http://www.shizit.com/ Ultimate Online Game Site Featuring Thousands of Online Games, Tips and Game News en-us Nucleus CMS v3.22 © Weblog http://backend.userland.com/rss http://www.shizit.com//nucleus/nucleus2.gif http://www.shizit.com/ http://www.shizit.com/index.php?itemid=45
ArenaNet , developer of the award-winning online roleplaying game Guild Wars, and NCsoft Corporation, the world's leading developer and publisher of online computer games, announce today the release date of Guild Wars Factions, the hotly anticipated second game release from the critically acclaimed studio. Guild Wars Factions will be available in stores worldwide April 28, 2006. Guild Wars Factions takes place on the Asian-inspired continent of Cantha, where new and existing Guild Wars players join an epic quest to defeat an ancient evil and save a war-torn empire. Roleplaying and competitive player-versus-player gamers alike will be able to join together in guild alliances to take control of territory and determine the fate of Cantha. New scored challenge missions and strategic competitive missions allow players to test their roleplaying prowess and earn the right for their alliance to take control of cities, towns and outposts. Large-scale alliance battles pit teams from opposing factions against each other in a struggle to conquer new territory and redraw the battle lines across the continent of Cantha. New elite missions allow the most skilled players exclusive access to areas designed to be the ultimate cooperative challenge.

"Guild Wars Factions is an exceptional game that invites players to immerse themselves in a truly epic adventure unlike any they have seen," says Patrick Wyatt, a co-founder of ArenaNet. "The four new mission types create a unique experience that will engage both the roleplaying and competitive gamer in cooperative conquest of territories and strategic battles. Set against the landscapes of the visually stunning, Asian-themed continent of Cantha, and with two new characters to choose from — Assassin and Ritualist — Guild Wars Factions will redefine the online RPG experience."

New players will join the more than one million gamers already playing Guild Wars worldwide, and existing players will have a new continent and storyline to explore within the universe of Guild Wars, the ground-breaking online roleplaying game that took the gaming world by storm in 2005 with its innovative design, depth of play and no-subscription-fee model. While Guild Wars Factions is a standalone product that does not require Guild Wars to play, gamers with Guild Wars accounts who purchase Guild Wars Factions will be able to play in both campaigns with their existing characters and even gain extra character slots.

For gamers who can't wait until April 28 to get their hands on a copy of Guild Wars Factions, ArenaNet is hosting a massive beta test event in which all existing Guild Wars players and their friends are invited to delve into the experiences awaiting them in Cantha. For those who want to be the first to enjoy all that Guild Wars Factions has to offer, a limited edition pre-order package is currently available at retail stores throughout North America. This pre-order pack includes an access key to the Factions Preview Event (FPE) on March 24, and also provides access to Guild Wars Factions twenty-four hours before the street date, exclusive in-game items for each of the game's new professions, a "friend-key" that gives access to the FPE for friends without an existing Guild Wars account, a limited trial of Guild Wars (original Prophecies campaign) for a friend, a tactical guide, a quick reference card, and a CD that includes concept art, wallpapers, and in-game trailers.]]> General http://www.shizit.com/index.php?itemid=45 Fri, 10 Mar 2006 19:19:31 -0800 http://www.shizit.com/index.php?itemid=44
In addition, online Massively Multiplayer Online Games have been expanding with new genres. From your classic online role playing games to the fast pace shooters such as Half Life. While it is more then apparent that MMORPG generate a bulk of the revenue casual gaming is starting to take a hold now as well.

It is predicted that North America will eventually pass Asia in online subscription based revenues in 2011. It is also speculated that in 2011 that 29% of the worlds subscription revenue will be from console systems, however Japan is expected to be almost completely PC driven. There are many potholes ahead in the road to expanding the online gaming market. Electronic Art's growth can be noted as one of the few examples that will stand out in particular. In fiscal 2005 alone, EA had generated $3.1 billion, of which $55 million was directly from online game subscription revenue. All in all the online gaming market is still one with a long road of improvements and changes ahead, time will only tell who the true beneficiaries of this large growth will be. However its beyond a shadow of a doubt that many opportunities are yet to be found in the online subscription based market.

The research done by DFC Intelligence resource services help to provide a detailed strategic analysis of the interactive entertainment industry.]]> General http://www.shizit.com/index.php?itemid=44 Fri, 10 Mar 2006 19:18:20 -0800 http://www.shizit.com/index.php?itemid=43
Born in Mexico and presently living in the United States, Brody Condon is one of the most important artists who in his work is reacting to the content and graphics of video games. His Suicide Solution shows images from more than fifty ‘first person shooter’ games. Each time he shows the moment at which the player – the first person shooter – gets hit. The effect is both hilarious and eye-opening. The title of the work refers to the song of the same title by Ozzie Osbourne, who in 1984 was accused of being responsible for the suicide of an American teenager. In the work Karma Physics < Elvis he refers once again to the movements that are used in games. We see a floating Elvis Presley, gilding through space in slow motion like a curdled Barbie doll, making spasmodic movements. Condon’s Lamborghini Diabolo is based on the ‘Need for Speed’ games. The work shows a model of a sports car and is constructed as a skeleton of cast polyester elements. Brody Condon has shown at a number of museums including the Whitney in New York, and, in early 2006, at the Pace Wildenstein Gallery (New York). The authoritative art magazine Artforum has also devoted attention to his work.

