Second Life calls the FBI
http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2005/12/the_solution_to.html#more
Some people shut down the MMO Second Life by creating self-replicating objects with the in-game scripting system that replicated so much that they crashed the server. The CEO of Linden Labs (the game's publisher) turned over the names the griefers to the FBI.
I'm usually quick to point out the problems of banning people who perform legal in-game actions that have consequences that "you don't like." In almost all of these cases, good answers are "have the developer fix the problem in the code" or possibly "allow players a way of policing or otherwise sort out the problem themselves." This is an extreme case though, since these actions caused the entire server to crash, denying all other players the ability to play and the company the ability to make money. Perhaps in this extreme case, it *IS* correct for the developer to step in and ban, and call the authorities. Almost anything less than this probably does not warrant a ban or any penalty to the player from the developer.
In a Street Fighter tournament, if you do something that intentially crashes the game, you lose the round. Hypethetically, if you did something that somehow not only crashed the game, but stopped the entire tournament from happening, we would not hesitate to eject you from the building.
Meanwhile World of Warcraft will ban you for "playing too much," attacking Lord Kazzak in various unsanctioned ways, using a rogue/warlock combo to lure bosses too far from their spawn points, fighting on rooftops, entering unfinished areas (why are they accessible at all?), buying gold or items on ebay (eventually the courts will probably overrule them on this), collaborating with the other faction in battlegrounds, "using terrain exploits to your advantage," player-created casions (that merely use the in-game /random command), player-created bingo games, profanity (even though there is an in-game language filter, to say nothing of free speech), posting on forums about whether a guild is full of Blizzard employees, posting on the forums about why you were banned for posting about something seemingly constructive, having a name such as JustKidding, SergantTaco, TheAthiest, or roflcopter...and a whole lot more things, too.
Finall tally:
-----------
Linden Labs--Probably Justified
World of Warcraft--Apparently Fascist. :(
--Sirlin
Some people shut down the MMO Second Life by creating self-replicating objects with the in-game scripting system that replicated so much that they crashed the server. The CEO of Linden Labs (the game's publisher) turned over the names the griefers to the FBI.
I'm usually quick to point out the problems of banning people who perform legal in-game actions that have consequences that "you don't like." In almost all of these cases, good answers are "have the developer fix the problem in the code" or possibly "allow players a way of policing or otherwise sort out the problem themselves." This is an extreme case though, since these actions caused the entire server to crash, denying all other players the ability to play and the company the ability to make money. Perhaps in this extreme case, it *IS* correct for the developer to step in and ban, and call the authorities. Almost anything less than this probably does not warrant a ban or any penalty to the player from the developer.
In a Street Fighter tournament, if you do something that intentially crashes the game, you lose the round. Hypethetically, if you did something that somehow not only crashed the game, but stopped the entire tournament from happening, we would not hesitate to eject you from the building.
Meanwhile World of Warcraft will ban you for "playing too much," attacking Lord Kazzak in various unsanctioned ways, using a rogue/warlock combo to lure bosses too far from their spawn points, fighting on rooftops, entering unfinished areas (why are they accessible at all?), buying gold or items on ebay (eventually the courts will probably overrule them on this), collaborating with the other faction in battlegrounds, "using terrain exploits to your advantage," player-created casions (that merely use the in-game /random command), player-created bingo games, profanity (even though there is an in-game language filter, to say nothing of free speech), posting on forums about whether a guild is full of Blizzard employees, posting on the forums about why you were banned for posting about something seemingly constructive, having a name such as JustKidding, SergantTaco, TheAthiest, or roflcopter...and a whole lot more things, too.
Finall tally:
-----------
Linden Labs--Probably Justified
World of Warcraft--Apparently Fascist. :(
--Sirlin
21 Comments:
At 1:08 AM, Kayin said…
I wouldn't even say Second Life is even valid for the whole "Making use of Gaming Exploits" thing to begin with. I "played" for a long while, making many crazy contraptions, but honestly there is no real "game" to be played. It's more of a super glorified 3d chatroom/social program that allows people to build stuff.
You really can't win at Second Life. You can only be really awesome.
