South Korea bans virtual item trading & bots
incgamers.com
incgamers.com
"the government took the decision in a bid to prevent students from wasting their time."
"The punishment for breaking the law will be a 50 million won fine (£27,612) and a maximum jail sentence of five years."
Wow. Classic mistake, South Korea.
"A separate, but related, law has also been passed that bans the use of gold/item farming bots in online-enabled games. Players found using programs that “allow in-game characters to hunt and collect items without the need of a player controlling them” will be made illegal and blocked from internet access.
The punishment for breaking the law will be a 50 million won fine (£27,612) and a maximum jail sentence of five years."
South Koreans, though, are really serious gamers. I wonder how much their purist gaming ideals influenced this ban.
Perhaps South Koreans are so fucking hardcore about their games that they don't want anyone to be able to "cheat" with real money. Almost everyone in South Korea - the anti-gamers AND the gamers - could be perfectly happy with this ban. Except the game developers.
Offer your body to make money (prostitution): ~ 1 year (US, couldn't find South Korea numbers)
Offer virtual items to make money: max 5 years
Offer your body to make money BUT TAPE IT: Legal (to my knowledge)
Note, i'm not commenting on the morality or rightfulness of either policies, just pointing out this (to me) interesting fact
what do you mean? I thought without your body/mind, you can't do any work. So:
Offer your body to make money: lifetime
Someone had fun downvoting...
There is another angle: old laws are more balanced - for worse crime there's more punishment. People could compare crimes back then.
Newer laws are hysterical: the crime severity does not readily correlates with punishment severity. This is because of lobbying by various forces and because people DEMAND BLOOD on some issues which were brought [by same or other groups] in order to distract them from other issues.
Depending on the way it is done, it can be like gambling. That's what is happening in Japan, where children would spent enormous amount of money to get (artificially) rare virtual items, and the government had to pass laws to restrict these kind of games. I don't know if it's better or worse than prostitution, but it can have a clear negative impact on the society for sure.
http://kotaku.com/5908147/japans-youngest-self+made-billiona...
Isn't it same as banning sale of alcohols/drugs since they can be harmful? It will push the activity to go underground.
I worked on the tech for an MMO that launched in S.Korea a few years ago and even then we had to be careful to make sure that purchased game money could not be exchanged back for real money. I seem to remember also adding features for enforcing a law that under 18's could not play after certain hours.
(All kinds of age/violence ratings) You can see their icons on games' websites, it's annoying how people get paid for making monkey faces and pretending to be important.
Don't you have any hard problems left in your society?
Businesses that fall into other categories have mind blowing layers of complex regulations. The idea that a company, or individual, would have to spend millions or tens of millions of dollars a year just to ensure that they are operating the business within the law is pretty wild.
We are very fortunate indeed for the Bill of Rights. When you have armies of people whose sole life purpose is to create and enforce rules you end up with something, if it was computer code, would just crash immediately.
No. Alcohol and drugs are with us from the beginning of history, are very much ingrained in human society and culture, and support trillion dollar worldwide industries.
In-game trading virtual goods is a niche novelty activity, and trading them for real money even more so. You can get the same satisfaction out of the game trading them with token money.
>It will push the activity to go underground.
Games cannot really go "underground" though. They are sold in stores or accessed online and depend on massive communities of millions of players. It's not like Sims of Farville can go underground suddenly.
Nor are they as essential and addicting as alcohol/drugs.
There are some very successful entrepreneurs who made their fortunes off of in-game trading that would disagree.
How so? A handful of people make money out of ANY novelty. A handful of people making money of it, is actually, the very characteristic of a novelty.
A handful of people made money off of hula-hups, the rubik cube, and yo-yos...
But there are people out there making gobs of money off of the trade of virtual items and then manipulation of virtual economies, and not by enabling it (although that is also profitable) or by doing it as a parlor trick for others' amusement, but by the same means as any other economy is exploited.
In particular, what makes this not a novelty is that the attraction that these people have to it is not that it is a video game, or that the idea is new and interesting, but that it is simply an unexploited opportunity.
In game economy is nascent but becoming more complex every day. It required Valve to hire an economist. It may have been a novelty. But for how long?
> Games cannot really go "underground" though.
I meant the economy will go underground to meet the demand of in game favors.
> South Korea
I like to point out we have no idea of what it is to mix government law with video games. Because we're ages behind in term of video game culture. If you go to korea you'll see show about videogames on TV, you'll see huge events everywhere, even cellphones advertise with videogames in the street. They've reach a point where law has to deal with it.
#2
> a “serious hindrance” to a “healthy gaming culture”.
Keeping in mind that S-K do have a problem with videogames and its youth. We can ask ourselves "is the trading of items a good healthy gaming culture?" What does it mean? A healthy gaming culture should not just get gamers addicted.
If you think about it, there is no fun behind the item trading system of diablo3, it's just to get people addicted to it. A bit like the "hat" system of TeamFortress 2. It adds a dimension that we don't need and that is harming the players more than anything.
#3
I'm not saying we should ban them, like S-K did, but I think we're far from them with our addicted people.
it did work; the vast seas of children playing cards in shopping malls and sidewalks seized to exist, but it didn't happen because children were studying. it happened because these kids switched to something else, which isn't necessarily better than the cards they banned.
It's not heavily based on RMAH, but if you want to progress quickly, you spend money. I don't think it's a pivotal part of the economy at all. I think it's more to make sure Blizzard gets a cut of gold sellers/buyers.
I understand the Auction House is essential to completing the game on Inferno level, but good players can complete on Nightmare without using it. I don't know about Hell level - that's probably where there is a judgement call required.
I cant win as it is =/