IXI Jim IXI


Yeah, but does it cover fender benders?


fender benders you can fix yourself, I'm just happy that the rates don't scale like they would in real life if you totaled a car every week.

SomeAmerican
The only way to know for sure is to track stolen in-game money through transfers, which necessitates tracking many trillions of items, or to link financial transactions in real life to in game transactions.

How hard would it be to do a

SELECT bank_account_increase FROM all_financial_info;

every night? That's all I'm talking aboot ... if someone goes from 10k to 5mn then consider investigating. Of course it can be "meh, who cares" ... but it is possible to track down stolen credits within the game system.

I think in general companies shouldn't punish players for doing things that are possible in-game.

Also, value is subjective.

She comes in colors everywhere

The EVE EULA, written by CCP, protects them and the users of the game from legal action because it defines all in-game "property" as having no value, and also being CCP's exclusive property.

So what? How does this analysis change anything? If I promise to say grace before every meal for $1000, and I don't, how have I not defrauded you? The fact that saying grace has no "value" (if I were to accept your definition) does not change the fact that I promised to do something in return for money, which I have not done.

An ebayer is making a representation that (1) he has the in-game property and (2) he will go through the required steps to transfer that in-game property.

Personally, I would never want to see an in-game scammer be prosecuted, but if someone looses real money because of failure to deliver on a promise, it sure smells like fraud to me.

Check e-bay. 500mil ISK going for $96 USD. That being said...

HAHAHAHA! Silly MMORPG players... CS:CZ FTW!

/Now all these gamers can say they got Lay'ed!

Houseofthedead2: 6 years ago my account was banned from ultima online because I scammed people. Im really thinking I should play eve now :)

/pirates rule (space pirates)
/YARRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

Ultima was kind of unique because you had no protection, except in town later. I had one guy scam a buddy in a guild I was involved in, and for an entire month that house was camped. The characters literally couldn't leave. The person cried to a GM "waahaahaahaa I can't do anything!!" but the GM couldn't stop us.

Finally GM Onyx (? been too long, this was just post T2A), one of the top dogs, came in and literally asked our Guildmaster to stop, because it blew up from us basically nuking one account to us kill-camping another long-time guild.

After we received some, recompense, we stopped. Katin probably still hates the warrior with the guild title Gunji-no-Kanrei over his head.

Pencil_Pusher: The EVE EULA, written by CCP, protects them and the users of the game from legal action because it defines all in-game "property" as having no value, and also being CCP's exclusive property.

So what? How does this analysis change anything? If I promise to say grace before every meal for $1000, and I don't, how have I not defrauded you? The fact that saying grace has no "value" (if I were to accept your definition) does not change the fact that I promised to do something in return for money, which I have not done.

Another issue here is the fact that many times now EULA's have been found to be unenforcable contracts. This makes them nearly null and void and puts the onus on the publisher to come up with one that isn't. This is why the Origin/Blackice case was settled. Origin couldn't afford to lose publicly, EULA's had started getting tossed out at this point for being overly broad. I'm surprised some Asian farmer group hasn't sued WoW other than the fact it keeps their prices high. Blizzard would almost assuredly lose, and if they did, ouch.

Personally, I would never want to see an in-game scammer be prosecuted, but if someone looses real money because of failure to deliver on a promise, it sure smells like fraud to me.

Well the real problem is that these games try to be "old west justice" or something similar, but there are NO real repercussions. Not even a character jailing or deletion (and I tend more to jailing, with a ticking countdown timer). This leads to the criminal side really not caring, because NOTHING bad can really permanently happen.

Meh, that's the whole problem right there.

Wow. Just wow. I am speechless. I literally can't think of a thing to say about this. I mean, I just can't even form words right now, much less sentences. Seriously, I literally can't even talk, or type right now. Wow. This just leaves me speechless. Totally speechless. I'm without words right now. Wow. Holy shiat.

Worst part in all this,

A guy who had actually done a scam on that game (getting people to pay him to get a blueprint of a big-ass ship) and wrote about it warned everyonefrom the beginning of this scheme that it was probably a fraud.

