South Korea bans sale of Virtual items

What liberties are those? The liberty of selling items inside Blizzard games?

There is no "market" around virtual items, there can only be markets for things that are worth something.

Virtual items cost nothing to make, aren't real and don't obey the laws of scarcity.

There's just big greedy/exploitative companies that set drop rates incredibly low, lower/raise them accordingly and make their games about grind and stupid people that buy into that.

This is absolutely the appropriate response to that.

 

Virtual items do have worth. That is why people are able to sell them. Lot's of things that aren't physical objects have worth and markets even if their scarcity is artificial. Significant sectors of the modern economy are based around such things.

You really don't understand how being stopped from doing something is a restriction of individual liberties? It's pretty self evident in my opinion. Perhaps you are using a definition of liberties that is overly restrictive.

According to the article the law is more directed against the individual selling of virtual items and not RMAHs and cash shops. I believe those were already covered under some South Korean gambling laws.

Even if a restriction is limited to companies it is still a restriction on individual liberties since companies are run and owned by individuals.

 

The whole concept of having states is a restriction of individual liberties. They were born to stop people from doing stupid shit that harm themselves and other people. South Korea just did that : being a state.

Are you going to scream COMMUNISM?

 

Yes, the liberty of selling items inside Blizard games. Every item is worth what its purchaser will pay for it. The government should stay out of private affairs as much as it can. The companies should regulate the economy of their own games; don't want poor balance due to people selling items for currency, ban them or organise the economy differently.

 

Does it mean virtual stuff like e-books is illegal too?

 

Except you're not selling shit. If you read the TOS for Blizzard games, you'll see that you don't own the items, Blizzard owns them. What you do is basically transfer the right to use an item to another person for a fee, while Blizzard takes a huge cut out of it as an ironic middle-man in the process and has the right to revoke your item use at any moment. Why is it the ironic middle-man? Well that's because the middle man is technically you, except you've just been middle-manned yourself. It's a great way to have cash shop profit without directly running a cash shop.

P. sure the law states what is considered illegal and what is considered an exception.

 

You are right about the whole concept of states being restrictions on individual liberties. You are wrong about it being about stopping people from doing stupid shit that harms themselves and other people though. While some of the restricting states do is for that reason many are about gaining some beneficial thing instead. Such as roads, defense, social spending. It is about the tradeoff of what is gained versus what is lost.

You can take your reasoning of stopping people from doing stupid stuff that can harm themselves and other people and use that to justify any restrictions you want. Any activity can have harmful effects. That justification is the one used for all the dictatorships that we currently have and those we have had within recent history.

You have to determine if the trade off is worth it. You usually can't know what the effect will be since we aren't psychic and laws tend to have lots of unintended effects, both positive and negative. You can guess and have your theories but people are wrong about these kinds of things more than they are right.

I feel that you should only implement new restrictions if there is a strong case for the benefits gained. If you implement every restriction that some people think might produce some benefits you will end up with a lot of restrictions and a lot of the anticipated benefits not panning out. Laws also have a lot of inertia so stuff is not often repealed. They usually just write new laws over the old ones.

I don't think this law has a strong case for benefits gained. It's pretty weak as far as I can tell. That is just off one article though so the actual situation could be pretty different.

 

Uhh. Criminal & civil law? Social security? Emergency services? Sure, bro, these exist purely for the lulz.

You don't, their parliament does. Guess you know better than their parliament.

 

Read all of what I wrote and not just what you quoted. States are about gaining benefits not preventing harm. I acknowledged that some of the things the government does is concerned with preventing harm. Preventing harm can be a very beneficial thing.

Parliaments are wrong a lot. Their batting averages tend to be well below .500.

You are right though. We shouldn't second guess governments. We should only be supportive and allow them to do what they decide is best. Using your individual judgement is bad. If those in power think differently than you, you are probably wrong.

 

While I usually don't like unnecessary restrictions, this hits the assholes who think RMAH was a good idea and thus it's great.

 

Virtual items don't have worth, the only "worth" there is is created by Blizzard setting a drop rate to 0.0001% or 100%, they could change those easily within minutes and everyone in the game would have the best items this instant, and they will and the "item grind" will reset and begin anew the moment they release their next expansion(s).



The entirety of Diablo III and similar games reeks of greed, from their DRM, to the business model and the basic game design that doesn't let people continue unless they grind their ass off for hours or pay money for better gear in the RMAH.

There's already gambling laws and a lot of other laws against quacks or fortune tellers, con artists trying to take advantage of people's stupidity. I don't see why Activision Blizzard should be exempt from it and make money off of people's stupidity by literally not doing anything.
You might argue that stupid people shouldn't be protected sure, but that's not quite the goal of having a social society.

