I think gamers should stick together no matter what game they enjoy, I can’t believe how negative some of you are and senseless to feelings. Thats not what gaming is about.

I am a beta tester for the sims online i have been paying and playing for almost six years for 4 accounts and 1 year on a new account.. I know its really hard for people to understand what happen you have to have been there to understand the hurt, the rage, that some are feeling about EA’s closing of our game. Six years we have worked, played, and helped each other through all the bugs the botters exploits, the fact that ea left us out in the cold years ago.. When luc and his team come in it was a sigh of relief.. no updates had been made in years none what so ever. No dev team nothing new.. most of us thought our game was gone.. but that my friends turned out to be bitter sweet. We love our game truely its a part of our everyday lives we sit and relax and play our games. The new team comming in was a god sent… none of us I mean none of us were ready for that horrific post on the blogs.. Our dev team worked harder then any dev team that I had seen in years in game. There were promises of new and upcomming updates, they emailed old players said come back well give u amnesty.. they changed the date on that pushed it back and then the day before boom we got hit with… EA closing Ea land. They took our game name they took the name of our sims and changed them to so called avatars, they wanted to change the name of our money.. our game got lost some where it was no longer the sims online we know and love and none of us were ready for that but went along for the ride.

Our homes our lives in game were changed forever. Six years of waiting it all out to hopefully see changes all lost.. People were heart broken alot come back just to see the new changes there was alot of hope in alot of people.. we used their atms it was to better the game when they made the price of living in there so bad that we could not live any more. We supported them through bad bugs horrible game play lag.. to be told screw you were closing with out any warning at all.. some sims used atms and put as much as 200 plus dollars in at one time…

We are heart broken ea has never done us right their advertizing for our game has been almost nill.. their customer support is what killed the game to begin with… errors would happen people would loose their things to get the run around when reported to ea nothin has ever been givin back to the players that they worked so hard for.

They took all our devs away bam no warning.. 3 weeks before with no word all the updates stopped.. (and there were plenty scheduled they kept us advised of what they were working on and when it possibly be implimented)
Closed us down the day before we were to get all our gifts back with amnesty. Told us we would no longer be charged after that date.. that we would all have free play till aug 1, 2008.. and free club pogo subscriptions.

We were outraged to say the least.. our hard earned real money waisted in atms. Promises not kept.. Months of next to no game play because of updates bugs and mishaps and us still stickin in was all for nothin. They said that our game play would continue as always… well it hasnt.. they have decided to do refunds on all the atm charges and our subscription fees for a month… which the atm charges no one has seen yet to my knowlege and that was posted I’d say at least a week ago. Players are still being billed by ea even after they said they no longer would. They promised us stable game play till the end and most of our custom content has dissapeared. You cant get on a lot because the game locks you up. The lag that was fixed is back in droves. When they reimbersed us our game play (we had to call to get it) they changed our accounts to free play in which you cant hardly do anything in the game not like a premium player. Yet another call to get that fixed… none of us have been treated right or fairly for along time its not just since the new dev team come in to update the game.. people need to understand just how long ea has owned the sims online.. and the horrible customer support we got. To understand just how much we have been through, you had to have been there. And all for the love of the game we staid we enoured and in the end we have lost… There is a rally to save our game even after all we have been through… Why you say after all this??? Plain and simple we love our game… how many games do u know would their players go through all of this and still want their game???? We want our game to be sold to a company that cares about their player and will manage the game right.. Things could have been done and should have been done to make the game successful and plain and simple they just werent and we the players are the one that paid the ultimate price for it with our hearts.

So when entities increasingly get this much space and power and control over huge swathes of the public and their time, hey, law is going to change

Since the law HASN’T changed yet, you admit, at least for now, that you’re wrong and he\she’s right in the current context.

You didn’t need two posts worth of text to state that.

Try brevity sometime.

Eolin, as I said, I’ve heard these arguments a million times, and they are no more persuasive or instructive for being repeated the millionth and one time.

Everyone knows that computer game companies are “private clubs” and fit under the law as “private club”. Except…they aren’t. They increasingly fit more under the rubric of “Internet Service Provider” and “common carrier,” and increasingly become a giant public space that everybody is in before, during, and after work and private life, increasingly taking as much more time as work or private life or even intersecting with first lives.

So when entities increasingly get this much space and power and control over huge swathes of the public and their time, hey, law is going to change *even if your mind doesn’t*. Aren’t you tekkies always telling us to adapt, change, evolve, embrace the inevitable? Did you think those principles only apply to us, and not you?!

Increasingly, influential public figures, politicians, media, government, regulators are going to say, hey, this isn’t like the private club law that applied to the Boy Scouts to enable them to keep out gays (and many will say *that* should change); this is more like the private mall law where a mall can’t crack down on a political t-shirt wearer because it’s a public commons. And so on. Try to realize that you can’t just issue a diktat on this anymore.

