Out of Pod Experience

The Oracle case has no bearing on EVE since the contract is completely different. At best, it could apply to CCP's disallowing account transfers, but since accounts are free and since CCP owns the bits, it becomes practically inapplicable anyway. Sure, you could spend money on trying to get your bought account unbanned, but that would leave you with an account that was no better than the free one you could get in 10 seconds flat without going to court, so all you'd be doing is wasting court time… which I'm sure is popular with everyone (well the lawyers will love it —they get paid for it, after all).

Moreover, even European law very pragmatically recognizes SLAs as legitimate contracts since it would be industry-demolishing not to. As such, CCP can quite easily point to the SLA part of the EULA that you had to agree on before you created your account; that you had to read again before you bought your subscription; and that you had to read again the first time you logged in.

This new idea doesn't particularly change any of that. At most, this would shoot out the knees of Sim City-style DRM, but that's about it.

[noogie and a hug]

Aww cant stay mad at you

Still, when you sue an entity for not being able to deliver, you sue the company (a legal entity) not some servers(piece of hardware)?

Gotta love when posters complain about proposed legislation that they haven't seen yet.

Nah, that's part of the game. If they can't log in due to server issues or the game keeps crashing and ins't a hardware client side, then I guess so.

For determination, not quite sure, maybe some sort of logging software, not the guy to answer that.

But for enforcement, there's resorting to the EFTA of which Iceland is a part, the anti-terrorism laws already used to control Icelandic assets for the benefit of British customers (this case the servers) and the UK has veto rights on Icelandic membership of the EU.

I'm not trying to be melodramatic, but the UK has a history with Iceland and would just add this to the things it feels it needs to sort out with Iceland, like the North Sea fisheries (Cod Wars ).

Most likely scenario would be Iceland relocating the Servers to Iceland before it became enforceable, would greatly lower the UK's hand, but would put it through the EU courts instead of the British ones.

The sale takes place in the UK even when on the internet and if something happens like what happened last year to several high profile games in the future we have the right to demand our money back. EA could be in for some bother.

These kinds of laws are just silly on all sorts of levels. Define "freeze" for one. Sounds easy, but, there's so many different reasons for "freeze"...driver conflict, overheating, old code, bad API calls... Now, by freeze, do they just mean the game locking up, or whole system? How do I prove, as a consumer, the game code itself locked? How can I verify that the network path between myself and the servers are perfectly fine, and it's not ISP shenanigans (Trust me, no ISP in the world is going to open themselves to that legal problem).


Now, the game this law is likely based from...the new Simcity. If you were unlucky enough to get that pre-order, you sure weren't playing it day one. I doubt EVE will see any impact.

I'm certain CCP would never connect Goons anus to mouth in a chain to power the server on a massive hamster wheel.

... right?

Why would they have a legal position before the law has even been finalised and passed? How could they?

I am pretty confident in my prediction that anyone who tries to sue them because a bloo bloo there was lag in my fleet fight or whatever won't be playing EVE the next day though.