Post about IGE you should readFollow

I'm assuming our law abiding citizen who owns MySupersales has reported all of his real money earnings off his site sales to the IRS, because they can sure get nasty when they find someone forgetting about the $1.5K x all those sold characters and stuff. Could even end up shutting them down and being tossed in jail if the auditors found anything.

I've also heard that people who report tax evaders get a percentage of the loot gathered by the IRS.

Just a thought...

Out of all possible options one so far has not been mentioned: SOE can issues a corporate grievance with Visa and MasterCard citing 3rd party institutional fraud. The fraud in this case would be construed as a contract between two parties that was held in detriment to the third party, and in violation of the stated SOE licensing agreements. Interesting enough federal and international law does not apply. Why?

Every company or business that wishes to accept either MasterCard or Visa transactions must be underwritten by a financial institution (a.k.a. a bank). Before the bank allows the business to process any credit card transactions, they must first sign a fairly lengthy compliance agreement with MasterCard/Visa. Any actions by the business outside of this contract will result in very hefty fines being levied by MasterCard/Visa, or in the most severe cases the permanent revocation of their ability to process credit card transactions. Fines may be issued either directly to the business, or to the bank underwriting the account.

Although a breach of contract can be used in court to help determine any warranted damages, Visa & MasterCard retain the right at any time to drop a customer that may be overly problematic. Dropping of a customer doesn’t have to go to court. It is a simple matter of convincing Visa & MasterCard that the signed compliance agreement has been significantly violated (usually over a prolonged period of time). Normally this is done through two parties via a series of third level chargebacks, but in the case of a third party an auditor can be assigned to make a ruling.

Of course SOE would need tons of evidence of the exact transaction between IGE and the customer, and this could be very difficult to obtain (since it was a transaction that never was processed with SOE). If SOE could figure some legal way of obtaining this information they have it within their power to request that Visa/MasterCard prevent IGE from ever being able to process another credit card transaction.

First of all we all have choices and the ones with more money have more choices and that is what brings me to this post. Now, not forgetting that EQ is a game (we have to keep perspective) and the reward for playing hard, playing long, investing to SOE monthly, investing REAL LIFE precious time and divorcing ones self from reality is the "DING"...a new level...higher skills...more friends...and most importantly "RESPECT". In my opinion the respected players are the ones you hear about, the ones that help others, the ones that "GIVE" instead of take. They are not the people that go out and buy old accounts or plat. They know how hard it is to start from scratch and remember the thrill they felt when they got their first pp. For those who spend real money for game plat are only cheating themselves. Once you attain all your uber armor, weapons, spells etc...what is left? You have a twinked toon with few skills and little knowledge of the game. You cheat yourself out of the thrill of getting the last few plat needed to get that one item you have been bashed, slashed, burned and LOADING, PLEASE WAIT ... to attain. Now I've been lucky in game, peeps have given me items that have really helped me out...I have spent hours in the bazaar looking for "bargains" for my beastlord...I have fixed her up so I can help others so that they can get that drop or that last gold bubble to the next level for a "to die for" spell. I have yet to sell anything in or out of the bazaar (except to merchants) I either loan or trade with friends or I look for newbies in PoK and give them items I have outgrown or loot I don't need.
It is the players choice how they attain their plat...but once you spend it all...once you look at your credit card and see you spent your hard earned money to buy money to buy uber items just stop and ask yourself "what do I have to show for this?" Give me the sense of accomplishment and let hear that "DING" and watch me RUN to bazaar to buy that item I busted my butt for...yep, I'll take the thrill over the steal any day.
To buy plat is to cheat yourself out of the spirit of the game...it takes dedication, devotion, and the Spirit Of Accomplishment and Spirit of Respect to win in EQ.

Just my own 2cp here...

Terris-Thule
Barbarian Beastlord Goddess 45
Human Bard 13
Dark ELf Wizard 5
High ELf Enchanter 10
Kitty Bard 18
Barbarian Shaman 5
Half Elf 1






