothing, actually. Farmers will sell for cheaper than the RMAH. Just look at Diablo 3. It's insane.
The cheapest you can sell gold on D3's RMAH is .25 per 100k. However, farming sites are selling it for 1/4 that price.
If I knew that I'd be charging the American Government (and indeed any other Government I could fleece) mega-bucks for my insightful legal knowledge.
Yeah, but why would you need gold? You can just buy stuff off the RMAH with real money. In fact, it is insane to deal with gold farmers because of the risk. If i want to buy stuff with RM, i go to the RMAH, not buy gold first.
Yeah but it massively cuts into their potential profits, which dramatically reduces how many people are willing to enter the gold-selling market. I wish I could find some chart of gold-seller prices before and after the RMAH, as it would likely take a very sharp dive at that time (after the gradual decline which would've already been happening due to the game aging.)
UPDATE: Yeah looks like jun 12 was when RMAH went live and this chart I found (small but readable) clearly shows more than a 50% drop around that time.
Won't link directly to the site here (since it's goldseller related) but if you want to see for yourself google "gold prices d3 over time" and scroll down to the images at the bottom of the page. It's the fourth chart.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
The last thing the U.S. (or any other country really) needs is more laws. Current laws deal well enough with 99% of issues we face and would still do so even if you got rid of half of them.
Let the industry deal with this problem on it's own. It already seems to be doing ok because these issues aren't rampant throughout the industry.
People need to be careful with their own accounts and devs need to ensure thier players are reasonably protected.
You want me to pay to play a game I already paid for???
Be afraid.....The dragons are HERE!
actually i think the RMAH makes gold farming less relevant, because if you want to buy items with real money, just use the RMAH and by-pass in-game gold.
Now one can argue that "gold" farmers can farm items and sell them on RMAH, but then they have to compete with every one else.
I completely agree. If a company wants it can easily get rid of bots farmers and destroy major gold trading simply by pressing a button... Look at runsescape. They did it. The only reason major companies, specifically pay to play, aren't doing this is becuase of they get paid for the seller to play the game. Runescape being f2p (most of it anyway) found it wasn't profitable, it affected their actual playing community, and cut down the amount of potential membership. So they terminated it... Finding most of the bots destroyed were fromAsain accounts. Pay to play finds it is profitable to keep these well cheaters, and therefore do very little to get rid of them, even though I am sure they can.http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/innovation
IMO All this gold farming/selling and rmah are bad for gaming and I will not take part in it. I thought it was something blizz was against as well but I guess there just against not getting there slice.
Their getting their slice with the 15 dollars a month.http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/innovation
It is already there, with or without the RMAH.
i think the RMAH is a good idea because it put everyone on the level playing field. Now the gold farmer (or item farmer) has to compete with every other player.
And it is actually good that i can SELL my items for real money.
[mod edit]
Blizzards RMAH is in no way a solution, it basically just made it legal to sell pixel items for real money which was ilegal before but done anyway. All blizzard is truly accomplishing here is getting there cut of the money it brings 0 beneficts to a legit player, gold farming bots will still be around they can keep using gold sites to sell their stuff and make money or they can use RMAH and sell there the only downside is their profits will decrease since blizzard gets a 15%? cut of any deal there (see how smart they are? they flipped this issue around in a profitable way for them), they can also just sell the rares/epic items there and keep making money and messing up the economy for legit players.
Now that RMAH makes legit to buy items for real money u will also see alot of people paying to win (common model in almost every cash shop free to play game around the market), with no downsides like risks of being banned or scammed the rich/spoiled players will just dominate the game.
When we talk about selling ANYTHING in-game, we should focus on the world as whole... If there comes a way to ban it in the U.S sellers would just move themselfs to the nearest foreign ground. But, in my opinion, such a system won't exist if the net stays free for all...
"Democracy's main problem are the people"-argument holds too true in this situation. There isn't really anything better than reporting, maybe a media crusade?Hire hackers to use some "Higher Power" against their systems?One thing is for sure, legal and clean "Effective" solution won't most likely ever exist...
But i really hope there would be some form of punishment. And on the other hand feel that the people who BUY gold are more guilty to this situation than anyone, lazy one's get more problems
. Im too conflicted to offer any kind of suggestions, but might as well share my opinions.
Edit1:Fixed a pselling errur
I am a legit player and it already brought benefit to me. Before RMAH, i cannot sell my items for real money.