Yet people were on the side of the scammer, being so convinced it was legit. Now no one will admit they were wrong


I don't care much about this scam, my corp had actually borrowed 2 billion from this scammer. Guess who doesn't have to repay :))

This is different from getting ripped off in other MMORPG's because EVE was designed from the get-go for you to be able to convert your game money to real-life money. In effect, he just stole at least several billion dollars, unless the game admins can stomp him and get it all back. Being able to convert it to real money makes it a virtual crime, and while he probably won't go to prison, they can certainly take it all back and delete his account. What's he going to do, sue them for the virtual money that he stole?

Haven't seen this many liters make their presence known in a while.

/youngfogey STFUGBTWKTHXBYE

I just uninstalled EVE yesterday. I finally admitted that it was a huge waste of time. At least I was only registered for a month. They've got a pretty good racket going; at least they only got 20 bucks from me. I'm finally back to what is meaningful after wasting about two years. Of course, I don't have the strength to quit Fark just yet.

MedicDance,
That is exactly why I do not play Galaxies or WoW. I refuse to pay for the ability to waste my time AND pay them for wasting my time. The day I can learn real world skills by playing a game is the day I will cough up the cash to play. Until then, I shoot to kill.

har har har, cally eh... I remember her sponsoring the large BIG lottery they had for their 3rd year anniversary... Where they gave out all those faction ships and mega isk... Of course that's how Cally built her rep up to scam all these people....

Wow... 790billion isk is a lot, a reallly good pvp fitted t2 cruisr costs 300-400million isk for example.

A carrier with fittings and stuff costs around 2billion isk.
And Carriers pwn all.

Wow, using the Base price of an "Avatar" class Titan at 50B
790B would buy you 15 Titans, and 'prolly let you equip them too.
titan, wheeee

As an Eve player let me add a few things the linked story missed

There has been more than one lagit "IPO" in eve, the money was raised based on trust of the corp backers and each week money is payed out to the players who "own" stock in the corp.

There is currently no in game inforcment of this style fundraising, it's 95% based on trust.

This guy raised his money on the tail end of a number of large IPO's and took advantage of gullable players. Eve is made in such a way as to allow people to lie and steal, but in most cases there are built in functions that protect you if your smart and don't need hand holding.

The one problem with this scam is that it was done on the offical eve-online forums, which had a rule in place related to scaming, bascily you can't do it on the forums.

Because of this event CCP changed the rules to allow scamming on the forums, however each player who gave money expected themselves to be protected so CCP returned thier money and allowed the scammer to keep his money, effectivly doubling the money involved.

In the eve economy 700 Billion is very large for a single player or corp to have, however it's not but a small fraction of the entire economy. Remember this is one cluster with more than 100K users, another record concurent player record was set this weekend with 29K users online at one time, each user having 100s of millions of isk in ships and resources, many with billions each.

CmdrRat

Do you know an EVE player by the name of Steel Rat?

LMFAO if the people give you the money ingame, there should be nothing illegal about it....

this is pathetic

I hope the legal lobby that wants to start treating online game objects like real property doesn't get into this. Virtual property, money and such in an online game are just an elaborate way of expressing a player's score. If game objects are property, then points in a football game are also property, and committing a foul is stealing. Ridiculous. No matter how seriously anyone takes a game, it's still a game.

Giving people their money back after a scam is a bad idea. EVE should probably allow scammers to exist but provide better tools for detection and retribution. In the real world companies and funds have a rating based on their assets, their returns etc. Perhaps EVE needs something like that with some kind of community based system for providing ratings or even a specialised skill auditing ability.

That is exactly why I do not play Galaxies or WoW. I refuse to pay for the ability to waste my time AND pay them for wasting my time. The day I can learn real world skills by playing a game is the day I will cough up the cash to play. Until then, I shoot to kill.

I am in "upper management" for the WoW guild I am in. I manage a group of people with different backgrounds and nationalities, all of whom must meet or exceed certain requirements to maintain their status in the guild. I am responsible for recruitment, training, conflict resolution and performance.

To me, it is exactly like being an HR manager at a company. I find that I use more of what I went to college for in WoW guild management then I do in my RL job. I am gaining valuable experience that will help me in my career.

Damn. Im one of the ones who got scammed on the other mentioned scam in there (Currin Trading) who only got 30 bill.

