A busy day in the digital world news cycle. Protests, digital items and donations, oh my!
First, the Terra Novans were asleep at the wheel and missed the Star Wars: Galaxies protest, covered in detail on Law Meme. Digital world protests are nothing new, but this is an interesting look into how SW:G's customer service reps handle emergent situations.
Second, Wired News has an article about earning real money in digital worlds, specifically on using cheaper, international labor. Julian is mentioned and Brock Pierce is quoted.
Finally, actually a bit of original news. Following VERTU's successful campaigns for Heifer International and EFF, IGE has now opened a donation page as well, allowing digital world residents to give their earnings to Mercy Corps. Any of the lawyers want to jump in with a discussion of how simple US charitable giving rules are :-)?
I've only had a small amount of dealings with 501(c) corporations but I do know that if you want the donations to be tax deductible, you need to establish a 501(c)(3) corporation. 501(c)(3)'s are MUCH tougher to form. The IRS is very stringent and can be rather reticent, absent a good showing of charitable nature, etc., to allow the appropriate incorporation. If you're not looking for the tax deductible perk, however, then it's a piece of cake (relatively speaking).
Posted by: Alan | Aug 24, 2004 at 12:58
I’ve been wading through legalese and I can’t see anything that says that one can’t publish things that SOE say on the forums (if there is such a clause somewhere can someone point me to it).
So, here (http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Announcements&message.id=245) is the official word from SOE about the credit dupe:
JustG
Dev
Posts: 542
Registered: 10-03-2003
Credit Dupe...
… A credit dupe has surfaced. We are aware of it, and have put a solution in place.
We know who did it. We log everyone’s financial transactions, including WHO AND WHERE THE MONEY IS TRANSFERRED TO.
Please be careful of receiving large sums of money from anyone.
We are going to suspend, and then ban anyone who has participated in this dupe, which includes transfer or reception of funds.
If you know of a PA hall that has received these funds, DO NOT attempt to retrieve any money... this will flag you as dirty as well. And anyone you transfer money to becomes dirty as well. And so on...
We take this extremely seriously, and will go to great lengths to protect your play experience.
Blair
Dev
Posts: 167
Registered: 06-26-2003
Re: Credit Dupe...
Greetings...
* All persons potentially involved in the dupe have been banned or suspended.
* People who have been banned or suspended are going through the appeals process now. Each case is resolved privately between the customer and customer service. The appeals process will be complete by early next week.
* Over 75% of the duped credits are being removed from the economy preventing hyper-inflation in the SWG economy.
* No vendor owners were suspended for purchases made from their vendor with duped credits, only people that had money directly transferred to them were affected.
* We are committed to maintaining a safe and fair playing environment and exploiting will not be tolerated.
OK, but my contracts with SOE reads, in part, as follows (http://starwarsgalaxies.station.sony.com/content.jsp?page=Policies%20EULA):
6. We may terminate this Agreement and/or suspend your Account immediately and without notice: (i) if you violate any provision of this Agreement; (ii) if you infringe any third party intellectual property rights; (iii) if we are unable to verify or authenticate any information you provide to us; (iv) if you violate any of the player rules of conduct located at the Game Site or The Station (as defined below in Paragraph 9) rules of conduct located at http://sonyonline.com/tos/tos.jsp (either of which we may amend or supplement from time to time, in our discretion), or (v) if you engage in game play, chat or any player activity whatsoever which we, in our discretion, determine is inappropriate and/or in violation of the spirit of the Game. If we terminate this Agreement or suspend your Account under these circumstances, you will lose access to your Account for the duration of the suspension and/or the balance of any prepaid period without any refund. We may also terminate this Agreement if we decide, in our sole discretion, to discontinue offering the Game, in which case we may provide you with a prorated refund of any prepaid amounts.
So, if someone has just given me 1 million credits for some legitimate reason, but SOE track the currency movement and ban my account, it looks to me like they are in breach of contract. Point (v) does state “in our discretion”, but there must be reasonable limits to this, and from reading the forums today the feeling seems to be that SOE’s blast ‘em first attitude is far from reasonable.
If we move to hypothetical land here and we do have a complete innocent that was playing fully by the rules it seems that SOEs discression can simply ban them.
What recourse do players have?
Where are SOE's obligations and the associated penalty clauses in that contract?
Posted by: ren | Aug 24, 2004 at 15:00
The following is a screenshot showing a server wide channel broadcast from SOE. The message states that if the protestors do not stop in 10 minutes they will shut down the server.
http://www.uploadyourimages.com/viewer.php?pix=151411screen.jpg
Posted by: Brian Whitener | Aug 24, 2004 at 15:21
Not only were the usual "professional" exploiters duping as many credits as possible (and then selling them to resellers such as IGE for a quick profit) but the dupe exploit was posted on a few forums. The dupe became public knowledge for about a day.
The actual dupe was as follows:
"
Player A - Has vendor
Player B - Offers item on vendor
Player A - Accepts item
He gets a confirm window and hits ok then esc then reject very quickly
"
With most dupes nowadays if you can manage them properly and are one of the only people who can dupe in that MMORPG you can make an easy $300,000 working out deals with major resellers (depending on popularity of the game).