The Dutch participants Persijn Broersen and Margit Lukacs, and Joes Koppers developed new work especially for this exhibition. Broersen and Lukacs have already become known with their video works. Joes Koppers developed a space in which the visitor can be part of an interactive game. The visitor is the ‘target’ and can be transformed and even destroyed by other visitors. Koppers plays with the fact that the majority of video games revolve around destroying as much as possible in order to achieve a goal. By allowing ‘real’ people to enter the reality of the game, he mixes our reality with the fiction of the game and demonstrates that the boundaries are becoming increasingly vague, especially seeing as games are becoming an increasingly important factor in our society. In the work Cargo Geert Jan Mulder shows the vacuity of driving a car. The GameKings, familiar from TMF and MTV, also seize upon elements from popular culture. Competition, pop music, violence as entertainment and interactivity are subjects with which they entice the viewer to form his or her own opinion about the game as a social phenomenon. They are exhibiting San Andreas, an edited version of the sensational Grand Auto Theft. By means of a MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game, or online role-playing) they seek to reveal the scale of the greatest modern game worlds. Their point of departure for this is World on Warcraft. In addition, the GameKings have made a selection of current Japanese games.

The Sandburg Hall of Stedelijk Museum CS is being rebuilt into a game lounge especially for the exhibition ‘Next Level: Art, Games & Reality’. Various educational projects will be taking place there. ]]> General http://www.shizit.com/index.php?itemid=43 Fri, 10 Mar 2006 19:17:07 -0800 http://www.shizit.com/index.php?itemid=42
Restless World is a MMORPG that is based on our own, original set of rules. It is set in a varied 3D world full of all sorts of interesting creatures, which are unique to this world and not drawn from a Tolkeinesque world. There are no standard fantasy races like elves and dwarves, but players have access to a character palette with enough variation of physical appearance that they may create a character that resembles one of these races.The ruleset has been designed so that no one build is more powerful than any other build. The taxonomy of the plants and creatures, the crafting system, the kinds of damage that can be dealt, and basically everything in the world revolve around a system of four elements - earth, air, fire and water, split again by the three alignments of good, neutral and evil. No one player character nor any creature can become an all-rounder, they will tend to specialise in a particular element. We believe this system will discourage powergaming and powerbuilding and encourage parties that have at least one member from each elemental group.Developer posts on Hidden Water's forums reveal Restless World will not be a Windows exclusive title. Both OS X and Linux versions are planned, the recent purchase of a Mac Mini allowing testing on the Mac version to begin.

Rumpled Elf:
We took delivery of a MiniMac today, bought off the Apple website. Apple are pretty neat, they deliver free to anywhere, and since we are based somewhere that is closer to nowhere than anywhere its impressive that they deliver here at all.

Anyway. Its very small, silver, and does an extremely good impersonation of a small lunchbox with USB ports. Colourless has been playing Marble Blast Gold on it - another Torque-based game. Our test network now consists loosely of:
a minimac
a 64-bit PC
a 32-bit PC
and a linux box.

So fear not, we are not limiting ourselves to the Windows community only.

Colourless:
And after a solid days work, I brought the MacOSX code up to date so It compiles. I also took the time to implement refresh rate selection and multisampling (that's Fullscreen antialiasing for those who don't know) in the Mac port and it was easier to do than in Windows (Linux port doesn't support these yet).

Anyway, the Mac version runs quite well on what is a very low end machine.Restless World is still in development. Test accounts should be available sometime in May. Click on over to the Hidden Waters site to learn more about this unique new MMORPG.]]> General http://www.shizit.com/index.php?itemid=42 Fri, 10 Mar 2006 19:16:16 -0800 http://www.shizit.com/index.php?itemid=41
He adds, "Today, a lot of revenue is being created by a small audience. In fact, the people who are paying most of the profits in the games we're running are the casual user, the people who are using the game lightly, a couple hours a week. They're the ones with the lowest variable cost.

"Ironically, they subsidize heavy users who are who are -- from a subscription basses -- a poorer value proposition. Right now, everyone is trying to figure out ways to do two things simultaneously."