The Japanese are also already regulating similar practices and I fucking hope this hits over here in Europe soon so they can go back to MAKING AND SELLING GAMES instead of thinking of more and better ways of how to exploit people: http://www.insidemobileapps.com/201...egulations-will-impact-gree-dena-and-the-u-s/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielnyegriffiths/2012/05/08/gree-dena-social-gaming/

 

ignored liberatarian

 

Dexter

Do Ebooks have worth? Do Ebooks that are in public domain have worth? Do software programs have worth? Do databases have worth?

Virtual items in games have worth because they allow you to save time. You do not have to grind to get the item. The value of the virtual item is based off of the value of the time you save.

I understand what you are getting at. That virtual items are entirely artificial and subject to complete manipulation. But That doesn't mean virtual items have no value. That value was created because people enjoy the game and want to play it. They value their time spent playing the game and some are willing to pay money to save time and be able to spend more time playing the parts of the game they enjoy more. There are several different competing theories of value. Under all of the ones that I am aware of Virtual items have value.

I don't like the RMAH. I don't own Diablo 3 and I'm not going to. I don't use cash shops. I generally don't like games that use them. But being able to use cash shops allows some games to be made. I play world of tanks sometimes. I have payed no money to play this game. That is possible because other people are willing to use the cash shop. I would prefer that it wasn't there and that the game wasn't balanced in a way to give people an advantage by spending money. I wish the game was less grindy. But the game wouldn't exist if the developers couldn't use the cash shop option. They wouldn't have been able to make it. Cash shops allow me to play World of Tanks.

The game making business is not a highly profitable business. Companies have to be able to make money to be able to continue making games. If I don't like the way a game is monetized I don't give them money. I don't go around trying to get that way of monetizing games banned.

Games don't grow on trees. People have to put effort into them. Some people are willing to provide that effort for free in their spare time but most can't. So games need to make money.

 

It is a restriction on individual liberties, because if you use bots in games, you can go to jail now.

I used to use bots all the time in Ultima Online, to gather resources (mining, fishing) and train up my guys. It saved me a lot of effort and wrist damage and it greatly improved my enjoyment of the game. It was common practice, by the way.

If the company wants to ban me for this, that's their choice. But to send me to jail for doing this? Ridiculous. Society wasn't threatened.

On the other hand, online cash shops for virtual items would fall under a nation's power to regulate commerce.

 

While virtual items with supposed worth are one of the worst developments in games to date (including paid DLC for a handful of items), I at least agree with darkpatriot about it being a bad idea to punish the people doing the trading, at least through the law. Companies of course should still punish people who do it, but overall you solve these problems at the source, and that is the developers and publishers who are making profits by deliberately being lax and irresponsible about these bots and farming situations (and their virtual economies in general).

I think the real answer is making these companies that create and facilitate the selling of the items more liable for the products they make, especially when people are buying products which have these farming communities actually affecting the overall economics within the game in a large way. Better consumer protection is what's needed, along with players being more willing to wield their rights when a company fails to provide a quality product or service.

 

Sounds restrictive without sufficient reason. I certainly wouldn't support a law of that nature here in the states. Honestly between this and, didn't they recently enact a ban against the teaching of evolution? sounds like the of South Korea to my ears. "Seriously guys, don't farm the RMAH for supplemental income or we'll put you in prison, it's takes away too much time from your creationist studies and causes youth crime."

 

Simplest reasons is taxation. Under which clause should it be taxed? Goods? Gambling? Service? That's the first consideration for it. Additionally I think that it's a major PITA for Korea, from one hand there's a bunch of corporations bitching about thousands of bots, on the other hand, there's now a bunch of customers bitching about companies like Blizzard. Frankly forbidding RMAH and botservices is a good move, because keep that shit out of my MMOs, tyvm.

 

Define greed. Then it will be possible to proceed with the argument.

Nothing has inherent 'worth'. Value is relative, dependent on an observer. Virtual items are worth as much as one is willing to give up for them.

Those are not preventive measures, as in, using darkpatriot's words, 'being about stopping people from doing stupid shit that harms themselves and other people'. Those actually aim to mitigate the effects of past ('stupid') human conduct. Unless you count on deterrence but that's quite a stretch.

Apart from using a false dichotomy ('[IF] this guy doesn't know the answer/I don't know the answer [THEN] this automatically makes parliament to be the sole holder of the answer') you seem to be confused where the authority of a parliament comes from. A parliament is not a scientific body. A parliament decides things on a majority vote (which might or might not be influenced by expert opinion).

Since politics of South Korea are as alien to me as COD buyer's thought process I find it challenging to grasp the whole situation. As far as I can tell this upcoming legislation is a part of on-going series that, at first, had been targeted at the fat cats of the virtual goods business: foreign (mostly Chinese) monopolies. The problem that drew Korean politicians' attention was not the sweatshop conditions of thousands of industry's employees but unchecked, untaxed money outflow. Those businesses played in the unchartered territory which over the years grew to multibillion market globally. Eventually, game makers decided not only to tap into those profits, but also preventively appease legislators - who accepted that with a relief. That's mainly how F2P and P2W were introduced. Let's look at the newest developments and analyse the vested interests here. The case of bot farming: since the underlying issue is not targeted (kid wanting virtual goods and services) banning automation will simply force people to farm manually. How does it affect the game makers? They save money on the overall fight with the 'cheaters' since it is delegated to the government. They save money on the consequences of having to deal with a bot infested game environment and they regain full control of gamer/subscriber driven rate of input and output of virtual goods in/out of the game. One might believe that, with the newest installment of the legislation, the main concern is the well-being of the children. I would like to avoid being cynical but the incentives at play clearly point at government-business relations. Looking forward to being proven wrong.

