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Is stealing and scamming considered a normal, expected and acceptable behavior in MMOGs?
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I'm sorry op but you dropped stuff because it was fun to watch folks pick it up. This is on you. I'm like you were intentionally dropping stuff to watch folks pick it up, were past the point of folks stealing, you were giving stuff away to have a laugh. Only at some point did you realize that something went wrong and you drop 1500 instead of 1 copper. Perhaps they should have some sort of system going hey that's a lot of cash are you sure. I know in eq2 you can set limits of what you want to spend on the broker and get a warning going that item is x-amount of plat.
The entire argument you have of folks slealing from you is out the window, you were giving the stuff away. I don't know why but you were dropping items, cash or whatever it was and you admit to it. You have no recourse, other than to go cry, and hopefully learn a leason. 1500 dollars is a lot of money and I have to ask what you were doing dropping stuff in the first place. This entire thread reaks and I have to call into question what was really going on.
Indeed. In many games it isn't even "digital property" as many TOS'es and user agreements state that all ingame items and currency are the sole property of the company itself and how they can do whatever they damn well like with it, just like they can ban accounts from paying customers without refunds. Which kind of makes the whole ingame-real life comparison an effort in futility.
Bottom line: As soon as you transfered your real life money into ingame commodities, you surrender its value's worth to the mercy of the user agreement you signed as a player.
My brand new bloggity blog.
this only kicks in if that wallet have any kind of ID on it and/or you can prove it, it also have a minimum valor to make it a felony, and on this case its first the internet, you do not trust anyone on the internet, if you do its your problem crying over it on the internet don't solve anything, and if he bought some items via RMT he is even more stupid.
for me this case is stupid dude being stupid and hoping someone feel pity on him and give him something for it. well only thing I can say really is move on
No denying that whoever picked up those items is a thief.
But people drop things they do not want in games all the time (I always pick them up too), although the thing is something of such massive quanities and worth that much in real $ should have been returned or atleast questioned if that person had any decency.
I don't expect anything to be done by the company about this though, things like this happen all the time and nothing is ever returned, they cannot be responible for an error you made yourself, not to mention there's no way for them to tell if it were done on purpose or an honest mistake.
If they were to replace said items, who's to stop someone from claiming the same but having a friend take them instead and getting free items out of the deal?
Things just do not work this way for good reason.
I think that sucks and am sorry to hear that happened to you, but no theft was involved sadly.
Someone profited from your mistake, sucks it was such a big mistake for sure, but your mistake it was. =(
If it was actually theft then maybe you could do something about it, but basically your error caused you to lose your stuff. Be more careful next time, and really have a look at why in the hell were you carrying around $1500 worth of stuff in that scam they call a game.
Wake up call maybe?
So this one time in Maple story (I know I know) this guy dropped something on the ground, jumped around it and made emotes so I picked it up and he made smiling emotes and then ran away.
And now I am THIEF?!? Are you seriously accusing me of stealing? Are you accusing me - in public?!? Of a CRIME? Me?!? For what? For accepting a GIFT? Do you have some limits on gifts, do you leave prices on gifts so you relatives can double check that they are not commiting crimes?
Am I close to the real story?
Or was it black market and tax evasion and you want police to enforce your shady deals?
I'm not entirely sure that if you find some anonymous $1500 worth items (wallets are a different thing, they usually have ID cards and stuff) on the ground someone can simply claim it without a very solid proof (i.e. being taped) even in the U.S.
Especially if that item was left on purpose as a gift...
Actually, no. The guy who dropped his money didn't have any ID with it, I believe it was actually just a pile of bills FROM his wallet. It doesn't matter, you still are supposed to report it to the police. Seriously. Go look up the pertinent laws.
Incorrect. If the item was left as a gift, you have to be AWARE that it was left as a gift. Perhaps if it had a ribbon on it and 'To whoever wants it'. (Just being gift wrapped might mean you stole somebody's present. Which makes you a thief AND a jerk.)
Even if it's just a pile of money, or somebody dropping their watch or whatever, it's still theft if you just take it with no reasonable effort made to get it back to the original owner.
Sure, you probably won't get caught, but that doesn't mean what you did is legal, it just means you got away with a crime, that's all.
In U.S. law it would only be free for the taking, in most states, if you intentionally and voluntarily relinquishes all right, title, and interest. This doesn't have to be formal, e.g. throwing stuff in the trash had be held up in courts to infer voluntary and intentional relinquishment.
So here you voluntarily dropped something on the ground, but not in the right amount, arguably, not intentionally. So it probably is theft.
However, that is not your main problem, I just say that to clarify hopefully the earlier discussions of lost property.