Its not that hard. There's a lot of waiting in Eve. You cant accelerate your character's advancement, only wealth and social networking. So if you're gonna quit and arent sure you're coming back, why not invest on the chance that its not a scam and get weekly interest delivered to an account that is no longer active.

I doubt I made my 50 mil isk back before he turned scammer though. Id have to re-activate an account to find out and thats just silly.

Just like
Jesse Games

Wait for the follow-up scam, where Cally's alts pretend to be bounty hunters who'll go after him...for a hefty fee, of course.

IXI Jim IXI - Ouch...things like this make me glad I only get hooked on a game for six months or so, then get bored.

I played Diablo II for almost 3 years, because I made tons of $$ duping items and selling em on ebay. I had 5 static IP's, and 5 registered copies of the game on 5 PC's running bots on battlenet 24/7. A lot of people did that, it really messed up the game's economy... I haven't been involved in an easier online racket since.

IRONIC TAG!!!

Not not really, but close ... the person you trust to hold your money robs you.

Did anyone think that the picture of the reporter looked a lot like the flute chick from American Pie?

This guy found and explotied the biggest bug in EVERY MMORPG......the people playing it!

This was on Slashdot the other day.


Appearantly the guy is now bountying himself for 1 billing isk a pop just for the fun of it.

The best things about MMORPG?
COSPLAY

"Since this is a pretend world I'm only going to pretend like I give a shiat."


LOLOLOLOL

Valari: I am in "upper management" for the WoW guild I am in. I manage a group of people with different backgrounds and nationalities, all of whom must meet or exceed certain requirements to maintain their status in the guild. I am responsible for recruitment, training, conflict resolution and performance.

To me, it is exactly like being an HR manager at a company. I find that I use more of what I went to college for in WoW guild management then I do in my RL job. I am gaining valuable experience that will help me in my career.

Just please don't put it on your resume. Please?

If it has real world value, it exists. And MMORPG currency has real world value. You could buy a barrel of oil for about 410 WoW gold, for example.

But isn't it against the EULA for many of these online games to sell in game items for real money through services like ebay? That means then MMORPG currency only has real world value in a "black market" scenario. No court would touch that with a 10 foot pole. It would be the equivalent of drug dealer A taking drug dealer B to court because B stole A's 20 pound bag of crack.

PunGent

Actually, the Cally character has placed a multi-billion isk bounty on his own head (inflated by many others I'm sure), and is now going around PVP'ing in the bestest of ships and modules. Or, so I heard.

"Cally" claims he did it as a reaction to everyone constantly calling it a scam, but I doubt that is the case. More power to him, I'd probably want to bludgeon him if I met him IRL -- just on general principle -- but this is EVE and this stuff happens here all the time.

As another EVE player stated, this is the deep end of the pool. There are a few lifeguards; but running, diving, horseplay and all that jazz are encouraged :D

Cally, whoever he is, might want to consider a change of address, alternating his usual travel routes, upgrading his personal security, etc.

Yes, it's just a game, but he's stolen a huge amount of fake money from real people who've intested real time and effort in amassing that fortune. Some of them will not see the merit of the "good for him" arguments presented here, and will take it very personally.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting this man deserves to suffer real life reprecussions for his actions. At the same time, I wouldn't be terribly stunned if it comes out in the next year that he found himself the victim of a seemingly random violent assault, or took an unexpected trip down a flight of stairs.

To borrow a quote from Die Hard's Hans Gruber --

"When you steal $600, you can just disappear. But when you steal $600 million, they *will* find you..."

I love it when people act like MMO money is real money. MMO's have open, unregulated economies. In the real world, money has to come from somewhere, and the amount of it in circulation is tightly regulated. In video games the wealth is pulled out of the ether. When you loot a corpse or an NPC gives you GP, that money doesn't come from anywhere, it's generated on the spot.

Runescape is having this problem, the money keeps being pulled out of thin air and accumlates in the economy. People who've been playing for awhile have millions of GP, but new players have a hard time playing because they don't have the wealth needed to participate in the economy. This is probably why Jagex (the company that runs the game) implemented player-owned housing recently, to siphon off some of the extra currency floating around and reduce inflation.

This is the problem with saying "x isk is worth x dollars" because the amount of isk in circulation is totally fluid.