He adds, "One is diversify revenue streams so you get away from doing hardcover books into doing paperback books and comics. We're trying to get away from the heavy priced subscription side. And conversely, we're tying to go after the intellect because the intellect should be treated differently. So when you see somebody who's willing to pay a hundred to two hundred dollars a year for item transactions, we also want to capture that revenue."He adds, "One is diversify revenue streams so you get away from doing hardcover books into doing paperback books and comics. We're trying to get away from the heavy priced subscription side. And conversely, we're tying to go after the intellect because the intellect should be treated differently. So when you see somebody who's willing to pay a hundred to two hundred dollars a year for item transactions, we also want to capture that revenue."

Primary Revenue Sources
John Needham, SVP and CFO of Sony Online Entertainment says, "You've probably seen a lot of ancillary services that have been rolled out. We started out with character transfers, and character renaming services that once spawned, were really successful. With the launch of Everquest 2 we launched Station Players. We've also got Station Exchange. I like to call it SOE-Bay."

Robert Garriott, CEO of NCSoft, North America adds, "I don't think there's any ?after' subscription. Subscription is a viable model, and will continue. The key is that there is going to be a lot of variety. Pretty much any way you can think of for paying for games, you will pay for games."

He adds, "Look at gaming in Korea. The methods of paying a much broader, in terms of how you pay for games, than we have in the United States. And that's partly because they have such a wide variety of billing methods. So people can pay for games with cell phones, and telephone bills, and everything else. Our job is to provide entertainment to customers in the way they want to pay for it.

"I don't think subscriptions are dead," Garriott concludes, "As a matter of fact, I think that the gamer in general is willing to pay even more for games, I think you might see subscription prices actually increase. But there will be more variety and people will be paying lots of different ways."

Needham would be the first to disagree. He believes the base subscription fee will stay in the ballpark that it's in now, "with the goal of growing the market. And I think you'll see value added services layered on top of that. Trying to capture people that are willing to pay above and beyond the base subscription fee.

"At the same time I do think we'll see a lot of innovation from Asian markets, potentially out of Europe, and other games coming out of the US from people who don't have as much vested interest in the subscription based model." says Needham.

The Retail Question
Where does retail distribution come in? Garriott says, "The answer to that is different depending on what market you're looking at. If you're looking at the US market, retail is critical. However, if you look at Asia, it's very unimportant. As a mater of fact, there's no retail for MMP games in Korea, because retail space never developed in those markets.

"If you look at the US market, it's very important, but for different reasons. The retail space is a great place to do marketing. It lends credibility to your product. Our model in Korea is to give away the client, and then charge a subscription fee, and that subscription fee is much higher than it is in the US. A product like Lineage has a $26 a month subscription fee in Korea. But you get the client for free. In the US we tried to actually give away the client, but there's an interesting dynamic, or difference in culture between the US and Korea."

Garriott continues, "In Korea, if you go to a customer and say ?I want to sell you a product, and then charge a monthly fee,' they say, ?You're crazy. Why would I buy a product?' In the US it's actually the opposite. If you go to a customer and say ?Here is a free product, I'd like you to try it and then pay me a monthly fee.' Most Americans say, ?The value of this product is exactly what I pay for it.' So when you give it to them free, they think it's worthless."

"From our market research and studies, if we sell them the product at retail, they like the product more, they have more value to it, they think it's worth what they paid for it, and they try to get that value back on the computer, learning about the game, and then they have a higher chance of paying a subscription fee afterwards.

"In the US retail is critical," Garriott concludes, "And it's going to continue to be critical, just by the nature of our culture. I think we'll have more online downloads and direct online selling. Of course it's going to become bigger, and more prevalent, but retail is always going to be a critical part."

Anderson says, "The American MMO is suffering under what I call an Ultima Online hangover. When we first launched the game at EA, and EA was trying to figure out how to price it, there weren't a lot of good examples of how to do it. So they said, ?hey, people understand retail.' And they went with this model, which is all you can eat. Fifty dollars, up front, free for thirty days. So if I asked anybody in this audience today ?how much is the first month subscription of any of our products?' and people will say ?It's free,' Right? Wrong! What is the first months subscription? It's fifty dollars!"

"If you think about this even more obtusely, today you could just put a box on the shelf that was empty it would probably be more effective. We're already patching on day one. It already takes an hour to install these games. Everquest 2 had ten CDs. These are not small games. So by the time it's finished installing I could have downloaded it. So what are you really paying for? The manual could be PDF. What you're really getting is a code. So what we're really telling the consumer is, ?hey, pay fifty dollars for the first month, and after that it's fifteen dollars a month.' The problem is, it's not the best way to reach customers."

"It's even funnier." Anderson continues, "We're saying ?hey, it's fifty dollars for the first month, but we're only going to take fifteen as publishers in retail.' And all retail is doing is putting out a piece of paper or a sticker about that big. So it's even more bizarre when you think about it that way. What we're seeing over time is that the market is going to continually drift away from retail because it just doesn't make any sense."