Edited, Tue Feb 3 18:39:38 2004 by Allakhazam

I love this thread; it points out one of the horrible things that happened to the game since SOE took over. I send them feedback all the time and I am sure by now they have a progrom running just to delete everything I send so they can ignore me. LoL. I have taken a personal war against the bazaar and all the high prices. Not just the cheats and hacks, but all the asses that raise their prices also hoping that the folk that buy that plat will spend some on them. I work with a group of tradeskillers on Xev. I buy and resale tradeskill components (I sale at same price I buy, this is not a money making deal for me) I auction constently and go to zones buying up all the items before they have a chance to hit the bazaar. (Well most of them. some people will still try to sell for much more then I pay in the bazaar and I feel sorry for them because they lose my business and thus a good amount of PP). I then pass these savings onto folk that have come to know me. I don't know about them; but I buy in volume and sale my JC items for less then anyone else on server. Because I deal in volume I still make a good amount of PP and anyone sitting in bazaar trying to sell off a bloodmetal Earring for 30k it sits there for damn near ever because everyone knows I sell for less. I pass this idea off to the rest of you. Pick a market, don't try to get into everything. Pick one market and make it your own. Get word of mouth out, it will be easy if you are a fair dealer. People will go on waiting list to buy from you. (this isn;t only for tradeskill items. You can choose to buy up and sell fungis for example. If they are going for 90k on your server put your name out, let people now you are buying offer 60-75k. then sell them at 80k. prices will drop and you can buy cheaper. If you don't put it up in the bazaar the hacks can't win)

Gbaji is right.

SOE will defend the game's integrity when they believe it is threatened.

And, they will absolutely hate the thought of IGE making money out of it without paying any liscense fee or royalty.

You can be absolutely certain that there will be some serious discussion taking place at SOE as they formulate their postion on this issue.

But;

1. They will want to investigate for themselves and determine just how big the scale of it all is. (So far we have nothing but rumor and speculation, SOE will not make any decisions or take any sort of action without the true facts.)

2. The final course of action they choose will be based on a compromise, between maintaining the integrity of the game, providing an environment and game mechanic that satisfies the majority of subscribers and, increasing their revenue take where and if possible.

You can also be quite certain that one of the topics on the agenda will be to examine whether there is some avenue of unexplored (some may unexploited) "service" to subscribers which could be a legitimate extra revenue stream to SOE.

It would not be the first time that an unliscensed and unauthorised entreprenure has unwittingly developed a market for someone else's product.

If this were to take place though, I wonder how SOE would reconcile the maintainence of the game's integrity with the great new service to subscribers - buy your PP from the EQLive online store?

Of course. From the server end, it is impossible to tell the difference. That's why they've never gone after smaller operations before. It's just not worth the trouble. However, those smaller organizations have never had the impact on the game that IGE is having. If it was black and white they would always take one action or another. It's "grey" because it's not the action taken, but the degree of the action that prompts a response.

Remember. The problem from SOE's point of view isn't the sale of plat itself. It's not even the buying of plat. It's the virtual monopoly on the sale of plat by a single business. Thus, they don't need to track the sales internally. They do it externally.

It's just not that hard (how many times do I need to explain this?):

They simply run stings. Have one person, once a day, place a paypal payment to IGE. Since they are going to IGE's web site and using IGEs system and paying money to IGE, they know with absolute certainty that the account that arrives to pay them must be one owned by IGE. Since selling plat is a violatio of the EULA, they can simply ban and cancel that account right on the spot when the money shows up. There is no tracking required. It really is that simple. It might cost them a few hundred dollars a week to do (practically nothing to SOE). But each account taken from IGE sets them back enormously. They have to keep buying new accounts from people. They have to work to transfer plat to the accounts. The plat on the account being used is lost to them as well (which costs them real money since that's lost revenue, right?). I suppose IGE might use one account for each transaction, but that's probably not the case. Odds are there is platinum on the account SOE just banned that was slated to fill the orders for many players. SOE just "cost" IGE several sales with each banning. And that's assuming each account has just one character on it and only on one server. One account banning could destroy a significant amount of potential profit for IGE.

Do this once a day for a few weeks, and IGE is out of business. The only way they can protect themselves is to put only one transactions worth of plat on each account so that they minimize their losses when SOE bans an account. The problem there is that it now becomes *trivially* easy to track where the money is coming from. You ban the account and look at the logs. If you see that account has recieved specific, large amounts of cash from a single other account, you know that's the account where the plat is being kept to shuffle to the actual transaction accounts. SOE simple bans that account as well. While you can argue that there are lots of legitimate reasons to transfer large amounts of cash around in EQ, I can't think of a single legitimate reason why an account would be making multiple platinum transactions to an account used as a transfer mule for an IGE plat purchase. The only logical reason for those transaction is that the account giving the money is also owned by IGE and is used to hold money for the transactions. Ban those and you really hit IGE in the nuts.