The bigger problem is that in the context of this game, you consented to this risk. At least according to the response from the GM on your web page, the TOS tells you that dropping items is risky.
For example, when people enter into a boxing match, can they sue each other for assault? The only difference from a boxing match and assault is consent - They hit each other, intentionally, it is unwelcome, BUT it is consented to.
You consented to play their game according to their rules.
As to why you would spend $2500 on a game is beyond me. Must be nice.
"Never met a pack of humans that were any different. Look at the idiots that get elected every couple of years. You really consider those guys more mature than us? The only difference between us and them is, when they gank some noobs and take their stuff, the noobs actually die." - Madimorga
I agree. If you're willing to spend $1500 on in-game items, then you should know the games mechanics well enough to understand that to drop an item is to discard it. Aside from recommending some intermediate "are you sure you want to drop X Y?" screen, or maybe even an intermediate intermediate screen, "seriously, dude, are you REALLY sure you want to drop x million y?", no more interaction with customer support is warranted. You really shouldn't expect that no one pick it up, or that the GM's give it back to you.
Now, if you were hacked, I'd have a different opinion. But here, it's your mistake. It wasn't a failing of game mechanics, or a scam where a player is exploiting game mechanics to make you believe something that isn't true to get something from you. Or a player exploiting metagame security to steal all your virtual belongings. You dropped something you didn't intend, and you left it there unsupervised long enough for someone else to be wandering by, see it, and scoop it up.
There's a saying among financial savvy folks: Never buy something that you can't afford to lose; the exception, of course, being something that can be insured.
Not that I don't have sympathy. Thanks to not reading the tiny print on the applicator, I used the fleadrops for a 50 pound dog on my cat, which nearly killed the poor thing. Fortunately, the cat is ok, but my mistake cost 800 dollars in vet bills. I could blame the tiny writing, but in the end, I should've known that it was tiny writing that I should have read before using it on an animal.
People in games these days have no morality they think if they CAN do something dishonest and not get caught then its ok to do it.
personal responsability is a big issue. If you knowingly engage in activity that you know is wrong or risky then you deserve what you get. however the person taking advantage of that person isnt innocent just because he found an easy/willing mark.
I voted that the game's CS Team should have helped you out, but even at that I would put an * beside it and say that they should if the item was destroyed, and they have the capacity to check the game logs, confirm that you aren't lying and that the item was indeed destroyed, and then maybe restore it (if they have the capability).
However, if someone did pick it up than they can't do anything if the person isn't willing to give it back. Fact is is that this is entirely your own fault, you made the mistake and someone else gained something as a result. Would I give it back? Yeah I think I would. Should I have to? No, I would have found something I could use and I took it. Either way the CS Team for that game won't be able to just take things from that character without consent, no CS Team ever do that in any game.
It's not a police matter because nothing illegal happened. For my analogy I will say that it isn't like you putting your backpack on the ground and someone taking it (because that is illegal), but it's more like you bringing a working TV to a dump to get rid of it. You leave it there, drive away, realise that actually you might want to keep it and going back to get it. Once there the TV has been claimed by someone else and it is gone. You have nothing to complain about because you left it down, you left it for grabs, if you had not done that we wouldn't be talking about this now.
The player, if one did indeed pick it up, morally should have given it back (given that it was a large amount of money), but was under no obligation to
Sorry just checked out your website and saw that a) someone did pick it up, and b) you actually did get warned when you dropped it that it could be picked up by anyone, also it appears in the chat what you have dropped, and how much you have dropped
This is your fault, not the CS Team, so I guess you just have to get on with life
Also there is another case you have up where you wanted to leave the game for a while and so believed a guy who said he'd mind your stuff for you in case you wanted to come back, you gave him all your stuff and surprise surprise he didn't give it back to you
That is fairly dumb
Also I'd suspend you for about a week or two for spamming the CS Team, issue threats and stalking other characters
I'm surprized that OP is surprized
If in-game stuff is so valuable, then the game has a lot of grinding. No thing can cost so much if it is not too difficult to get. So if you want to avoid such issues in the future, than stop playing games with grinding and try something like GW1 or some offline games.
Actually, it *was* a gift: he was purposedly gifting low amounts of money, but by mistake he gifted something he didn't meant to.
Let's make this other example, more pertinent: you have $1500. You put 10 cents in 10 boxes, then put the remaining $1499 in another one slightly different. You proceed to give away the 10 boxes with 10 cents each, but by your mistake you give away the "big" one instead.
I don't think you can have it back.
Actually gifts given through mistake can be forced to be returned if a court finds that an 'unjust enrichment' occurs.