Posted by: Brian Whitener | Aug 24, 2004 at 15:32
The only surprising thing to me is how some people start asking now "Can SOE do this?". To me it has always been obvious that in the virtual worlds we live in a totalitarian state, where you can be executed for about anything, even if you are innocent.
Look at the screenshot Brian provided. It makes China look like a shining human rights example. SOE basically say "Stop the protest, or we are going to blow the whole damn Tiananmen Square up".
With EQ they said it best, "you're in our world now". Real world rights like freedom of speech, or property rights, do not apply in virtual worlds. Because even if you think you are "living" in that virtual world, in fact you are just consuming an entertainment service. And the service provided has the unalienable right to stop providing that service to you.
Posted by: Tobold | Aug 25, 2004 at 03:37
That's not how this particular credit dupe worked.
It had to do PA hall's, the "treasury" and transferring the PA hall.
You think that happened a lot and by accident?
'Cause I don't.
Posted by: Jeff Freeman | Aug 25, 2004 at 03:50
Oh. My. God.
Posted by: Jeff Freeman | Aug 25, 2004 at 03:56
Ren>What recourse do players have?
How about they stop playing?
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Aug 25, 2004 at 06:41
Without any intent to comment on this particular situation, I just posted a long essay on sovereignty and the "virtual state" in MMOGs, and it turns out to be somewhat relevant.
The basic fact is that developers are the sovereign of their particular virtual worlds, but that they refuse to recognize themselves as such--otherwise they'd realize how tyrannical (and pointless) these kinds of "acts of rule" appear. In a way, the ineptitude of SOE's responses to protests is kind of charming rather than appalling, precisely because of its unapologetic crudity.
Posted by: Timothy Burke | Aug 25, 2004 at 10:40
Ren>What recourse do players have?
> Richard >How about they stop playing?
That’s not recourse, its defeat.
While I don’t like the idea of law encroaching into the magic circle but, if laws can be constructed reasonably, I like the idea of them protecting it.
Stepping out side of the game this does seem to be a customer service / contract issue. If I’m paying for an online service I expect to get it and I expect service credits or cold hard cash if it don’t get what I paid for. Sure, the EULA might say that the company can be as capricious as it likes, but that just does not seem reasonable these days.
Posted by: ren | Aug 25, 2004 at 11:00
Jeff, it doesn't matter. You are punishing everyone for a problem that is responsibility of SOE.
The first error was about banning peoples not directly involved. You should only ban who directly did the dupe. Then you simply remove all the duped credits. That's enough.
The second error is about announcing the bans before performing them. So that those involved have all the time to hide all the money in the wrong pouches and create the disaster thay were able to create.
The third error is about not using this as a resource. Instead of banning peoples you should reward them. So that the next time they could gain something valuable by *reporting* the dupe instead of exploiting it.
A dupe is a problem in design and implementation. The first responsibility is of SOE, isn't of the players. This isn't cheating, it's about a bugged game. This is why you need to use the players as a resource and incentivate them to report and fix these issues.
I guess in this case it was a complete failure.
--
Ren>What recourse do players have?
> Richard >How about they stop playing?
Ren>That’s not recourse, its defeat.
I absolutely agree. A protest is the search for a dialogue about a "sensible" issue. Telling the players to stop playing if they don't like how SOE behaves isn't a dialogue, it's a defeat for BOTH.
Posted by: Abalieno | Aug 25, 2004 at 15:19
FYI: Links reporting on this story appear to be disappearing. Injury += insult. Hopefully this is due to excessive traffic or local issues.
Posted by: AFFA | Aug 25, 2004 at 15:25
Here's a great image of the protest itself:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v124/nichole222/screenShot0015.jpg
Posted by: Betsy Book | Aug 25, 2004 at 20:33
Richard >How about they stop playing?
Jeff > Oh. My. God.
Let me try to untangle things a bit. We are discussing on two different levels here, and that messes up the discussion considerable.
One level is to see Star Wars Galaxies as just a game. You don't like it, you stop playing. Comparing SOE to the chinese government is obviously silly. End of discussion.
The other level is to see Star Wars Galaxies as a virtual world. In that case SOE is the virtual equivalent of a government. The reaction of that virtual equivalent of a government to a virtual equivalent of a peaceful protest is of importance. "Stopping to play" is the virtual equivalent of protesting by setting yourself on fire. It has very little consequence in the real world, but in the virtual world you are dead if you do it. Shutting down a zone, teleporting players to random locations, and banning the most persistent protesters is the virtual equivalent of dispersing protesters with tanks. Again, minor effect on the real world, huge issue on the virtual world.
You can be very well aware of the fact that in the real world this all is not very important, beyond maybe making Sonys stock price drop by half a cent, but you can still be virtually outraged by the huge implications of a virtual totalitarian virtual government of the virtual world.
We can all be rational and only talk about things of real world importance. But that would kill about 90% of the threads on Terra Nova, and make the whole site irrelevant.
Posted by: Tobold | Aug 26, 2004 at 03:33
It wasn't a "peaceful protest", it was a Denial of Service attack on all the other players.
