Just noticed that TMS is now formally running adverts for black market secondary item sales on the left hand stack of ads next to the top MUDs list.

I'm not sure how I feel about this myself, though I think I'm likely to simply take the stance that it's none of my business and it's Adam's site.

--matt

OMG NOES! I MUST PROTEST.

Weren't you the one yelling at people who protested Medthievia's being allowed to post here?

Take your pay-to-get-ahead game and shove it.

I don't yell, first of all. What happened with Medievia was that I posted a welcome message to Medievia and was flamed for it, and was then flamed for suggesting that perhaps Medievia's suggested crimes are not that big a deal.

I also fail to see the parallel, as I'm not suggesting any action regarding the black market virtual goods site and was just bringing it up as a point of discussion. Mainly, I brought it up because it's a sign of how prevalent pay-for-perks is. There's no big virtual world of any type that you cannot pay to get ahead in somehow these days. It's strange really, as it shoves in your face the fact that -everything- is capitalized these days. There's no escaping it it seems like.

Incidentally, that's pay-to-get-ahead games, plural. I'm not sure that we'll "shove" them anywhere, but we do enjoy our success. Thanks for the pleasant wishes.

Have a nice day.

--matt

Capitalism isn't looking so good, take a look at America. I'm moving to china.

-D

There's an article on the web someplace that suggests that everquest has (or had a the time of print) the ninth largest economy in the world. It makes me chuckle that people spend real money for virtual goods, but hey, it's their money and they're welcome to spend it anyway they choose. Delerak, maybe you should move to Everquest rather than china.

I love how you have to include something irrelevant to the situation at hand for no discernable reason. If you have anything to add in direct response to the post, keep on trucking, but the content of the post doesn't require a flame of the person posting.

Anyways, honestly I can't say that it's that worrying. As long as he doesn't get bad feedback about the site, why not? Ebay's a reputable company, but they can't stop the gold sales. It's become less of a "black market" and more so a "don't look" market.

Actually, Ebay can stop the gold sales, and have in the past. Sony asked them to do it around 2001 and Ebay complied.

--matt

You're thinking of Edward Castronova's 2001 paper, "

It doesn't conclude that EQ's economy was the 9th largest in the world. It did conclude, not completely seriously, that EQ's economy is larger than some small countries. As many economists have since pointed out, and as Edward has recognized, he used a bit of a questionable way to add up the size of the economy.

Currently, the size of the secondary market for items (ie items not sold by the game's publisher) is estimated to be around $880 million (source: Steve Sayler, President of IGE, by far the largest player in the secondary market.) Whether he's right on or not is up for debate, but it is certainly quite large. I believe the Korean government recently published something saying that they believe the size of the secondary market has crossed a billion dollars.

As for buying virtual goods, you do that all the time. You buy a virtual good when you buy the right to watch a movie in a movie theatre. You buy a virtual good when you buy MS Office and download it from Amazon, or a song from iTunes. As the information economy advances over the years, more and more goods will be virtual, since information can be encoded digitally (software, music, etc).

--matt

I thought that was overcome with the new wording... "You're not paying for the gold, it remains the property of so-and-so, you're merely paying me for the time it takes to get it."

Unless they removed the auctions despite that wording. I just assumed since I saw that as a byline on most auctions, that it allowed them to circumvent the EULA in a theoretical sense.

Well, as it's never been tested in court in the US, at least, it's hard to know what the real impact of the EULA is going to be, but I seriously doubt that interpretation would fly. The fact that IGE's ads never pitch paying for time and always pitch paying for gold, for example, is a big giveaway.

And yes, Ebay removed -all- auctions for Everquest stuff that would infringe on their IP. Search Ebay for Everquest and then search it for World of Warcraft. You'll notice that the former doesn't have any currency sales while the latter does.

--matt

huh..

So now people here make threads to say something like, "this is none of my business, the site admin is welcome to continue doing as he pleases"?..

hey, that's cool. While we're at it, I'd like to say I really don't mind if the site admin continues to run this site as he did before, with all the mud rankings and the forums and whatnot.


Or only admins of commercial MUDs do that? Or what? I'm confused.


p.s. Sorry for my first post in god knows how long is somewhat of a flame, I just suddenly felt an urge to express my feelings.

You can raise a concern without hefting aloft the pitchforks and torches. Its the nice way of doing it, instead of the -go for the throat- mentality many on this board have.

I think its simple professional courtesy for the most part. Or, simpler, playing nice in someone elses backyard.

-H

It's not even a concern. Adam made clear with Medievia that either he's not going to be the judge of whether people are violating licenses (such as Medievia is accused of and such as the virtual goods trading site likely does) or that it's irrelevant to the operation of TMS. I just thought it was interesting as we'd recently had a small discussion on another thread regarding the ubiquity of virtual item trading.

Some people just look for opportunities to flame though. *shrug*

--matt

Well, I'm going to say that it is a little odd to have those ads on the site.  I'm not criticising Synozeer here, but I'm just saying.  I wouldn't have put those there.  But then again, I don't own a site which is trying to turn an honest living, so I'm not going to judge.

While it's not fair to view someone as guilty by association, it often does give people the wrong idea about what you stand for. Running a business is one thing, but so is personal ethics. If you can put aside those in the name of making a profit (or even breaking even), don't be surprised if people judge you as no better than those you're bargaining with in the name of making a living.

Take care,

Jason