Now i can and i have.
In fact, prices will be more stable in RMAH, than in a gold AH because there will be no flooding of currency and high inflation.
And there is no "winning" .. pvp is not even implemented in the game yet. If i group with someone, i prefer him to be geared, and if he is willing to spend his own $$$ to help my game, so much the better.
Again u missing the big piicture, yes u can sell items for real money and make a little profit out of it and thats good. But u cant compete against gold sellers because u cannot beat a bot, a bot dosent need sleep/food or anything like that it takes near to 0 effort from whoever is using it and can be used 24h 7 days a week.The RMAH is just making it easier for botters to make money, alot of players avoid gold selling sites afraid of being scammed or banned for breaking the rules (in most games this is illegal after all) so they dont buy, RMAH makes it 100% legit and risk free so alot more players gonna buy it, i wouldnt be surprised if they end making more money this way and blizzard is happy because they getting a piece of all the action.
The concept of pay to win is easier to grasp in terms of pvp (guy buys best gear in game and beats less geared player simple to understand) but it also affects pve alot. Not sure if u ever tried free to play games with inbalanced cash shop but many aspects of pve are tunned in a way that it is impossible to be accomplished without the best gear available and the game always presents u with the 2 following choices: buy from the cash shop and get it easier or work/farm like a mad man to reach the same result (it would be fine if the amount of effort u had to put was reasonable but is is often purposile done in a way that is near impossible for a normal player to do it in an acceptable amount of time).
Yea I can't wait for pvp to be dictated by who spent the most cash in the RMAH. It will also be a wonderful day when players tell people sorry your gear isn't good enough to join us go buy some on the RMAH.
If you remove progression only to replace it with dollar signs you don't have much of a game, well unless you enjoy throwing money away on virtual gold and items.
"classification of games into MMOs is not by rational reasoning" - nariusseldon
Love Minecraft. And check out my Youtube channel OhCanadaGamer
Try a MUD today at http://www.mudconnect.com/Well sure bots might the price down, but that aint fixing the gold sellers problem or even punishing them (which seems to be what people think RMAH and it wont).
RMAH aint a cash shop but it serves the exact same purpose, it allows people that to just buy whatever they fell like it without working for it.
Does it bother me that people can buy their way to the top be it in pvp or pve? Yeah it does, i think it is kind of if i enjoyed playing soccer/basketball or whatever, and im having fun and being amazed at how me and my friends progress then some random kid with alot of money buys robot arms and beats everybody with no effort at all, would u fell happy about that?
Any game is supposed to be played and tuned in a way people can accomplish things on their own they shouldnt sell short-cuts, if ur playing a game and u cant advance either your lazy/really bad at the game in particular or the game wasent done right and has critical problems.
Well my goal is to play in as much RMT free enviroment as possible withoug severely hurting game itself.
Also my other goal is that game mechanics are not made for RMT.
Those are not my only goals in gaming, but they are one of most important.
What RMAH does it expand RMT. More people engage in RMT and since it is official and corporation that made game earn money on rmah - game mechanics also are affected.
So while some famers may be little bit hurt (but not much there is huge amount on gold / item trading outside of RMAH) - OVERALLY RMT is more common with rmah than without.
So because of that, for me - rmah is making things worse, not better.
We have enough laws, you want to change the way it works change the players. If there wasn't a market for it, then it wouldn't be popular.
The people that are trying to make the world worse never take a day off , why should I. Light up the darkness Bob Marley
Who really gives a crap if third-party gold selling is illegal when the game dev is selling gold themselves?
The only thing making third-party gold selling illegal is going to do is make it so the game dev can fix prices wherever they want with no competition...it doesn't benefit the players at all.
[mod edit]
Are you team Azeroth, team Tyria, or team Jacob?
Instead of banning people cought cheating by buying gold or what have you, maybe permananly flag their accounts so all their characters are flagged as cheaters and maybe make them look like something horribly lame that the person would feel shame of being seen like that.
Then let the public ridicule of the masses be hurled on the cheater.
They can still play the game but...who wants to play with a cheater?
THIS.
+1
@Psychow
That is part of a problem.
Devs rarely go against buyers, and if they do punishment is usually close to non-existant like temporary ban.
Going after and punishing sellers almost exclusively is part of a problem.
hmm it is not cheating if there is a legit RMAH.