When the public has THIS much time, treasure, and talent locked up into a giant public space like this, then government/regulators/media/schools, etc. begin to cry foul when they behave in beastly, unjust matters and steal or confiscate or callously lose or destroy what people have come to regard as their property, and which in some cases, will already increasingly be viewed *as* their property, created by them, re-created or aggregated or stored by them in permissions transfers in these systems.

I’m sure someone who is a professional historian can think about persons though history who were once considered someone’s property (nobles, landowners, women, children, slaves) but then became propertied, emancipated, made equal. Why not the avatar?

You can cry and whine and howl and scream all you want about how unfair this sounds, how unscientific, how impossible, how ridiculous, but more and more it will be taken seriously, and you’ll have to adjust. It’s not going to be the calamity for game-god state capitalism you imagine, either.

And yes, a game or VW company emulating a government function, in a capacity where more and more, it will have powers and money and people under its sway larger than many small countries, will in fact face demands to behave under the rule of law like a government, too, just as trans-national corporations increasingly came under this pressure as least to put in some policies to behave like good corporate citizens.

I find that the game and VW companies themselves are evolving faster along these lines that the geek coders in and around them are evolving on this issue.

Cool, I’ll take a look at it. They’re generally not the sort of thing I enjoy playing, but they’re interesting on other levels.

“My avatar is real, and is valid, and is private property and shouldn’t be encroached on.”

…the real, valid, private property of Electronic Arts, unfortunately, per the EULA you signed before you began play. I’m not sure if Second Life has anything similar in its licensing agreements, and I know that EULAs are often of dubious legal worth, but your attempt to encroach on their private property by claiming ownership is as valid as claiming that you own the teacup ride at Disneyland because you go on it ALL THE TIME.

– the custom artwork that YOU created for the game, however, certainly belongs to you, unless you sign a contract with them giving them ownership for money.

What we’re seeing, I think, is the result of standard management crossfire — one team is working very hard on making the program economically viable, adding new features, drawing people in — and the other, higher up, steps in and aborts the whole project. This sort of thing is why companies often appear to be working at cross purposes to themselves: they ARE.

It’s a shame that it’s being shut down, though, if just inasmuch as it’s an interesting experiment into different ways of monetizing player contributions — I think it required a longer term investment than the EA management was willing to pay; these sorts of things don’t pay off right away.

Are there any other virtual worlds that allow one to ‘cash out’?

Prok, in SL you may be right about “owning” the avatar, especially if you build all the assets yourself. But if you did that you still own the assets and if they kill the servers you can still use them where ever you want. “Game gods” only have to cave if they want your continued business, which, obviously, EA doesn’t. You don’t get to have entitlement, you are at their mercy, they have no *need* to pay attention to you, and you have no need to continue to do business with them. This is simple market capitalism. But no matter how you look at it, it’s still not *real* in the sense that it physically exists and it can’t be “killed” because of it. However, you’ll note that I’m not telling you to get a life, and never did. And I’m not saying you have no right to be upset, in fact I pointed out several times that you had every right to be upset, and it’s because your *feelings* toward it are real, even if the content, and the data isn’t. Losing something we’re attached to hurts and I get that, but your post showed a certain sense of entitlement to things that you really have no right to. So it hardly *killed* anything about you, unless you want to tell me that your personality has been shattered by this event and you are no longer capable of expressing yourself in the same ways (not that you can’t express yourself in the same context, but in the same ways; there is a difference). If I do plays in a local theater and the theater gets torn down, it sucks, and I’ve lost an outlet for expression, but I haven’t lost my ability to express, and I certainly couldn’t stop them if even if I wanted to, because it wasn’t my theater. Murder is a strong word; hyperbole does *not* help you get your point across.

And revenue sharing is fine under the circumstances you just laid out mind (you’re generating unique content), but they cannot use the simeolean as the basis for it, because the simeolean can be generated out of nothing with no metric for useful content that generates increased revenue. It’d be a failing business model if they attempted it. This means that anyone who spent time building up a stock of simeoleans was acting under the assumption that they’d do something *really* stupid. And that’s what I was responding to in your first post. There are ways to make cashing out currency work, and Trevel outlined them all, but that’s not what you had said, and what you said was all I had to go on.