"Consumers are getting more comfortable downloading everything from music, iTunes, they're going to be more comfortable with websites like IGN, getting downloads of betas. There's less and less reliance. It'll get increasingly difficult for retail reliant companies to get away from that model."

"I think retail will continue to be a crucial part of most core gamer products." Needham. You've got to look at the demographic you're trying to reach as well. There are a lot of successful MMOs out there that are not at retail. Runescape, Toontown -- they've been very successful, and it's because they're appealing to a younger demographic. Less mobile and able to get to stores. For us, we have a very fervent belief in retail and will continue to support retail. We'll use digital downloads mostly as a retention device."

Jeff Anderson agrees. "In the short term, it is the principle acquisition vehicle because it's still the way people look at it. But in the long term..."

Digital Divide
Is there a tipping point where digital distribution becomes more important than retail? Robert Garriott doesn't think so. "I don't view this as a fight between the two. As a matter of fact, I view retail in the US as self-paid marketing. Why would I not want to have self-paid marketing? It's where I can get my product on the shelves, people can look at it, where there's educated sales people who can tell them about the product, they pay me for this opportunity, and that's what drives a lot of article that are written in magazines."

"So it's actually a great system. I like them both. There's no reason why I'd want one over the other. As a matter of fact, to take the opposite direction, you go to Korea, and the only reason we don't have retail in Korea is because is because there is no retail channel. That's probably going to change. One of the things that drive retail in the United States is console sales."

"Until last year, consoles were illegal in Korea." Garriott says, "And so the retail channel did not evolve around that. Well, now consoles are going into Korea, there will be a retail channel, because there has to be a retail channel for console sales. And as the channel develops, my guess is we'll start using that retail channel in Korea. Why? Because it's a great, self-paid channel to get marketing and advertising and articles written and everything else."

"The funny part," says Jeff Anderson, "is that people now refer to retail as marketing. It used to be that retail was revenue. Now a lot of people see it as primarily a marketing function. And the tipping point is when that marketing function, those dollars that you're spending on marketing, whether those dollars are better spent giving it to your marketing team and saying, ?Hey, you know what? Instead of me going out and selling five-hundred-thousand units at five dollars a unit, how much money can we spend on marketing?' Get those people to come to the website, and put this product everywhere. And that's the tipping point. When you start realizing that the economics may not be as good."

"Maybe this is the inverse of Robert's point," muses Jon Grande, VP of Sigil Games in San Diego, "The reason retail hasn't happened in Korea is because there's no good physical distribution mechanic in that country. Maybe that's the inverse of the problem here in the US. There's great retail, but that's actually sucked the energy out of a great digital distribution model." ]]> General http://www.shizit.com/index.php?itemid=41 Wed, 16 Nov 2005 11:07:42 -0800 http://www.shizit.com/index.php?itemid=40
If you haven't played WoW (also known as World of Warcraft) by Blizzard Entertainment, you can download a 14-day free trial from FilePlanet. The trial includes 4 additional days over the standard 10-day trial available to non-subscribers of FilePlanet. All you do is fill out a quick form and then download.However, prepare to wait. There are several new World of Warcraft patches to download, and a few updates. After the initial install has completed, it will search for the new patches. Don't get discouraged though, this WoW video game is worth the wait. You'll be in the world of MMO before
you know it.

World of Warcraft recently launched a new extensive open beta for a short testing period, and the base included over 800,000 video game players. The number of testers online simultaneously peaked at over 140,000, exceeding the company's initial expectations.

As a counter-measure against piracy and on-line World of Warcraft in-game hacks, Blizzard Entertainment has implemented a CD-key system for authorization and account access. CD-key packages can be bought individually for NTD 168 (HKD 42) and include 99 free World of Warcraft points, which are used for game time.

Do you play WoW? Let us know about your World of Warcraft experiences by posting a comment below. Or, if you are new to World of Warcraft, come back and let us know what you think of it. We want to know your comments about the game!]]> General http://www.shizit.com/index.php?itemid=40 Mon, 14 Nov 2005 10:56:55 -0800 http://www.shizit.com/index.php?itemid=39
Endlessly reproducing the chair would be conning the customer in a way: to some degree at least, the chair's value is linked to its rarity. Would your conscience get the upper hand? Or would you start duplicating and selling like mad to get as much money as you could before you were found out and/or the market collapsed?

It sounds an unlikely dilemma. Chairs don't magically replicate themselves. But this seems to be exactly what happened in the world of Everquest II, an online computer game. However, before you jump to the conclusion that this was a virtual-world scam involving just virtual-world money, stop. This is real money we're talking about. For this is a story about two types of money: game gold and US dollars. And the point is that you can sell one for the other.Our furniture salesman is the self-dubbed "Methical", who according to the account he has posted on the internet, stumbled across a software glitch that allowed him to reproduce, almost without effort, virtual items in Everquest II, one of the massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) played by an estimated 20m people around the world.