I also find the link between virtual goods trade and crime in the example provided in the article extremely dubious. In case of MMOs: given history of the industry's legislation and government arbitrarily declaring illegality of certain activities in already booming market, one can only sneer at the ineffectiveness of battling the demand. Foreign big shots will stay outside of the jurisdiction and continue the game, completely monopolising the sell-side, while EPIX hungry kids will turn to the black market.

 

bot

I admit I was strawmanning there a fair bit (seems it worked too well). Obviously the parliament doesn't necessarily know better, however, it usually takes serious lobbying or some serious SME considerations to actually forbid something, and considering how many small businesses and corporations would suffer from this prohibition, I'd guess that lobbying is more or less off the list of suspects.

Then again, S. Korea's policies (and much of cultural phenomenons, like turning games into social/sports stuff) are pretty alien to me as well, so I can't really judge appropriately. It could well be that Korean Parliament has better APM and win/lose ratio in Starcraft than I'll ever dream to, or they could be thumbs-in-the-ass morons, can't tell either way.

 

The individual liberties is a pretty poor argument, particularly that last sentence. What you're saying is that since companies are run by individuals, they should have the liberty to create some very addictive games and get rich off of it? That's not the type of liberty that democracies are about. Liberties can only go so far until they start impeding on other people's liberties. Absolute liberty doesn't work, although mostly libertarians make the argument, because taken to the extreme, not only would it break down society as is the common complaint but an individual should also be allowed to have the liberty of control over others, including slavery.

Modern society isn't built on unlimited individual liberty, but on individual and collective liberties, and that means that sometimes the collective benefits trumps the liberties of some. This doesn't lead to fascism or whatever libertarians want to believe, keep in mind those who made the profits from this now-illegal practice will be free to keep everything they have, but future such actions are forbidden.

My personal opinion on the law is that it's not very good, but the korean government makes strong arguments that excessive gaming is bad for their society and a lot of the modern RMAH and shit is nothing but gambling. Additionally, the law is worded several times that it's meant to improve the public confidence in the usefulness of games, that's something else to consider.

 

Just as I suspected. When I heard about learning 18hours a days, I immediately thought that it must be horribly inefficient.

 

Oh how I love the kodex, a bunch of tree hugging, left wing hipsters with neck beards and scarfs sucking back PBRs, high-fiving each other. All hail da gubment for saving us from corporate evil. I'm sleeping peacefully tonight.

 

Renegen

I must be giving a false impression because we are mostly in agreement. I'm not saying that individual liberties trump everything else or that we need unlimited individual freedom. I'm saying that if you are going to limit individual freedoms in anyway the resulting benefits needs to outweigh that. That seems to be what you are saying as well but if it isn't please correct me.

The main point I disagree with you on is characterizing Diablo 3 (or any game) as an addictive exploitation. You honestly feel that way? I don't like that business model but it is hardly exploitative and evil. The thing I don't like about the RMAH is how it effected their design choices for the game and made it something that I don't care to play. I don't care that they are able to use it to make money. There is nothing wrong with that. Why do so many people seem to have the opinion that corporations being very concerned with making money is morally wrong? Them doing so provides the majority of the jobs, economic growth, and development in modern countries. Their can certainly be abuses by large corporations but the RMAH isn't one. It is a game. It is entertainment. If you don't like it don't buy it.

RMAH and Cashshops falling under gambling laws is understandable and I think that is a decent way to curb some of the negative social effects of them but the idea that someone can be sent to jail for 5 years for selling a virtual item or running a bot is ludicrous in my opinion.

 

Mark my words: this will have so many loopholes that it will only ban third-party profiting from the money-grabbing platforms while allowing the corporations to milk gigantic amounts of money from the idiots like they have always done without any competition. Blizzard will just replace the RMAH with a DLC shop if it goes through... and the idiots will then buy totally worthless horse armor grade shit at even higher fixed prices with 100% of the income ending in Jewish hands.

And if the jailtime for theft is lower than 5 years in South Korea... what a fucking joke. This may look incline superficially, but think the other way: this could as well lead a slippery slope towards getting people in jail for "trolling", which may include any opinion contrary to what the government wants people to think. This can very well end leading into the same kind of shit laws as SOPA, PIPA, COICA and ACTA.

The only government that needs to "protect" idiots is the one that requires them as voters to ensure its self-perpetuation.

 

Diablo 3. The gift that just keeps on giving. Without having to have paid a cent for it.