I'm serious here. This would take virtually zero money and effort for SOE to do. They just have to decide on exactly how to go about doing it. They also have to decide that the damage to their product being caused by IGE is worth banning the accounts owned by IGE (and the loss of monthly cash for those subscriptions). However, SOE has banned accounts in the past for far less disruptive actions. Right now, I'm betting SOE is simply examining the issue and determining exacly how disruptive IGE is to their own business. If the disruption is considered too high, they will act. I can't see any reason why they wouldn't.






Again. There's virtually no tracking down required. They simply use the same mechanism that IGE uses to sell plat to customers to ban IGE accounts. SOE can literally let IGE do the work for them. As long as IGE is a big enough name, and has a large enough customer base to cause a disruption, SOE will always be able to sting them and ban the accounts used for IGE's operation. It's really that easy.

Um... Also. Selling of ingame items for RL money is expressly forbidden in the EULA. Whether that would stand up in court is a moot point. They don't have to take IGE to court. They control the servers and have the rights to ban accounts for any of a number of reasons. As long as the paypal payments SOE uses to sting IGE are valid (ie: they actually pay them), and they refund any subscription payments on the accounts they ban, there is absolutely nothing that IGE can do to prevent this legaly. Nothing.



Yes and no. SOE doesn't care too much about purchases as long as they are minor and they can legitimately say they don't know about them. IGE has made themselves into a very obvious seller of EQ "content". SOE has to do something to protect their product. The problem is a legal one. If they do nothing, they have the potential to lose any right to do anything later (kinda like a trademark loss in a way). If they sue, they have the potential to lose. If they do, then the strength of the EULA is diminshed. They may lose more in the long run going down that path. If, however, they simply enforce the EULA within something they already control (the game and the servers for the game), then they can claim that they enforced their EULA (thus protecting the legality of it if needed later), while putting the ball into IGE's court. IGE will have to sue SOE for banning their accounts. They'll have to show that their profits were lost as a result of SOE's actions. Of course, it puts them in the unenviable position of looking like they are sueing the owner of a property for not allowing them to make money off of it in a way not agreed to in a contract. IGE doesn't want this to come to a trial either, since it could result in a loss of business for other game venues (which they don't want).

The key from SOE's perspective is to make it unprofitable to sell off stuff from EQ. The sting method is the only really effective way to do that. IGE is a business just like any other. If they aren't making money selling plat in EQ, they'll stop doing it. It's just that simple.




Heh. I'm not trying to prove anything to Sony. I'm trying to explain to you what SOE will likely do, and why. Integrity sounds like a fluff kind of word until you apply it to something like the hull of a ship. Then, suddenly, it's really important. A game like EQ is just like that hull. It works because the players believe that it's worth their time to play. The integrity of the game is about how consistent the game is and will continue to be. There is a reason games like Shadowbane die off. There is a reason games like Diablo2 never become huge online hits. If it's easy to "cheat" in a game, no one's willing to invest that much money playing it. Same applies here. If the game becomes just about buying stuff online, then most of the point of playing it becomes moot. If that was not the case, the SOE wouldn't put any effort in at all to expose and remove exploits. Yet, oddly, they do spend time and effort fixing those exploits.


Why would they fix exploits like the recent plat-duping bug, and the tradeskill bugs if they didn't care about the "integrity" of their game? Same logic applies. If they see that IGEs actions are damaging to their game, they will take action to fix it. Now, I'll grant you that it's entirely possible they'll decide that IGE isn't really causing enough damage to justify action. It's possible. I don't think it's likely though. In this case, it's not just about preventing some random people from cheating. It's about another company making money off of their dime. I don't know of any corporate entity in the world that wouldn't immediately put that on the top of their "we need to fix this" list.

Hehe. Lets just wait and see. I'd expect no more then one month before we see some sort of action by SOE.

As much as I appreciate your point of view and as much as I communicate with other players solemnly on the basis of respect, reality is that our society is mainly based on success.
I'm kind of a sunday-artist and you wouldn't belive how many a*****s ask 2 sec after they've seen one of my paintings "For how much does it sell?" and NEVER ask about technique, time spent or anything else.

So expect no one to give a "piece of Owlbear dung" about how you acquired your stuff or how you did reach your level. EQ is - no mattter what server- just like real life:

EQ: Toon says "What lvl?" ..... RL: Dude says "What's your salary?"
EQ: Toon /inspects Leiany ..... RL: Dude inspects Leianys car

MMORPG's are by no means an escape from the world we live in - its just brought down to the essentials there.

Edited, Tue Feb 3 03:38:10 2004 by Leiany

well...I checked the link and....