A decade or so ago, this might have been of some importance to a handful of geeks but probably not to most readers of the Financial Times. But breakneck advances in online gaming and its popularity mean that virtual items, and the virtual money to buy those items, are now traded for significant sums of real-world currency.

"I started laughing like a silly little girl," writes Methical of the moment when he realised what he had discovered. "It was the kind of laugh you have when you're a kid and just hit a house with an egg. I couldn't contain myself."Before explaining exactly what Methical did, and its startling implications, it is worth explaining how far MMORPGs have come from their ­humble text-based origins.Before broadband, most games were single-player challenges - you against the machine, albeit an increasingly intelligent machine. But as connectivity grows, multiplayer games are fast taking over. Here the challenge is social, rather than technical.

For me, these games hold the same attractions as books, movies, theatre and art. The best are towering feats of imagination, offering new worlds to explore, with beautifully rendered landscapes, compelling plotlines and a constant need for split-second and sometimes morally laden decisions. The most creative minds and best engineers have partnered with mass consum­erism in a fertile marriage, whose eventual destination social scientists have only begun to imagine

When I started playing World of Warcraft, then the most popular MMORPG, it was a revelation. First there was the sheer size: an entire Tolkienesque universe, depicted through a kind of cartoonish impress­ionism, replete with jungles, ice-scapes, deserts and forests, inhabited by dozens of races and fantastic beasts, all fighting, exploring or making money across two continents of towns, cities and wildernesses.

When my fledgling elf, with his humble forest origins, first reached the dwarven city of Ironforge I felt a genuine sense of wonder: not unlike my feeling on arriving in New York after my previous job in Nairobi. As my character, Eghed, surveyed hundreds of players talking, crafting, duelling and chatting, I realised that I had arrived in the kind of online metaverse first imagined by the science fiction writer Neal Stephenson in the early 1990s. But now it was real.

Even more than the graphics, the game mechanics were what amazed: the plotlines, in-game postal service and messaging systems, even an auction house where players traded for game gold the items they had crafted using hard-earned skills and whose prices rose and fell according to supply and demand.And as players advance, they increasingly meet challenges that can only be accomplished in groups, and eventually by entire guilds of like-minded players.

To succeed in the challenges requires long-term relationships, organisation, bonds of trust. These online relationships endure and become an increasingly important part of the game experience.In time the aim of the game becomes the acquisition of interesting new items and powers. As the MMORPG player base grows older (many are now in their mid-30s), with more disposable income but less disposable time, many would prefer to buy those items with real money than work for them in the game. Fortunes are there for the taking.

Which brings us back to Methical. His tale starts when our anti-hero, who says he sold upscale modern furniture in the real world, "figured it would be fun to sell furniture in Everquest II as well". (Characters in many of these games like to buy clothes and furnishings as well as more obvious things like weapons to build up their individual identity). Unfortunately he found the process of making furniture online rather dull, so instead he started buying cheap furniture from hard-to-find "non-player" computer characters and selling it at a profit.

He started doing quite well, so he set up a showroom in his in-game house. So far, so normal. But one day, during the act of selling a "gnomish thinking chair", he came across a glitch where, by performing a certain series of actions, he sold the chair to another player but somehow still retained the original item.He tried it a second time and the same thing happened. "I must have turned bright red. I was waiting for some alarm to go off. There, in front of me, was the most beautiful gnomish thinking chair I have ever seen," he writes. "I now knew a working dupe. God bless those gnomes and their thinking chairs."

After a brief struggle with his conscience, Methical teamed up with a partner, who helped him replicate the glitch time and time again. They were soon duplicating hundreds of items and selling them for ever-increasing quantities of game gold."We duped and duped until our eyes bled. We were laughing the whole time," Methical writes. And then he started selling his ill-gotten gains for real money.One of the most intriguing phenomena of MMORPGs over recent years has been the emergence of secondary markets, over the internet. They allow players with more dollars than free time to spend their real-world money on virtual currency to buy attractive in-game items.

Pay $100 in the real world and your online character gets several hundred units of game gold. With that you can buy the in-game items you desire - a fancy bow, for example, or a funky piece of clothing to help develop your identity.Some of this game gold is sold on generic auction sites but specialist companies have also sprung up, both offering a forum for exchange and trading on their own account. One such company, IGE (www.ige.com), claims on its website that "the 2005 marketplace for virtual assets . . . is approaching $900m."

In Asia and other developing parts of the world, "gold farmers" - players who spend time earning virtual gold by performing online game tasks - can earn more selling virtual currency to players in the developed world than they might by, say, making T-shirts.Game gold and real dollars have effectively become convertible: one website (www.gameusd.com) even posts the latest average exchange rates, just like the FT does with real-world currencies."Some experts believe that the market for virtual assets will overcome the primary market [in game sales and subscriptions] - projected to reach $7bn by 2009 - within the next few years," says IGE.

