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[Alawen]

Originally Posted by deneauth [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Which part was I wrong about though, the part where RMT is not a big issue, the part where I don't care or the part where RMT is against the rules?

Our differences in opinion are in the significance of RMT to the server and the use of words like right and wrong when discussing the problem.

I think there is certainly RMT activity. Someone will always feel clever by turning their hobby into a $2 an hour job. Someone else will be that desperate or living in a deflated economy where $2 an hour isn't so bad. On this server, we don't have large numbers of anonymous players who do nothing but farm and sell the proceeds. I wasn't around for the IB departure, but I suspect there was some overstatement of their net proceeds as a face-saving gesture. I find it very difficult to believe that there are enough buyers for a large and on-going RMT market. I would guess that the typical buyer will spend $50 or $100 on some platinum, but that there aren't enough of those for anyone to be making thousands a month. The numbers just don't work.

As for trying to turn this into a moral issue, that has always been absurd. EverQuest is a game, a toy. Verant/Sony sold it to us and charged us a monthly fee. Their attempt to dictate how we could use that toy and what we could do with it when we lost interest was always legally questionable. Can I sell you a car and tell you that you have to buy my brand of tires or the car will be remotely disabled? Can I sell you a pair of jeans and force you to buy a new pair every month or the originals will somehow become shabby? Those are the sort of business practices covered by the RICO act and those practices ARE legally criminal. People go to jail for that.

The Sony EULA is an example of a shrink-wrap license--we couldn't see it until after we bought the game and it was confirmed by a couple of clicks, not by a signature. That creates a really fuzzy contract with a lot of major holes.

Now we come to the legal questions surrounding all of these emulator servers. Do they infringe on copyrights? Will the portions of the EULA regarding reverse engineering hold up in court? To further complicate matters, there are countries which specifically prohibit some of these strategies. If I go reverse engineer your software in NoEULAstan, am I breaking any laws if I then sell it or give it away to Americans? What if I'm a citizen of NoEULAstan? Laws even vary from state to state within the U.S. and there are conflicting precedents about many software licensing practices. There has been no court decision about whether EULAs are generally enforceable.

What is undeniably illegal is downloading the Titanium client from a non-Sony source. It's piracy.

At the end of this twisted and ill-defined road of contract law and intellectual property, we come to the moral question of selling P99 platinum. Is it clear cut enough to call it right or wrong? I say no. If we are discussing facts, what we can say with confidence that it is against server rules and that it exposes both buyer and seller to banning and loss of virtual assets in excess of the actual RMT transaction. It then becomes a consideration of risk versus reward. The risk would seem higher for the seller in most cases, making the decision to sell virtual goods even more questionable.

There is apparently some level of RMT here in the shady underbelly of Project 1999. Unless there are a couple very wealthy guys making an awful lot of purchases, the likelihood of that volume being significant in terms of total dollars is very low. Attempting to frame the issue in moral terms is just silly; Jesus doesn't care if you sell platinum or cheat at solitaire.