1. EQ platinum has such limitied content that many fans can do it better and proved that in large numbers - this site is pure crap.
2. Personally I feel like SOE just pissed on my head and as soon as WoW goes online I'll be a goner.

Edited, Tue Feb 3 07:16:10 2004 by Leiany

Stop right there. You keep repeating this like it's true. The problem is from your point of view. You don't like IGE/Yantis/Whatever. Which is fine, I am not saying you have to like it, but you keep repeating that this is a problem for Sony, when there is nothing to back it up. Your explanation of HOW they could go about it is pointless because you haven't addressed WHY they should do so in the first place beyond that you don't like it.



Again you are comparing bugs/hacks to non-bugs/hacks. One is taking advantage of or outright hack the code of the game. The other, while not being "allowed" by their EULA, does not. The distinguish different levels of breaking the EULA, hacking/duping is more severe in their eyes and is enforced, buying/selling to them is benign. And again, the easiest answer for it being disallowed is CYA by Sony: They don't support it, so if you get ripped off, they will not have to help you. If they challange this in court and lose, they are going to be screwed - They will then have to moniter and prevent such scams in the future, all for the possibility of some disgruntled players that cancelled coming back if they win. Bird in the hand.

What do you attribute to the huge inflation in low to mid level items?

I'm talking about the FBSS, SCHWs, the Focus II items ... just to name a few.

Also, I thought Verant had logs for everything we do in game. I would think they can run a query for all accounts that have over XXX amount of plat. Or run query for accounts on a single credit card for XX amount of plat. Monitor those accounts that do not look to have a legit source of income.

AND they can start banning people from buying/selling plat. Since they have records, they should be able to easily tell when someone buys plat.

All they have to do is ban a couple of accounts for everyone to take notice.

Hi all,
just wanted to add my 2cp. Although these are all possible solutions to the problem, I do not feel that any of them alone, will resolve the issue totally. I do not feel closing the Bazaar would resolve anything. And why should we punish those of us who buy/sell/trade fairly? Besides, if we went back to an EC style of auctions, the same thing could be done, it would just take a little more work. I believe the best solution can be achieved in two steps. 1. Do NOT buy anything from those who wish to "take advantage" of the the system. If it is way overpriced, forget it, do without or try to hunt/quest for it. If no one is buying their stock, they will be forced to reduce the price eventually. 2. Now I saw this one posted already, but I am including it here as well. Spread the word, tell a friend, guildie or simply tell a stranger how you feel about it. I believe there are far more PC's out there who choose to earn what they acquire and get a sense of satisfaction and accomplshment by doing so, the way the game was intended. Additionally, use the "in-game" /feedback command and tell SOE how you feel. Make it the first thing you do when you log on tonight. If you read some of these posts, you must have an opinion. Now all you have to do is make it known. Thanks for letting me add my thoughts.

Good hunting.

so, in other words, these ppl live to buy stuff from bazaar instead of work for lvl 65 and get in a guild that is elemental flagged, where they can get any number of no drop items. i understand where these guys are coming from, but this is no longer a game for low end people who play to buy a 5k item anymore. this is an established game and sony already has shown through its expansions (except ldon) that this game is now for higher end ppl. ornate? go farm it in solro or nameds in bot. u dont have solro flag...go get it. instead of ******** about prices in the bazaar for an item, work harder to go get gear in high end zones that are better anyways.

this game is not meant for every user to have the same experience. the ppl who play all the time do more than the casual players. so, if someone wants to cheat and get all the items they can buy, so be it. let them be the hard core, full ft, max hp and mana, 5 kazillion plat person they want...and they will be the most uber ppl in bot. big deal. woot, a big bad uber person in bot. u wont see those ppl in high end zones since most of them cant play their characters anyways. point is, play your game your way, dont worry about any others.

oh, since im the only one saying anything negative, i expect to get flamed, accused of cheating, etc...i dont really care. chances are, i wont even read this again. i will still go about my normal daily business of playing EQ and having fun while u guys get depressed because joe bob is cheating and has more plat than u.

Masculine
Level 65 Cleric
Forsaken on the Rodcet Nife server

Um. I'm sure that is going to frighten them.

Funny thing is, by sending that you are weakening your own stance... You are telling them "I don't like this! But I don't hate it enough to stop paying you so stop, or I'll... ask you to stop again!"





Either the EULA must be followed to the letter, or it is enforced by Sony when they think it needs to be enforced. So, where is the drama to stop this guy? He is also violating the same EULA quoted above. This guy is actually HACKING the game to reverse engineer a server emulator, so you are going to pay him so you can get away from the.... hackers??

Right.