By discovering how to make game currency for almost no effort, Methical could effectively print his own money: "I checked the prices: they were ridiculous. $300 for a platinum [a piece of Everquest II currency]. We were pulling platinum out of thin air. We set up some player auctions and started selling," he wrote. "The first day of sales we made $500."

Methical moved on to the specialist game currency distributors. "You name them, I sold to them. Our money was spreading like syphilis at a nymphomaniac recovery summer camp."The money started pouring in. Money that made me so scared I went and consulted with a lawyer and an accountant. Needless to say, neither of them had a clue as to what the hell we were talking about," he writes. "Try telling your accountant you're making money by selling pieces of gold in a video game."Unfortunately for Methical, however, his greed ran away with him and he started doing things that allowed him to be caught. He duplicated a vast number of rare "Halasian Maulers", a kind of pet dog, which caused questions to be asked.

His characters were also showing up on the game's statistics sites as making much more money than appeared feasible for their level. In the end, he says, Sony Online Entertainment (the game's maker) found out and informed him that his account was banned. But he had already made a killing."The exact total of what I profited is not important," Methical says. "Just know it's more than some people make in a year and it was enough to take my girlfriend and entire family on a vacation to Paris.

"PS. Sorry for ruining the economy and all that."

Fascinated by his tale, I tried to hunt Methical down to talk to him but he proved elusive. However, Chris Kramer from Sony Online Entertainment, confirmed that the company knew of him, that he'd been "problematical" and that he had been banned from the game. But Kramer also said there were "a number of inconsistencies within his story" and "some serious doubt about the veracity of his claims".

IGE similarly had heard of the tale and raised doubts about its accuracy but did not shoot it down entirely.It is not surprising that the game-makers and currency exchange sites are wary of raising the profile of someone who claims to have cheated the system. I, like other players, am inclined to believe there is significant truth to Methical's story, which provoked a storm of debate and comment in the gaming community when it was posted on the internet.Whatever the precise truth, there have been other confirmed cases of duping and people are clearly ­making a lot of money from trading game gold.

This raises important questions. As game currency takes on real-world value, what are the rules governing it? Does ownership of game gold entail property rights, or intellectual property rights? If something alters the value of the gold (such as duping or changes to the game design), is there room for redress?According to Kramer, the situation is clear. "We own the gold. Everything within the world is the property of Sony Online Entertainment." That said, SOE recently launched its own "station exchange" service (http://stationexchange.station.sony.com) where players can buy and sell game items and characters. The implication is that Sony also recognises that the stuff being traded has value. However, Kramer asserts that, rather than the property itself "people are buying and selling the rights to use" it.

"We have the right to take it away if necessary," he says. "We allow people to come in and play in the world but they don't own the world. Our games are entertainment; we provide an entertainment service to our subscribers."But legal experts are questioning how sustainable that position might be. According to Joshua Fairfield, associate professor of law at Indiana University: "The fight is whether or not there is any property interest for people who legitimately obtain these things."Asian countries, he says, have begun to tackle theft and abuse in online game economies with traditional property rules. "Korea, Japan and China have all cracked down very heavily on people who steal [or] abuse the economy," he says.

A recent New York Law Journal article reports how, in December 2003, "the Chaoyang District People's Court in Beijing ruled that the game company Arctic Ice Technology Development should restore to gamer Li Hongchen a virtual arsenal stolen from him when the game Red Moon was hacked.""The court determined that AITD should restore the weapons at a cost of RMB1,140 (about $138) and pay most of Li's court costs." It also cited a Korean law that instructs that "online virtual property holds value independent of the game's parent company/creator. The lawmakers reached the conclusion that there is no fundamental difference between virtual property and money deposited in the bank."

In the west, however, the approach has been to let businesses work out their own standards. The question is whether their solutions will stand the tests of time and litigation. Prof Fairfield believes Sony might be "trying to craft a new property right that is not defensible".

Steve Salyer, the president of IGE, which allows players to buy game gold online, takes a more pragmatic approach: "I don't personally have an opinion about whether they are leasing a right or whether it is a virtual item to which virtual property laws apply." he says."I've made it a point to speak to [the game companies] and say, 'Look, we are on the same side of the table. You don't want to litigate against your customers; I don't want to litigate against my customers'."He said it was not necessarily in either party's interests to get clarity through litigation but insisted that IGE did not support duping or "botting", where characters set up subroutines to perform tasks on auto.

Edward Castronova, another Indiana University professor who has led the way in charting the new phenomenon, calls it the dawning of a new era. "It's happening so fast," he said. "The phase we're in right now is that everyone is ­trying to apply the proper metaphor. This is terra nova; a lot of these phenomena are frontier phenomena."But as legal scholars debate what the rules are, so do the gamers. Their approach is not so much what property law applies or not but whether it is morally right to buy online gold in the first place.