Posted by: Jeff Freeman | Aug 26, 2004 at 04:02
Tobold>The other level is to see Star Wars Galaxies as a virtual world. In that case SOE is the virtual equivalent of a government
No, SOE is the virtual equivalent of a deity. The virtual equivalent of a government would be a group of players with power over other players within the context of the world (eg. elected leaders).
Me>How about they stop playing?
Ren>That’s not recourse, its defeat.
Defeat of whom?
To me, it looks like it's defeat of the developers, yet you seem to be implying it's defeat of the players.
All debate between players and developers is backed up by two fundamental real-world powers:
1) Developers have the power to do whatever they like in a virtual world, without necessarily adhering to any norms of rationality, consistency, morality or commercial common sense.
2) Players have the power to leave.
Ultimately, the players' power is the greater, but it's one-shot. If a developer acts in a totalitarian, arrogant or otherwise obnoxious way, the players can try to persuade the developer to act less so, backed up with the threat of leaving. Wise developers will indeed put in place mechanisms for dealing with protest so that players can get their views heard before things come to a head; wise players will only play virtual worlds that have these mechanisms displayed publicly, along with some evidence that the developers will actually adhere to them (or at least no evidence that they won't).
Unfortunately, the customer is not always right with virtual worlds. Sometimes, players will band together and demand things that the developer could give, but that would ruin the long-term future of the virtual world if they were to give it. On such occasions, the developers will sometimes give in (and suffer long-term) and sometimes not give in (and suffer short-term). Ultimately, though, it's for developers to decide what to do, not players.
If players had some legal recourse to force developers to change gameplay, this would drastically change the balance of power. Sure, players would complain about heavy-handed treatment by CS reps, but they'd also complain about nerfs, lack of nerfs, twinking, lack of twinking, eBaying, lack of eBaying, and the general behaviour of each other. Developers would find themselves in the position of having to implement the collective whims of groups of players. Their only possible means of curbing this would be to threaten to close the entire virtual world down if some proposed bad-idea measure went through.
So yes, I think that if SOE does ban innocent players then the players do have recourse: they can quit, they can ask their friends to quit, and they can warn newbies what they're letting themselves in for. If SOE is wise, it'll provide some other recourse itself (ie. an appeals system), and if the industry as a whole is wise it will organise some kind of independent ombudsman to whom players of any virtual world that signs up can appeal.
If RL law is the effective appeal court, then instead of looking at what is right and acceptable for a particular virtual world with a particular ethos and culture and a particular gameplay in a particular genre, we'll have people throwing all manner of ill-fitting laws at the problem in an attempt to get their point of view upheld. In the long term, when the law understands virtual worlds, this may be the way to go; in the short term, though, it could very easily destroy what it would aim to protect: players' fun.
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Aug 26, 2004 at 04:58
I think Jeff's comment about this being a DOS-style attack is worth exploring, but Richard seems to be boiling this down to a discussion of exit rights vs something more than exit rights - so I'm just going to past Sal's most recent comment from Richard's Law is Code discussion, which, in my opinion, gives a counter-balance to the exit argument:
And I should mention that Jack Balkin & Peter Jenkins were both dubious of the value of the exit argument -- Dan and I just noted that exit was a strong argument, but that counter-arguments existed.
Any links to recent developments in all of this?
Posted by: greglas | Aug 26, 2004 at 07:11
Richard:
No, SOE isn't a deity.
It's a sovereign with the *powers* of a deity, a hybrid entity we don't have in the real world. (thankfully)
Players may have governments, but they're mostly *not* the virtual state in MMOGs. It is, at least to me, an important distinction: governance is a subset of sovereignity or the state.
At least this is how I see it. (http://www.swarthmore.edu/socsci/tburke1/The%20MMOG%20State.pdf)
Nothing much is happening on the SWG forums right now on this issue as far as I can see--they're deleting threads that even mention it pretty quickly. In some ways, the duper controversy is a red herring: the inclination to protest goes a lot deeper at SWG right now, and involves more fundamental sources of dissatisfaction. But this brings us back to exit strategy, and one of the reasons players don't pursue it has to do with another issue that's been discussed a good deal with MMOGs: because play time is also labor time, and because the value of MMOG labor time is accumulative. A player cannot transfer his labor time from one virtual world to the next. Now that SWG has announced that they'll wipe inactive accounts every three months, a player cannot even "bank" his labor time: if he leaves for more than three months, it's gone, as if it never existed. In the context of MMOGs, giving that up by leaving is a real cost. If play time was less like labor time, less accumulative, OR players were able to transfer labor value from one virtual world to the next, then I think you'd see people enter and exit much more readily as a fundamentally *political* response to the way that developers exercise their sovereignity over their gameworlds.
Posted by: Timothy Burke | Aug 26, 2004 at 08:21
Players have the power to leave. Social networks are portable. It is the developers world - and in the case of a for-profit world it must legally remain so; Else there would be no for-profit worlds.
The resistance to follow up on a threat to leave indicates that the player(s) concede that the developer has provided a world so worth inhabiting, that the issue at hand is not worth leaving over.
Granting players any additional sort of official 'rights' over CS or design is a bigger can of worms than bad CS.