RL laws on things of this nature are extremely complex and deal with various categories of property, contracts, gifts, salvage rights, etc. There is a ton of rules in law that protect people from mistakes that normal media fails to portray accurately.
The problem is that no one is really sure which of these laws should be applicable in a virtual world, especially in something that is labeled as a 'game'.
Yes,
Why?
Because people , who practice these methods can do so at the comforts of their own homes and not be threatened by any false givings of E-Reputation when caught or at the most extreme exiled from the community.
at any given time, they can simply pack up and move to the next viable source of victims. and repeat the same behavior until caught again.
Then you have those who are on the fence of such practices, even to catch their would be predators they themselves would not want such a profession to be completely eradicated, they want in on the fun as well despite their hollow opinion of whats acceptable and what is not.
and for companies, if any of that "positive" resources comes their way, or it does nothing to ruin their cash flow, they have ways of joining into the party, While keeping the prosecutors at bay, to the point that their constant screams will label them as tin foil cap extremists and doom sayers to the rest of the community.
if such predators are threaten in a way that physically or mentally , financially harms them, along with the risk vs. reward being skewed to absolute idiocy, then scammers and the like will find other occupations and ways to screw with people outside of mmog's.
There is absolutely no mentioning of dropping items in the "TOS" (see http://legal.entropiauniverse.com/legal/terms-of-use.xml ). And all you get before you drop something on the ground is a small confirmation dialog which states the type of the item being dropped (Mind Essence in my case) without any quantity info and a statement like "Any item you drop may be picked up my another colonist".
Maybe my english is not good enough, but that statement does not sound to me like "You are about to gift your item(s) to anyone who manages to pick them up first." I may be wrong, but I don't see anything about ownership transfer or anything of that kind in the "ToS" or the warning dialog displayed before you drop an item. And once the item(s) are dropped, they all look the same, so it's very easy to NOT notice the mistake right away.
Don't get me wrong. I know it was my mistake to drop the wrong stack. Looking at it now, I also feel stupid for dropping small stacks of Mind Essence as well. I also know now that I could have moved the 100M stack completely out of the way so I would not even be able to reach it while dropping smaller stacks. I also know now that I could simply have left the 100M stack in storage to keep it entirely out of the way. But all these "ideas" to avoid this problem came to me AFTER the accident has already happened.
So ... I don't think it's only game mechanics fault I dropped the wrong stack. There are ways to avoid this if you think it through. But I also don't accept the whole blame and I'm alarmed to see now that 30% of people playing MMOGs seem to have very twisted concepts of ownership, morale and ethics.
From a moral perspective I think this is fairly cut and dried. Even though it sounds like the OP was being a bit of a jerk, dropping the large stack was clearly a ghastly mistake and ownership should be reverted accordingly.
The legal side is a lot more tricky though and unless there are specific provisions in the ToS i'm not sure anyone knows what stance the courts would take on what constitutes the transfer of virtual ownership of this virtual property. There is so little precedence in this kind of thing I suspect the courts would tend to reach a ruling which seems morally correct but i'm only guessing.
I don't know how much MindArk care about all of this but I guess it's an awkward situation from their perspective. They may be reluctant to revert the ownership because they feel that would be harder to defend if the case went to court.
Well if a game is going to deal with real money and the probability of this type of problem they should have a better method to ensure something like this does not happen. It is not monopoly money it's real money so it's no joke. They should introduced some laws on video games and the liability of the company since when you allow people to spend real money then you should police your game better.
I see the problem, its all in the game mechanics. Players should be able to kill you and loot your corpse, then you'd never take a stack of mats out of storage like you did and you couldn't have lost them.
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I think the answer to this question depends upon the game.
Clearly the game you are playing actually has in game items pegged to real world currency. Most games do not operate this way though there might be secondary parties that sell in game items.
In Lineage 2 scamming/stealing was part of the game.
In many games you can't drop items on the ground or the auction house lists items as they are as opposed to allowing players to list items themselves thus circumventing a player from claiming they are selling an item with a similar icon to another item.
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Sorry to hear, but as you firstly stated, you dropped the items on the floor by your own mistake, as the game mechanic allows for others to pick up dropped items, i dont think there is much you can do about it. Also I dont not think the company should be liable in anyway for your mistakes either
Its not nice to lose ingame items sure and most of us either ingame or out have been scammed, robbed or exploited and learned a big lesson from it
rav3n2, I'm not the one who wrote the Game User Interface. It was MindArk. By their design, items dropped on the ground lose any quantity information - unless you move your mouse over them. So ... if anyone was "entraping" someone or "luring" them into committing a crime, it would have been MindArk with their badly designed User Interface.