Two camps have emerged. On the one hand there are those who are convinced that advancing through the game by buying items, rather than earning them, is cheating and should be stopped. Even worse, in their view, are those players who use game glitches or create "bots" to perform tasks automatically.

Others insist there is nothing wrong with using money to bypass dull tasks. "Why do people have such an issue with buying gold?" asks a player called Sortilege, a troll mage, on a World of Warcraft forum. "I have limited playtime. I'm in my 30s, I work, I make good real-life money. Time is much more valuable to me in real life than money because it is a finite resource. I don't want to spend that time farming . . . but playing and having fun instead. God, I love capitalism!"Another player, Euthyphro, a human priest, responds: "The problem is mass buying of gold only truly benefits the gold sellers and everyone else ends up being screwed over. It drives up prices . . . "

"Actually, it only screws over the poor folk and little kids still on an allowance" shoots back a Tauren shaman called Cleaner. "I don't buy it now but I may consider doing it in the future and I won't give a damn what anyone thinks about it."

I recently had my own ethical dilemma to struggle with. After one complaint too many from my girlfriend, I finally decided it was time to hang up Eghed's spurs.I concluded that the only way to avoid myself going back in a weak moment was to delete the character altogether. It was a heart­rending decision: all those hours building up powers and reputation for nothing. But it had to be done.Then a thought struck me. I could probably sell Eghed for several hundred dollars - real dollars. He had many desirable items and was a member of a powerful guild.

I guess the game company behind World of Warcraft, Blizzard, a division of Vivendi, would, like Sony, probably argue that he wasn't really mine to sell. Yet he was something I had created. He represented my time, my skills, my experience.Finally, though, my decision had as much to do with personal ethics as the finer points of intellectual property. It is hard to explain but handing over Eghed to another player just seemed wrong. He might abuse the trust others had in my Eghed, the one that did not steal nice items and knew what to do. What if someone else wrecked Eghed's colleagues' game experience? Colleagues who had assisted Eghed out of altruistic good will.

On balance, I decided he had to die. But I still wonder whether I made the right decision. After all, like Methical, I could have treated my girlfriend with those dollars - a nice dinner and flowers, perhaps, rather than a trip to Paris - to make up for all that time spent in another world]]> General http://www.shizit.com/index.php?itemid=39 Sun, 13 Nov 2005 16:22:10 -0800 http://www.shizit.com/index.php?itemid=38
Gametea currently offers its 10 million registered users over 80 online board and poker games. It has an active user base of over 1 million and its game portal reaches a concurrent user base of close to 90,000 during recent peak periods.
According to the terms of the transaction which is subject to a final agreement with customary closing conditions, China.com will acquire all assets, intellectual properties, and operating contracts in Gametea and the consideration will be payable in multiple installments in accordance with pre-determined performance milestones.

Gametea has users from 28 cities across China and is particularly strong in the Zhejiang province in China. Some of its poker and chess games are ranked in the top tier of Chinese online games in its respective genre.]]> General http://www.shizit.com/index.php?itemid=38 Thu, 6 Oct 2005 13:22:12 -0700 http://www.shizit.com/index.php?itemid=37 (MMORPGs), which now draw more than 20 million players globally. Alongside the multiplayer universe is a marketplace for the virtual characters and other assets created online.

Some big name corporate players have started to get into the business of virtual asset trading, which is so hot that some industry experts say it may be overheated.

Still, virtual asset trading has a long way to go before it rival's eBay's multibillion-dollar revenue. Still, virtual asset trading has a long way to go before it rival's eBay's multibillion-dollar revenue.

And some sellers like Larkin -- who spent hours gearing up his characters to high levels with items including "the staff of dominance," a "kroll blade" and an "epic kodo" mount -- find that the process has been more a labour of love than a fast road to wealth.

Online games are all about fantasy worlds, but sites that enable trading of virtual goods such as powerful game characters and currency help players broker and buy status and power for cold hard cash -- just like in the real world.

"It's a way to make some extra money," said Larkin, who had hoped for a bigger profit from the eBay auction of his Level 60 Troll Rogue -- which has the power to go invisible around equal or lower level characters -- and Level 60 Undead Mage -- which is equipped with magical powers.

He was under pressure to sell before leaving Texas to study in England, where he will not have the same unfettered access to MMORPGs, where thousands of people play simultaneously.

"World of Warcraft," the world's largest MMORPG, boasts more than 4 million paying users -- including more than 1 million in North America. Some characters have sold for thousands of dollars.

Dan Hunter, assistant professor of legal studies and business ethics at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, was not surprised that Larkin's auction take was not the windfall he expected, saying that in-game economies are profoundly broken due to huge inflationary pressures.