Posted by: weasel | Aug 26, 2004 at 09:27
Tim -- great paper.
Penny Arcade being very clever as usual...
The SOE SWG Team repsonse updated yesterday.
Ban toll = 200: "the removal of around 200 players who were willing to damage the play experience of others for personal gain"
SOE comments on the economics / game play: "the confiscation of approximately 550,000,000,000 credits that were undermining the legitimate earnings of adventurers, crafters, and merchants throughout SWG"
Fascinating stuff... duping = griefing.
Posted by: greglas | Aug 26, 2004 at 10:26
No. Griefing happens inside and beside the game rules. Duping involves a bug. This is how I define them.
Posted by: Abalieno | Aug 26, 2004 at 16:12
Timothy Burke > A player cannot transfer his labor time from one virtual world to the next.
If your talking about labour value in terms of its cash value, then in practice this is not true, as well as that new site that let’s you convert between worlds, player can and do ebay across, OK there is an ‘exchange’ loss but there always is.
Thanks Greg for posting Sal’s comments. I was going to reference her stuff. One really cannot move ones social capital around, even if an entire guild jumps ship. I think this is a strong one and from the point of view of the social responsibility of games maker then I do think that this argument should weigh heavily upon them.
But in more commercial / legal terms, sure I have the option to opt out of service contracts that I enter into and, just so long as there is a not a monopoly in that market, there will be somewhere else I can go. Those that strongly believe in capitalism might argue that this is a very good thing indeed. But, if I’m hopping from one service provider that is going to give me a contract that gives me no recourse if they fail on points that I think I should reasonably expect, then what choice is that?
Richard > If players had some legal recourse to force developers to change gameplay, this would drastically change the balance of power.
Yes, but I don’t think that this is what I was arguing for – plus I was only speculating that what I was arguing for could be put in law in a reasonable way – I’m yet to be convinced that this is true. What I was looking at was not really a positive right i.e. players get to change stuff, but a negative right that would protect them against capricious actions of a company e.g. porting them for seemingly no reason, dropping servers coz they were getting upset about things (SOE may have had good tech reasons for their actions, I’m arguing the hypothetical), having an account banned coz I might have done a bad thing etc.
Currently it seems that I have no recourse against that other than walking – and, just so long as it is not game wrecking, I darn well want one!
Posted by: ren | Aug 26, 2004 at 17:19
Now that SWG has announced that they'll wipe inactive accounts every three months, a player cannot even "bank" his labor time: if he leaves for more than three months
BTW, what is the motivation for this? Seems to be atypical of the industry. Can't be operating expense - disk space is cheap - or so I would have thought.
The only other possibility I can think of is that, as you suggest, looking to drain some of those accounts. But I guess that would imply that there is indeed a pile of assets out there in those accounts that is of concern. I would also further guess, some sort of cost-benefit calculation was made: disadvantage to enticing burned out players back into the fold would be offset by advantage of eliminating whatever trouble those accounts represented.
Posted by: Nathan Combs | Aug 26, 2004 at 17:44
My interpretation of the 3-month wipe policy recently announced is about 75% about the peculiar technical requirements of SWG and 25% a cynical attempt to preempt cancellations in the wake of many recent dissatisfactions (the duping issue is the least of it). The technical issue is that the richness and variety of SWG's virtual world has generated unusual database burdens--most items have an individual record, as I understand it, and when you consider that a single crafter generates tens of thousands of items in fairly short time periods. Characters also have an unusually large amount of individual data associated with them. So characters who are not being played are resource hogs nevertheless, particularly because the structures associated with them may remain in the gameworld.
The cynical part is that with the Jump to Lightspeed expansion coming, I suspect strongly that they're trying to keep people from inactivating their accounts until after the expansion arrives.
----
On the deeper questions at stake in this thread, I think that Richard is making a mistake to assume that asking for developer accountability, or for developers to accept the role of government or sovereign means RL legal recourses for players and completely endorsing the rights of players to do whatever they want. There's an in-between here that involves developers accepting the implications of "code" being "law" in a virtual world and trying to figure out how to model that in-game, as well as provide more transparent and accountable ways of communicating with and governing their players. I don't think SOE has done a very good job of that with SWG so far; I don't think most MMOG developers do.
Posted by: Timothy Burke | Aug 26, 2004 at 19:50
> No, SOE is the virtual equivalent of a deity. The virtual equivalent of a government would be a group of players with power over other players within the context of the world (eg. elected leaders).
That totally depends on what attributes you define for "deity" and "government". SOE is a deity, because they can change the physical laws of the virtual universe. SOE is a government, because they are a group of humans excercising power over other humans, who kind of elected them by chosing their game.
I'll go with Timothy here, saying that defining the developers as government does not automatically give the players real life rights. You can even keep your definition as "deity", but that doesn't change the developers accountability in moral terms. It is just a hair-splitting of terms.
Same with the DOS attack, one mans freedom fighter is another mans terrorist. The fact remains that there is a large group of players protesting against the way SOE handled the affair, and now we got even more people protesting against how protests are handled. It leaves another black stain on SOE's already not very clean customer service reputation, and in the long run that will cost them players, thus it is bad business.