But sorry, it’s not at all state capitalism to control ingame assets, because the game’s not remotely comparable to a state, it’s a service. You are walking into a private club that hands out memberships based on whether you pay a membership fee, you don’t get any entitlement to anything that the club provides just because you’re a member, you simply get to use the space for as long as the club decides to stay open. this isn’t communistic, it’s not socialistic, it’s simply them not ceding authority to you using *their* space and *their* toys. They can choose to do so if they wish of course, and they can let you put your own things inside the space without forcing you to cede control of them, but if they do so, they’re being magnanimous. These are not separate little worlds divorced from reality; they’re spaces within reality, interdependent with it, and they cannot be treated as if what goes on in them exists in a vacuum. That’s why Linden had to ban casinos, since they ran afoul of real world anti-gambling laws, and that’s why something like WoW doesn’t have to cede control of it’s assets, because they’re providing them and they own them, and they can do whatever they want with them, because it’s a service and a club, and Blizzard as the club owners get to make the rules. And if you don’t like it, you don’t give them money, and the cogs of capitalism keep turning. And it really doesn’t matter if you don’t view them as being services or private spaces like clubs, because that’s how the law will look at them, and really, in the end, that’s all that matters. It’d actually be pretty bad if it didn’t, because then service owners would have no way of banning people even when they’re being extremely disruptive.

And SL is *not* comparable to TSO! Not in the slightest. Players are making their own assets in SL, and Linden allows you to maintain rights over those assets, as they should (though, note, they don’t strictly *have* to). You are putting your own direct creative energies into building new art and new code in SL, so you very much own that. TSO basically gave you a bunch of blocks and lets you rearrange them. There was no stipulation that you got to own the blocks, no matter how they’ve been re-arranged, so you have no inherent right to them. If they take them away, they take them away, and it can suck and you can be hurt by it, but it is within their right to do so. If it sucks and hurts enough, then they’re not treating you, their customer, very well, and you don’t do business with them anymore, and that’s that. Stupid on their part most likely, but stupidity isn’t uncommon, nor is intelligence something we have any right to expect (sadly).

As far as cashing out goes, casinos essentially use that model. Take slot machines. A player pays a fee over time to play and gets some amount of cash back. The slot machine “fee” is usually smaller and charged more often, but it’s similar to subscription in that it is an ongoing cost that’s tied to the right to play. Some players even come out ahead. The key is that on average, the house takes in more than they pay out.

An online game could do this too. As long as players pay you more, on average, than they “earn” in the game there’s no fundamental problem here. Of course you would have to increase the fees to cover the payouts in order to keep the same revenue that a traditional game has. This probably means microtransactions.

The big issue here is balancing things to ensure that the house has an advantage. This is easy with slots and simple games of chance, but a complex game would be a whole different matter. Bugs could be a big issue too. Image a dupe exploit, or even just a minor bug that affects game balance. Also, you don’t want to seem too much like a casino; there are a lot of laws governing gambling.

You’re certainly right, although most games DO pay various people to make content — they hire them.

And Bioware/NWN has, I think, somewhat implemented a more direct approach to that, paying certain people to make “Premium Content”, which they then offered for sale. I think one was hired on full time, as well, but I certainly didn’t take notes on it.

Ironically, of course, the closure of TSO is a triumph of capitalism and a free market — they have looked at the supply to their demand and found it wanting, and the cost greater still. Forcing them to continue because the people demand it but will not pay for it strikes me as more communistic than anything — I highly reject the idea that someone else’s wants or needs constitute any obligation on my part. (Which is not to say that I will not freely give — I do — I just don’t see that I should be *required* to, particularly for something as trivial as entertainment.)

It would be interesting, though, to see them go the route that other content providers have gone: stating up front that they need $X a year in order to justify it, and then making an all-or-nothing offer: let the community give the amount indicated, and the game continues; fail and they take no money, but the game shuts down.

re: ‘cashing out’ currency

Agreed that any time the game lets you ‘magically produce’ game currency, they cannot allow you to directly cash it out — you are not providing anything to them, so why should they pay you for it? In a game with nothing producing currency except for direct cash trade ins FOR the currency, on the other hand, allowing players to reverse the exchange (with a margin going to the ‘bank’, of course) makes sense. Ten million Buckazoids go into the game, nine million Buckazoids come out, the winners are happy, the losers were hopefully entertained along the way, and the bank buys a new yacht.

– conceivably a game could use two separate currencies, one of either sort. I don’t need to get into that just now, though.

The other possibility for getting cash from the game company that might make sense in this context is for services rendered — e.g., if you were selling the things you made to the game company; the artwork, the custom coding, et cetera. This couldn’t be automated — someone would need to oversee and decide on a price, there would have to be licensing agreements., et cetera. I could see this working out in a number of games — although I think the logistics of it would severely limit its usability.

I understand that companies go under or divisions are hemorrhaging cash and they have to shut down a world. I wish that when they did, they would open-source the jettisoned project and let somebody else take it up, along with the object database. Let somebody in the community have it and run it themselves.

Either that, or at least offer it for sale. They could make some final bucks off their work, and hand it off to someone who’s serious about it.