"If they were real-world economies, they'd be like a Banana Republic," said Hunter, who noted that virtual worlds have an unlimited money supply that is not being efficiently drained.

Contributing to the problem are "gold pharmers" who flood the market with in-game currency.

In several developing countries, multiple players will use one account to mine game gold non-stop. They then sell the gold through a site like IGE, which resells game gold or currencies and allow people to trade virtual assets for "real world" money.

Real countries use levers like interest rate adjustments to manage their economic health, and virtual gamers have their own way of attempting to correct perceived imbalances.

"There is a kill-on-sight rule for certain guilds (groups)" when members see what they think is a gold pharmer, Hunter said.

REAL-WORLD PROFIT OPPORTUNITY?

Many trades take place on sites like IGE and eBay, but competition is mounting as more individuals and companies see the chance to make money from virtual asset sales.

Sony Online Entertainment, whose multiplayer titles include "Star Wars Galaxies" and "EverQuest," recently changed its stance on virtual asset trading and began fostering deals for items in "EverQuest II."

Some of the virtual assets recently offered for online sale include a "rare" Robo Dog for "The Sims Online", listed for $41 on eBay. IGE is having a "World of Warcraft" gold sale, offering 500 gold for as low as $51.99 on some servers.

The average MMO player is a 27-year-old male -- a demographic drooled over by marketers. Plus, nearly half of all MMO players have jobs, which often means they have more money than time and are the perfect consumers of virtual assets.

While Larkin and numerous others have made money selling characters, gold and weapons for use in such games, buyers of such items are often regarded with disdain.

"I wouldn't play with them because they didn't put in the time and effort to learn the game," said Larkin.

According to a recent survey by IGN Entertainment, the publisher of gaming Web sites and magazines, most gamers say they despise and avoid sites like IGE, believing that they give players with more discretionary income an unfair advantage.

But such attitudes are called into question by size estimates for the virtual asset trading market, which is seen having a value of $200 million to nearly $900 million in 2005.

One potential explanation for the disconnect between attitudes and money spent may be that gamers are unwilling to admit they use the services, IGN said.

"People do role play, but a lot of real-world behaviours, market pressures and social pressures port over very quickly," said Dmitri Williams, assistant professor for speech communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

"For many people in the game guilds, the idea of paying for your character is verboten," Williams said.]]> General http://www.shizit.com/index.php?itemid=37 Tue, 4 Oct 2005 12:43:24 -0700 http://www.shizit.com/index.php?itemid=36 Are phishing crews paying more attention to virtual worlds? Phishing attacks on massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) have been around since at least 2002, and perhaps earlier. But some observers of online games say the growing market for virtual currency and player accounts may be attracting fresh attention from phishing scams, which are mass-mailing "bait" e-mails seeking to capture gamers' account logins.

Phishing attacks most commonly target banks, credit card companies and payment sites such as Paypal. This year phishers have expanded their target list to include smaller regional banks and credit unions. While phishing attacks on online games aren't new, they may represent a logical area of expansion for these scams, given the growing value of player accounts, the youthful demographics of online gaming, and a recent influx of new players due to the popularity of World of Warcraft.A recent phishing attack targeting users of EVE Online was reported by Terra Nova, a blog that follows trends in virtual worlds. The bait email purports to be from the game's security team, investigating unusual account activity and sending victims to a spoof site at a server in Spain.

Early phishes on MMORPGs date to 2002, when Dark Age of Camelot began warning users about bait emails, while other early efforts targeted Everquest. In January Netcraft received reports of a phishing attack seeking to steal user account details for Runescape, a free virtual world popular with younger gamers.

In South Korea, where online gaming is hugely popular, malware has been used to try and steal account details. Early this year a remote access trojan with keylogging capabilities sought to capture login details for Lineage, which has millions of users. Last month a keylogger-equipped worm was discovered stealing usernames and passwords for another Korean MMORPG, Priston Tale.

TerraNova's Dan Hunter predicts phishing attacks may increase due to the growing trade in "game gold" and other game-related assets, which has thrived at eBay and gaming auction sites such as IGE, despite bans on such sales by most game publishers. "Presumably (the phishers) empty the account as soon as they get the password, by transferring the assets to their accounts, and then they sell the virtual assets on eBay," writes Hunter. "It's an indication of how significant the asset holdings are in some of these worlds, that it's worth setting up a scam like this for the account details. And it can hardly be an accident that the first one targets EVE - a world known mostly for its trade."

The Netcraft Toolbar is currently available for both Internet Explorer and Firefox, and automatically blocks access to known phishing sites whilst displaying the longevity, hosting location and country for each site you visit. The toolbar can be freely downloaded, and customized versions of the toolbar can provide phishing targets with a powerful tool to protect their customers and networks from Internet phishing scams.]]> General http://www.shizit.com/index.php?itemid=36 Fri, 30 Sep 2005 13:21:17 -0700