Defining game developers as "deity" somehow implies they are infallible and can't be held to account. That is obviously not true, and developers calling themselves such would just invoke more player ire for sounding arrogant.
Posted by: Tobold | Aug 27, 2004 at 03:35
I find fun what Timoty Burke writes because of this: http://www.playvault.com/
Aside this I think that what he underlines is an issue of the design. A bad issue. Unfortunately it can be seen as "good" because it can help to retain the players (after all you *don't want* them to try something else) but the truth is that the model itself is wrong and a different one could be more successful for both experienced and casual players.
This genre needs to be more accessible and offer some depth aside the time commitment.
Posted by: Abalieno | Aug 27, 2004 at 03:40
Nonsense. If you're charging people money to access to a service then your first responsibility is to deliver access to the service. Even if that means halting a DoS attack from some of your other customers.
The vast VAST majority of the players don't know anyone whose account was suspended and don't know anyone who knows anyone whose account was suspended (let alone banned).
Most of them are pretty happy that the dupe was caught, the credits were deleted and the cheaters were banned.
Almost all of the complaints I've seen about this have been from people who don't even play the game.
Oh, really?
Posted by: Jeff Freeman | Aug 27, 2004 at 14:40
I personally think that the developers should move to get out of their governmental role and concentrate more on their role as deities. They can set up the "laws of nature" and then allow for the establishment of virtual communities to implement "laws of the land." If you don't like the local laws, move to a different community. You won't lose any labor in doing so, and you'll have more options beside simply leaving the game.
--Phin
Posted by: Paul "Phinehas" Schwanz | Aug 27, 2004 at 15:02
I don't think the duping protests are actually the best example of SOE's poor management of the SWG community, I'll say that much. Because really, they're caught between the devil and the deep blue sea on this particular issue. Last time there was a major duping problem, they just let it go for months on end and essentially the in-game economy will never recover from that, or at least not in the near-term future. So I can't really blame them for acting hard and fast on this, and then sorting out the innocent later.
What I think is blameworthy (and, ahem, Jeff, I *do* play the game) is not the suspension of suspecting duping accounts but the later management of the issue on the forums and on the server in question. The notion that those protests were a Denial of Service attack is just silly--the number of characters gathered for them was less than what's been seen on many servers when there are significant PvP battles, or when people were trying to get holocrons in the early craze for them, or frankly than I see in the Mining Outpost on Dantooine on a peak evening these days. So teleporting protestors into space or to distant planets (or aggressively deleting forum threads about the issue) is the thing that's objectionable here, and the behavior which raises the wider issues about how developers shoulder or fail to shoulder their responsibilities as "sovereigns" of their virtual worlds.
Posted by: Timothy Burke | Aug 27, 2004 at 16:16
I'm wondering why SOE couldn't be more creative in handling this. Didn't something similar happen long, long ago in a game far, far away, in this case Ultima Online? The "expensive and rare red hair dye" solution?
Posted by: Young Freud | Aug 28, 2004 at 04:59
There's one thread on it, where it is explained what happened, how it happened, why it happened, and players are allowed to post to that thread. Just how many threads do their need to be about it? You've got that thread, plus the whole rest of the internet, to talk about it all you want.
It isn't objectionable to delete other threads about it there, in order to keep the forums usable for all the players who want to use them to talk about things other than this. Most of the players, that is.
You're making it sound like there's a conspiracy of silence there, and that's untrue.
I can't really say anything about what motivated the CSRs to do what they did, or what they did, because I don't know anything about the CSRs.
But all the things you mentioned are problems, too. The difference is those things are the result of players trying to play the game, and this was the result of players trying to break the game so that other people couldn't play it. And they didn't get banned, they were just forced to stop.
And it's not a silly notion that these in-game protests were DoS attacks. All in-game protests are DoS attacks.
"Shouldering responsibility" means doing something about it, in every case.
On a related note:
Periodic big, loud, ugly bannings of mass cheaters is good for subscription numbers. The louder and uglier, the better.
Oh-the-horror and gasp-I'm-outraged of it all aside, most people prefer the devs to police the game.
Posted by: Jeff Freeman | Aug 28, 2004 at 12:14
If all in-game protests are DOS attacks, then so are all in-game social gatherings of any kind--concerts, etc. So too are massed PvP battles. Anything that might crash the server or interfere with what other players are doing. Players know, after all, that to gather in unusual numbers, for *whatever reason*, is likely to have repercussions for players who are not gathering simply by fact that the assembly and the non-assembled exist on the same server. To define an assembly--protest or otherwise--as a DoS attack is to define the "massively multiplayer" element of these games as a DoS attack.
Players are NOT allowed to post to the thread which explained what happened, by the way. It's a no-replies thread.
I don't know personally what "motivated" the CSRs, but there's a decent amount of evidence about what they actually did. You don't want to call that mishandling or making a mountain out of a molehill because you don't have psychological insight into the judgement of the particular CSRs involved, that's ok--I'm comfortable on the evidence which does exist in saying that it was an overreaction, one with a certain degree of historical precedent in SOE's approach to customer relations.
