And yet companies still do business there, despite the officials in charge taking that kind of stance....

I understand the MMO publishers stance on virtual property. It makes perfect sense.

What I don't understand is why they are not embracing the item sale business. They should open up their own little item/gold auction house with real world money sales. They could then take a small transaction fee and make a butt load of money from it.

AS for the fears of reembursing a player if they cancel an account, with the item sales, they could simply sell off all their virtual property before canceling their account. If anything is left in their avatar's possesion at the time of cancelation, it is gone for good.

E. Zachary Knight
http://www.editorialgames.com
Oklahoma City Chapter of the ECA
MySpace Page: http://www.myspace.com/okceca
Facebook Page: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1325674091

"In any place but gaming, something like your quest log should be protected by privacy laws..."

Nonsense. For one thing, participation in quests is not a private activity, so there's no default expectation of privacy. Furthermore, any expectation of privacy depends on the visible privacy practices of the service. If you, as the user, are aware that your quests, achievements, and other such records are going to be published, you really have no right to demand that such records remain private.

"If you really want to know what’s the cutting edge of this, I’d look at China. Because their government has stepped in and said ‘I don’t care what your EULA is, here are the new rules.’"

Since when is totalitarianism a good thing?

""Couple of reasons [why the player doesn't get to own in-game items]. The first is liability. If I want to cancel someone’s account, I don’t want to have to pay the person the value of that sword.  Second I don’t want to compensate them or own up to anything when I nerf that sword for balancing reasons...""

Thats not how it works tho a simple line of text in the contract of the sale can state as long you pay for the subscription of the game and you don't lose your account you keep the item you bought. Compensation?For what? Wheres my compensation playing this ass whack game that plays like a job? Again its simple these items are not permenante and may be removed by GMs,loss of account or no longer paying for the subscription...my god if the EULA destroys ones rights in order to protect the company why can't it state this aswell?

"Koster: All of these things are ultimately just bits and bytes in the database... I’m just fine with saying ‘yeah, that’s SOE’s sword. Damn straight!’ Where it starts getting a little weirder is that those databases are all a log of a player’s experience. In any place but gaming, something like your quest log should be protected by privacy laws... If you really want to know what’s the cutting edge of this, I’d look at China. Because their government has stepped in and said ‘I don’t care what your EULA is, here are the new rules.’""

Frist off wow....... how can a quest log be private? A conversation log maybe...but questlog???...also the government that makes the rules of the land should be able to tell the corperations that they may not rape the consumer through the EULA....
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You might can control a VR economy by making it bland and static but that wont make me play the fcking thing, I want to be able to spend some money to make the game fun to play if I can not do that I'd rather not play the game. Better exp,more starting skills,higher starting stats,money and items should be buyable from the developer as either one time transactions or you get a premium subscription that gives you better exp,more starting skills,higher starting stat.... MMOs need to change perhaps in order to deal with the economy it balances out item prices based on the total amount of  currency in "world" have servers tell over servers whats going on and then rate item price based on it with the money coming in just from it as they can reset it every so often and give subscription discounts at a 10K to 1$ rate under a medium class level, higher classes that should have more money get 20K or more to 1$ rate, and these discounts are stretched  out over time up to 50% of the monthly, think of it as a VR discount that goes to your subscription bill up to 50% of the subscription a month.

I is fuzzy brained mew =^^=
http://zippydsmlee.wordpress.com/
(in need of a bad overhaul)

"Frist off wow....... how can a quest log be private? A conversation log maybe...but questlog???"

It's a record of a person's activity on a service. So is your gear in WoW, for that matter. In a game, you may want to show that off, sure, but under strict privacy laws, records of activity with a service could easily be regarded as private info, particularly under the stricter EU privacy laws. As more sorts of activities make their way into VWs (financial transactions are an obvious one, but there will be more) this issue may come more to the foreground. I am just prefiguring it a bit. :)