At 4:54 AM, Anonymous said…
Facsist? It's a game. You pay blizzard for the privilage to play their game. I agree that developers shouldn't ban players for exploiting features in the game itself(that puzzle pirates incident) that the developer could actually fix, but saying that a game developer is not allowed to make the rules for their own game is insane. WoW is not a public entity, it's a private game that you must pay(and agree to a ToA I assume, I don't play WoW) to use. If you don't like the banning rules in an online game, simply don't play it. It's a game.
And saying that blizzard somehow prohibits your right to free speech is, again, absurd, because playing WoW is not a right, it's a privilage you pay for. The idea that a government agency censoring the internet sickens me, but a game developer should be allowed to choose if they want vulger language or not in their game. If you don't like it, don't play. It's a game.
At 6:47 AM, Lagwolf said…
Shadowbane suffered a serious hack too (ie game-killing) and went to the authorities. I think this is justified as it is for Second Life.
The way WoW behaves is up to them; its not exactly like Blizzard does not have quite a long track-record of what they will/will not tolerate. They do tend to be fairly up front about what they won't tolerate. There are idiots who don't believe them and get banned...fair enough.
At 10:56 AM, Sirlin said…
The poster two above is really missing what I'm saying. Does Blizzard have the right to make up rules I think are horrible? Yes they do. Does Blizzard have any legal reason to support free speech in their game? No. They can do anything they want, no matter how evil or good, and market forces will decide. I'm a little put off you think I don't understand that. Of course I do.
But the question is, do I think those are good practices? No, I don't. That is not at all how I would run a virtual world. Maybe you don't care how I would run a virtual world, but if you really don't care, I'm not sure why you bother coming here and reading anything I have to say at all.
--Sirlin
At 6:36 PM, Anonymous said…
Guild Wars had a similar problem with online casinos. They kept spamming chat channels. The solution? Ban the /random (or in this case, /dice) command in towns. Make it completely unaccessable. enforceable, warranted, and concrete
At 9:06 PM, Kicks said…
**Originally posted by Anonymous-
I agree that developers shouldn't ban players for exploiting features in the game itself(that puzzle pirates incident) that the developer could actually fix, but saying that a game developer is not allowed to make the rules for their own game is insane.**
How are these two things different? Nearly all the things Sirlin listed are just creatively using/exploiting the game mechanics.
Like the article about 2ndLife stated, they view their world as a country. In the country of WoW, you're not quite sure what the laws are and if you break them you get killed.
How is Blizzard stifiling freedom of speech? Getting banned for posting truths about how you were banned on a forum is total BS! What if you posted something about politics and a Blizzard guy disagreed with you. According to their previous practices, it seems like they'd ban you. I'm guessing they keep your monthly payment as well. Their practices are childish.
In my mind a ToS should be very explicit. It should be looked down upon if not ILLEGAL to have a ToS where they can ban you for no reason/their own made up reason, otherwise they're just stealing. If something arises like casinos or a 'vulgar' name, the ToS should be rewritten, sent to all members, then give the law-breakers a warning. If they persist, then they are in the wrong.
At 6:29 AM, The Wolf said…
WoW is, for the amount of material and work required for it, is actually pretty well designed in my opinion, (although admittedly I haven't played it that much)and I think that the reason these "exploits" seem so common is becasue there are 5 million players on the servers. That's 5 million players, not 5 million characters. But Sirlin has said that if a game is poorly designed, then people shouldn't play the game, since it is degenerate. But surely he sees the wisdom in being able to correct problems that they percieve in their own game, especially since they have the ability to do so, unlike a normal console game. Also admittedly, it's not a good practice to ban people for what they SAY (profanity, etc.)
At 6:30 AM, The Wolf said…
That previous one was from me.
-Dawolffman
At 11:23 AM, Steve Cochrane said…
I'm really curious as to why they would ban someone with a totally innocuous name like "roflcopter". Anyone have a link to an article for that?
At 2:17 PM, Anonymous said…
Does anyone know the legality of a WoW casino? If gambling for poker chips that may be converted into hard currency is illegal in your state would gambling for WoW Gold that may be converted into hard currency via Ebay likewise be illegal? I really have no idea how the law decides which chancy endeavors are 'gambling' and which aren't.
-Stephen
At 6:17 PM, Atrius said…
What laws do online gambling follow? WoW casinos would be in a similar jurisdiction.