Posted by: Timothy Burke | Aug 28, 2004 at 13:13
Ah, I see that one of the credit dupe/protest threads on the forums *does* allow for replies--I was looking at the wrong one. My bad.
The rest of my comments stand, though.
Posted by: Timothy Burke | Aug 28, 2004 at 13:17
Yeah, it's this one:
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=in_live&message.id=21925#M21925
All of the posts on the Announcements forum disallow replies, since it's for announcements rather than discussion.
Anyhoo.
I think if people do something with the intention of people to break the game, then they're doing something wrong.
Even if sometimes people - in the course of playing the game - wind up doing the very same thing.
C: What are you doing?
P: Trying to have a big pvp battle.
C: Well that'll make things laggy, but good luck.
C: What are you doing?
P: Trying to have a big in-game wedding.
C: Well that'll make things laggy, but good luck.
C: What are you doing?
P: Trying to make it laggy.
C: Stop it.
I'm not in customer service, and that might be a good thing, but I think that's plenty fair.
Posted by: Jeff Freeman | Aug 28, 2004 at 15:22
Tim, large gatherings of any object in one location causing networking and stability issues is a well-known issue with a long history, cf the old mud trick "drop 1.coin 4000*", or "black holes" in UO.
FWIW, I agree the public communication on all this could have been handled much better, and a post-mortem process on this has already begun. There really wasn't much reason for the protest in the first place; the replacement of the word "banned" with "suspended while we investigate" (which is in fact what happened) would have been enough to radically alter the perception of what was going on.
It's pointless for game developers and operators to decry the fact that the public assumes the worst about any given action, or to decry the fact that sensationalist and negative news travels faster and farther than more boring truth. What it does do is cast into sharp relief the importance of public relations, openness and honesty in dealing with your customers, and prompt answers to inquiries.
Posted by: Raph Koster | Aug 28, 2004 at 20:31
I agree that this actually isn't a case where the SWG team is at fault on the whole. I would have rapidly frozen all the accounts connected to duped credits as well--I just would have gone out of my way to say, "Just until we investigate and sort the quick from the damned" *early*. Hindsight is 20/20--it was actually good that the team acted fast on the dupe, as I was on record saying that they probably wouldn't.
I'd note, though, that the main thing that got roasted in this case is legitimately roastable, and that's the CSRs-teleporting-into-space thing. One thing I'd note is this: most other social institutions learn a long time ago that it's easier to co-opt protest than to slam it. I suspect a CSR would have achieved the same results by beaming several protest leaders into a comfortable house and offering to listen to their concerns, and not gotten a faceful of Penny Arcade for his pains.
Part of the reason that SWG players assume the worst is not just generic public tendency: it has to do with a history of poor communication that is specific to SWG (and for those with long memories, to the first three years of EQ's existence). I think there are other games on the market that would not have come in for the same kind of preloaded hostility even if players did the usual forum groaning about things.
Posted by: Timothy Burke | Aug 28, 2004 at 21:26
Going back to the idea of in-game protest as valid gameplay, personally I'd be a little disappointed if I attended a protest that failed to provoke a response from On High. Preferably, a ridiculous and ultimately meaningless one.
Getting teleported into space would make my day.
Posted by: Jeff Freeman | Aug 29, 2004 at 15:34
Exactly.
Posted by: Timothy Burke | Aug 29, 2004 at 16:28
Yes, but a protest must cause a disservice or it gets simply ignored. That's why in real life you can stop your work causing problems in "customers" during a strike or why manifestations have the goal of blocking roads and things like that.
It's too easy to create a special room where peoples can go to protest and where they can easily be ignored and laughed at. In fact in UO protests where about blocking moongates.
This is why what the players did is a big success anyway. Because they caused a problem and discussions everywhere. Forcing SOE to deal with this.
... Really?
It's ridiculous.
A guy on DAoC noticed that his character was bugged. He reported the bug and he got banned for a week.
A part of the reply from Sanya:
"One bugged guy has crashed the server before."
Bringing back the issue to SWG:
FIRST you investigate.
THEN you suspend.
Or perhaps even in SWG "One bugged guy has crashed the server before." ?
I don't know if I should laugh at this.
Posted by: Abalieno | Aug 29, 2004 at 18:24
Effective PR management in the Internet Age is evermore critical to the longterm health of VWs.
Unfortunately, most VW operators and lowly CSR have neither the training nor conflict resolution guidelines to manage the situation effectively.
It's like, if you can effect terrorism in VW the same way you can do it RL, how are you suppose to handle it? There's no right or wrong answers!
Posted by: magicback | Aug 29, 2004 at 23:30
"He who hesitates is last", as they don't quite say.
You don't let 550 billion credits leak into the economy while you investigate. You don't let *even innocent people* crash the server while you investigate.
Or maybe you do. But it's a bad idea.
Posted by: Jeff Freeman | Aug 30, 2004 at 12:23
Sorry not to have replied to these postings earlier, but I’ve been away visiting my folks. I realise the conversation has got back on topic in the meantime, but oh well..!
Greglas (quoting Sal)>Switching costs are very high for someone whose social life exists within the game. It's not like changing your brand of jeans.