Honestly Prok… any system that allows you to generate in-game currency via in-game *actions* that also allows you to cash out that in game currency is going to very rapidly become a money pit for the people who maintain it. I don’t understand how anyone could think that would remotely work. Being able to buy the currency would have to be the first step, not the last. You can’t port it in and have it work. Even if you do allow purchasing of currency, if the game lets you cash out directly, you’ll still have problems. It’s not a sustainable business model for players to be able to make money from constant repetative actions that do not increase the income of the devs. You’re not working for that in game currency in the sense that you’re an employee. You generate absolutely zero income for the company running the game as a result of your in game actions. And don’t go into the idea that players bring their friends inot the game driving up subs. That’s much too tenuous unless your cash out is so painfully difficult that the in game activities cannot amount to very much for a given month. If I can cash out for 10 dollars a month (or whatever the sub fee was), they’ve lost my sub fee. I’m now using server and dev resources for free. If I can cash out for 20, I’ve now eaten not only my sub fee, I’ve also eaten the sub fee of another player. At this point, it would probably be cheaper to ban me than it would be to sustain my business; I’m probably not getting two new players into the game every month, and that’s what I’d need to do for it to remain profitable, assuming those new players weren’t also making enough to offset fees. There’s a reason why Bartle would fall into a faint as a result of design element that would let people do what you suggested, and it’s not because he’s a socialistic game-god. It’s because it would very rapidly bankrupt the service provider.

On the other hand, trade economies, and players selling things to other players that they’ve made or collected or whatever (though, if it’s not content they’ve personally created, there are other issues), works just fine, as no money has to enter the system via the devs themselves for it to function, so there isn’t a constant bleeding of money. I honestly don’t think anyone really has a problem with players being able to sell content that they’ve personally created, though granted, there are problems inherent in letting players generate content to begin with. When people complain about RMT, it’s usually in the context of players selling things gained in game that they didn’t spend the time and money coding, creating art for, designing systems around, and playtesting. Ignoring the fairness and social contract violating nature that sometimes comes up based on the type of world we’re talking about, there’s another very good reason for people finding fault with it.

And it’s because no matter how emotionally attached to your avatars you get, no matter how much investment you’ve put into the worlds that they run around in on an emotional level… none of it is real, and you are not your avatar. It’s sad when a game that you’ve got a strong emotional investment in is shut down, but it’s not even remotely comparable to murder when they delete your characters. And they really owe you *nothing* when they do it; your emotional investment is *not* their concern, except in how they want your future business. They can’t take your memories away from you, they can’t take the friends you’ve developed away from you, but the data that drove those things was never yours. You spent no time in builidng the *data* even if you spent lots of time in building things around that data. And they can’t take those intangibles, so you’ve still got ‘possession’ of them, however you want to define that. But you’re asking them… rather, expecting them, to give you *their* property, and that’s just not a fair demand to make.

Emotional attachment doesn’t confer property rights. Time spent building that emotional attachment doesn’t confer property rights. If I go to a park and have a lot of fun playing on a slide there, and I go back every day and have fun playing on the slide and I meet some other people who like playing on the slide too, and I keep coming back day after day, such that I develop a strong bond with the park, the people I meet there, and the slide itself, I’ll still own none of it. And when the wrecking crews come to pave over the park into a strip mall I have every right to get upset, but I have absolutely no right to expect that my time spent there some how makes it underhanded of them to tear everything down. It wasn’t my space, it wasn’t my slide, if they want to destroy it, they can do so with no problem, because it’s *theirs*, no matter how attached to it I became because they let me play around with it. This is no different. If we’re going to hold on to the concept of property rights as being really important, it has to be universal. That means people can make things semi-public and then change, alter, revamp, or even destroy them as they wish. So I really can’t understand how the desire to maintain control over in game assets is driven by anything other than heavily capitalistic motives.

I’m a big believer that somewhere deep in the MMO player’s psyche seeing their product of choice, and its live service maintainer and supporter as a going concern is the most important factor when it comes to long term retention of a player.

So what effect does this have on EA’s future offerings? Is the disconnect between EA of old and EA Mythic enough to dull any but the most bitter? With the base that is left in TSO/EA Land are any of them actual MMO players that this would impact? (I exclude “virtual world players” because I don’t think that is a business EA will ever enter – at least not successfully)

Michael, you are either recommending everything or nothing to me for the rest of my life. I haven’t decided which yet.

I found myself afflicted with sympathy for the players that were being left behind. Then I read the comments on their post, with accusation after accusation of fraud, and the feeling went away. I really hope that when a virtual world I like goes away, I can be less of a jerk about it.

Considering that TSO was primarily a vehicle for leaving your spouse, it managed a better run than I would’ve expected.