At 6:19 PM, The Wolf said…
That is an interesting point. Gold buying may not be actually illegal, and gambling with non-real money definitely isn't illegal, but if one can be converted into another it's a tricky dillemma.
At 7:14 PM, Sirlin said…
The World of Warcraft naming policy is founded on the same invasive, babysitting ideals as the rest of the rules. During the alpha test, there was discussion of an upcoming naming policy and a guy named roflcopter asked if his name was ok, in the forums. Lots of people responded and said "great name." But Blizzard came back and said that it would be an illegal name! That was quite a long thread, indeed.
Anyway, the name roflcopter is now one of the examples of an illegal name given in Blizzard's official naming policy. Here's the link, just search the page for "roflcopter"
http://www.blizzard.com/support/wowgm/?id=agm01723p
At 9:35 PM, Veven Stass said…
I'd like to see Blizzard open up specific "lenient" servers which allow players to break these (+some of) rules, save destroying the game. If I was more of a lawyer I'd even argue that Blizzard is missing out on a keen marketing opportunity.
At 1:04 AM, Anonymous said…
Hey, I know this is completely off-topic, but would you mind turning on the RSS/Atom site feed feature for your blog? It'd be a godsend, so I can simply have my feedreader check your site every day for me instead of remembering once every few months to visit and read old posts.
Laziness, yes - but I'm probably not the only reader here who uses RSS everyday for this sort of thing. I'd really appreciate it.
...goes back to lurking...
At 3:37 PM, Chadius said…
Hey Sirlin? Can you make a blog entry for comments about game difficulty? I'd love to yap my head off about that...
On-topic, did the people realize it would crash the server, or was it an honest accident? Well, Second Life can simply ban "self-replicating" machines, right?
At 5:32 PM, Sirlin said…
I'll look into RSS this weekend, ok.
I believe the "offenders" in Second Life did know they were going to crash the server, and possibly even said so ahead of time. Apparently the company did disable the replicating ability the scripts were exploiting, but it also disabled a lot of totally "innocent" objects other players had scripted. Not sure what happened after that, I stopped following the story. ;)
At 7:42 AM, Anonymous said…
I've been playing Final Fantasy XI for a few years now, and it makes a really interesting counterpoint to the way your saying Blizzard runs WoW.
SquareEnix seems to run things much more like what you claim would be a "good" system. Their outlook very much seems to be that anything that the game currently allows is basically fair play. Their terms of service specifically state that selling currency outside of the game is illegal. But, despite that, bannings are almost unheard of, and many people known by other players to repeatedly break the terms of service have been playing for years. The company itself is also very notoriously tight-lipped about just about everything. I don't think they've ever once discussed the game with players, outside of a very small number of interviews that can be found on the web, where basically no information was revealed. They've certainly never gone out of their way to point out anything they wouldn't allow, or anything that was broken.
They're also very good about solving any gameplay problems by changing the game, rather than blaming players. One big example, a new class was added to the game with the game's first expansion, known as the ninja. This class was originally declared by SE to be a new melee attack class, but happened to have a unique magic spell that allowed anyone playing that class to instantly cause the next three attacks directed at them to miss. Basically, players figured out how to chain this ability endlessly, and almost never be hit. SE basically turned around and declared the class to be a "tank" type, and simply changed future armor provided to the class to assist with tanking, rather than attacking.
Another good example is the recently resolved claiming issue. Whenever a group attacks a monster in FFXI, that monster becomes "claimed", and can no longer be attacked by anyone outside of that specific group(very few areas in FFXI are instanced the way dungeons in WoW are, so having an entirely seperate group wanting the fight the same monster you are fighting is common, and often they'll simply try to take it away from you during the fight). There were, for years, a number of bugs that caused the group to lose claim, and there were enough of them, that losing claim during a long boss fight was basically inevitable. To my knowledge, noone has ever been banned by "exploiting" these bugs to steal a monster from a group that was fighting it, despite it being the largest complaint about the game for at least 2 years, and in the last 3 updates to the game, they've fixed all of the major bugs that caused someone to lose claim while fighting, and the issue has almost completely disappeared at this point.
Even the player-run casinos exist in FFXI, and they're just allowed to continue running. They really seem to be doing exactly what you're suggesting is a proper way to run a virtual world.
At 12:16 PM, Kayin said…
It's quite possible they didn't. It happened to a friend of mine one time while playing.