I agree; it’s more like switching your job and leaving behind all your workmates. Now there are plenty of laws (which differ between countries) that stop employees from exploiting workforces or acting unfairly towards them, and you may want to argue that some of these laws should apply to virtual worlds. Do any of them take into account social capital, though? If they don’t take it into account for heavily-legislated RL employment situations, why should they for virtual worlds?
Timothy Burke>No, SOE isn't a deity. It's a sovereign with the *powers* of a deity, a hybrid entity we don't have in the real world. (thankfully)
Anything that has the powers of a deity is a deity, whether it likes it or not. I agree that it has sovereignty over its virtual worlds, but it’s also a deity.
ren>What I was looking at was not really a positive right i.e. players get to change stuff, but a negative right that would protect them against capricious actions of a company
Yes, but the point I was making is that players can’t in general say what is a “positive right” or a “negative right”. Players will see some things as being negative that are actually positive. Some things may be both, for different groups of players. Some things may be both for the same player. Ultimately, whether something is good or bad for the virtual world can only be decided by the designers, ie. it’s an artistic decision. Now some of these design decisions are fairly easy to make and are agreed on by most developers, eg. banning people for something they haven’t done is unfair. However, it’s conceivable that this could be part and parcel of a very enjoyable game, if done right (as I mentioned before, this was a meta-gameplay feature of MIST).
If you don’t like the idea of playing a game that’s unfair, play one that promises to be fair and sue them if they’re unfair. That’s a perfectly reasonable approach, although given that almost all competitive virtual worlds are, by design, unfair in some respect (character classes never balance perfectly, for example), that’s a tall order. If you want all virtual worlds to be fair – even those that are designed not to be fair – then that’s interfering in the design process too much.
>Currently it seems that I have no recourse against that other than walking – and, just so long as it is not game wrecking, I darn well want one!
Well the first developer who creates a virtual world you like that contracts with its players not to do any of these things you don’t want to happen, hey, sign up for it. It’s a big selling point for people who are in favour of protecting their social capital in this way. For existing virtual worlds, that made no such contract, well yes, you might want a recourse, but unless they want to give you one you’re not going to get it.
In case anyone reading this thinks I’m against players being able to appeal, I’m not. I think that any large-scale virtual world would do itself a great service if it made clear what it regards as acceptable behaviour, what the penalties are for transgressions and what the appeal system is. I also think I’m being incredibly naïve in this belief (because people will play those rules systems to the full, pushing at the boundaries the whole time and tying up the appeal system in knots), but I think it’s worthwhile. However, I also believe that any such set of rules must be set by the developers, because no two virtual worlds are the same. If those rules are imposed by RL, creativity in virtual world design will suffer unacceptably.
Timothy Burke>There's an in-between here that involves developers accepting the implications of "code" being "law" in a virtual world
The problem is that the developers are well aware of the implications, but the players think there should be other implications.
Tobold>Defining game developers as "deity" somehow implies they are infallible and can't be held to account. That is obviously not true
In the context of the virtual world, they are infallible. The only infallibility they have is that which they define as infallible (eg. “oops, a bug!”). This doesn’t mean they want to be deities, or that they want to be infallible; it’s just an unavoidable consequence of the fact that they control the code.
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Aug 30, 2004 at 13:02
I don't think that many MMOG developers actually do understand the implications of sovereignty over gameworlds--in fact, not so well as many MUD designers did. Or if they do understand it, they don't operationalize that understanding well, in my view.
Posted by: Timothy Burke | Aug 30, 2004 at 15:07
Timothy Burke>There's an in-between here that involves developers accepting the implications of "code" being "law" in a virtual world
How is that an in between? If code is law and I, the developer, want you gone, I will use the code that gives me the power to delete you to do so. If I don't have that power right now, I can just code it in. When you have the ability to be the sole lawmaker, the idea of law becomes a bit meaningless.
--matt
Posted by: Matt Mihaly | Aug 30, 2004 at 15:18
Don't hide behind a finger.
Posted by: Abalieno | Aug 30, 2004 at 15:44
I have no idea.
Not at the rate of .5 trillion credits in ~a day.
Beyond a couple of transfers it is impossible to determine who is cheating and who is being cheated, hence the necessitity to suspend accounts right away: to prevent these credits leaking into the economy.
And even *then* it had to be a suspension followed up with a review, because you don't want to ban any innocents, right?
I don't know what that means.
But if you're trying to say that because this dupe had been going on for months, that because it's SOE's fault for making the bug in the first place, that therefore we should have done nothing, then this conversation is over.
Posted by: Jeff Freeman | Aug 31, 2004 at 03:45
Timothy Burke>I don't think that many MMOG developers actually do understand the implications of sovereignty over gameworlds--in fact, not so well as many MUD designers did.
There are many levels of implications. For example, some implications have secondary implications of their own (eg. an implication that you have power itself has an implication that you have responsibility). Also, some implications can lead to other implications when acted upon in certain ways (eg. you have absolute power, but the consequences of using it arbitrarily are different to the ones of using it fairly). I would agree, therefore, that few designers have a good understanding of all of these implications.
Nevertheless, I think that designers do have a strong grasp of the basic implications, in particular that this is their virtual world and they can therefore do whatever they want in it. Players may try to lay other implications on top of that which serve to limit or deny it, but the trouble is that neither they nor the developers can actually do that. Developers can do whatever they want in their virtual world; the only influence that players have is to try (through various methods of persuasion) to cause developers to want the same things that they do.
In most cases, developers' and players' views align anyway, so there's no problem. When there is a problem, though, the developers have the last say (even if they don't want it).
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Aug 31, 2004 at 04:05
> This doesn’t mean they want to be deities, or that they want to be infallible; it’s just an unavoidable consequence of the fact that they control the code.
Control of the code certainly gives absolute power, I agree. But every change in code has consequences, both social consequences in the virtual world, and financial consequences from players joining or quitting the game in reaction to the code. Developers control the code, but not its consequences. And while the code might always be "right", its consequences might well be "wrong".
The main argument of the SOE critics in the matter of their reaction to the duped credits is that there would have been other code solutions which would also have been "right", for example removing all duped credits immediately, but being slower and more selective with the bannings. And that this other code solutions would have been better for the players, the image of SOE customer support, and ultimately for the financial success of SWG.
Posted by: Tobold | Aug 31, 2004 at 05:54
Tobold>But every change in code has consequences, both social consequences in the virtual world, and financial consequences from players joining or quitting the game in reaction to the code.
Yes, that's right. Developers should take all this into account when making changes to the code (or when deciding not to make changes).
>And while the code might always be "right", its consequences might well be "wrong".
I agree, but who is to say which one? Ultimately, only the developers can decide. They may choose to decide by asking players what they think, or they may ignore them. Either way, they're the only ones who can decide, because they're the people who control the code.
>The main argument of the SOE critics in the matter of their reaction to the duped credits is that there would have been other code solutions which would also have been "right"
The first thing a developer should do when they discover their virtual world has a dupe bug of this magnitude is to shut down the server. Alternatively, they should take a snapshot of the database and announce that everything which happens from now until the problem is resolved will be undone at that time (ie. the database will be regressed to the snapshot). If they can't do that, well, they really should be asking themselves why they can't...
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Aug 31, 2004 at 15:16
Youch. Suspending everyone's accounts seems a lot more extreme that just suspending the ones you know to be, uhm, "infected".
Posted by: Jeff Freeman | Aug 31, 2004 at 15:26
Richard> The first thing a developer should do when they discover their virtual world has a dupe bug of this magnitude is to shut down the server.
I agree. Ditto for a bug that would cause loss of user-created content. Often, the fix is really simple, so in the time it takes to shut the world down, the patch can be tested and ready to go.
Posted by: Cory Ondrejka | Aug 31, 2004 at 16:03
Jeff Freeman>Youch. Suspending everyone's accounts seems a lot more extreme that just suspending the ones you know to be, uhm, "infected".
The problem is that you don't know the ones that are infected.
If it's only a minor problem, then it's usually fine to suspend only those people who you find abusing it. This would be like only taking away the driving licences of people who speed in their cars, rather than closing every road until every car had a speed-limiter in it.
If it's a major problem, then you generally want to stop anyone who could abuse it from doing so, even if that prevents other people from going about their normal business. This is why all commercial flights were grounded when the twin towers were hit.
An exploit is minor if the virtual world can shrug off its worst-case excesses. It'a major if the consequences of letting things continue as they are would change the gameplay.
As I said, if you don't like the idea of shutting down the server then you can always take a snapshot of the database and announce that anything which happens from now until the patch that fixes the problem is "just a dream".
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Sep 02, 2004 at 11:27
Richard> you can always take a snapshot of the database and announce that anything which happens from now until the patch that fixes the problem is "just a dream".
Or perhaps more accurately "just a temporary extension of the previous dream that will have no persistent consquences"
Anyone have any good links to the effects of such announcements on players? I've seen a few anecdotal stories that indicate, in essence, exactly what you'd expect. Lots of asset squandering, rioting, and generally nutty behavior.
Posted by: greglas | Sep 02, 2004 at 11:59
greglas>Anyone have any good links to the effects of such announcements on players? I've seen a few anecdotal stories that indicate, in essence, exactly what you'd expect. Lots of asset squandering, rioting, and generally nutty behavior.
In MUD2, we had a special event (over one Christmas, I think) where, for no good reason other than it might be fun, the entire database was snapped and we had a day of "no consequences". It was announced well in advance and there were other announcements upon entry lest anyone be left under any illusions. Things went pretty much as you describe, with everyone attacking everyone else, giving one another outrageous gifts, cheating, lying and tricking... There was also some "real" play, in which people risked exploring areas that they would generally regard as too dangerous.
The players universally enjoyed it, but it wasn't the kind of thing they'd want to happen very often. Most of them seemed to conclude that anarchic freedom is fun in small doses, but they wouldn't want to play in a virtual world that was like that the whole time.
If a virtual world like SW:G were to run "no consequences" while awaiting a bug fix, I should imagine that the players might find it highly enjoyable for a few days, but not much longer.
Legal murk: if you bid on something during normal play and win the auction during no-consequence play, you're not going to want to pay, right?
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Sep 03, 2004 at 03:39