"Hm, I wonder what happens if I make the object make another one of it's self".. "Oh shit, I just realized the copies also copy themselves!"
The issue here is it was a repeated attack by an object whos script likely had no other value.
To be honestly, crashing a server in SL is not usually a huge deal. A "server" is more of a "zone" and these zones are pretty small and quite often sparsely populated. Atop that the game servers are reletively unstable. I have crashed servers innumerable times in the name of science(I could probably claim up to 100 such crashes). Of course, since I was usually working in low/zero populated areas and was obviously trying to do something constructive I never recieved as much as a warning.
These attacks were apparently done on several servers -- or all servers or something of the sort.
The change was rolled back by the way. There was no way in hell the "citizens" of second life would let something like that stay(Linden Labs tends to ultimately kneel to the demands of the population if its easily within it's power).
Really though I think this is an overreaction. They should fix their code already. They've had quit ea long time to do it.
At 5:23 PM, Steve Cochrane said…
This post has been removed by the author.
At 8:20 AM, Anonymous said…
You are right Sirlin, you have a right to gripe about Blizzards, in your mind Facist, rules; HOWEVER, I think many of the rules you gripe about you do so out of ignorance not knowing the reasons behind them. Personally I believe in before passing judgement find out ALL of the information so here it goes:
1.playing too much - Never EVER heard of them banning for this. Sounds like a rumor as you know it would have been all over the forums and the net if they did do this.
2. attacking Lord Kazzak in various unsanctioned ways - This was due to the fact that you could have one group fighting him, have another group want to get the credit and "Kill steal" him away by say training a TON of additional mobs onto the fighting group just before Kazz dies. The fighting group get a wipe and you then kill Kazzak and get the credit. Normally not a big deal except he spawns only once a week and has some of the better loot in the game.
3. fighting on rooftops - No it was not fighting on rooftops that got you banned. It was using spells and other means to get onto rooftops where there was no way to hit you in contested territory on PvP servers essentially resulting in being able to camp the entrance and kill people as soon as they entered the area. Booty bay is a good example of this, it's a lvl 30ish area, just camp a 60 wiz on the roof and with one spell anyone that comes into that area is pretty much dead.
4. collaborating with the other faction in battlegrounds - Obviously you are unknolwedgeable about BGs. Some of the best equipment in the game for PvP comes from rank and BG achievements. If I can fill a BG with people I know on both sides and work out a rotation within a few evenings it could be made to where these two guilds can get essentially any equipmenet they want and dominate everyone else who doesn't have the equipment. And WoW is tremendously an equipment based game as any who has progressed to 60 can tell you. Someone with just bought items and maybe one or two epics can do nothing to someone with a full set of epic/PvP equipment. It's like your Akuma reference in playing to win.
And of course there are more and more examples. While I DO agree with you that a couple are foolish reasons to ban, the majority of them I know WHY they ban. Problems with casinos ripping people off, or totally crashing the servers, etc. You must keep in mind they didn't just wake up one day and say "We're banning for this", they gave notification well ahead of time.
Can alot of it be fixed with programming? Probably, but it's a cost/time issue. Where is it better to invest the money and time in? Expansions and content that keep players playing and them making money? Or fixing minor issues which can far more easily and readily be corrected by the giving of one quick command and given that once said "don't do this or..." most people stop doing that.
And while yes it would be nice to give the players the ability to police themselves, you should know from experience that doesn't work. The vast majority of people are by their very nature selfish when it comes to game (including myself). If I am out questing in a game and someone is getting harrased by the enemy I do one thing, I look at my map. If it is more than a few seconds out of my way I let them die. Too bad, I play the game for fun and I am not going to interupt what I am doing for anyone but a guild mate if I am already doing something. Thing is a large amount of people are that way. Look at Shadowbane or UO, awesome games which gave people the ability to police themselves and to a large extent they failed in that end. Because when you give them that ability you also give them the ability to ruin other's games, and those of us committed to "ruling with an iron fist" and taking what we want, so to speak, are far fewer, but have far more patience and tenacity than the gross majority of players. We also tend to be ALOT more inventive and group orientated than them as well. Thus we do what we want, take what we want, and end up driving them away, because no matter how good the player enforcement is we'll keep coming back till we are at the top.
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