EVE General Discussion

A gaming company would have to prove:
a.Money exchanged hands between the two parties in question.
b.The exchange of monies constituted a quid pro quo transaction.
c.The exchange was exactly real world currency for in-game currency/items/characters/etc. (as opposed to some sort of payment-for-service arrangement).
d.The original wording of the agreement between the gaming company and the gamer could reasonably be understood to prohibit such a transaction.

In addition, it would be very important that no other rules, regulations, laws superseded or pre-empted such a stipulation in the original agreement (the EULA) . . . blabbitty blah blah blah . . . there is so much gray area to muddle through. It's not so simple or lawyers wouldn't get paid so damn much and there probably wouldn't even be a need for something like an "End User License Agreement".

Besides all that, what gives a gaming company the right to essentially destroy what I may have been building up for years (maybe over a decade, in the case of EVE Online)? Isn't taking away my stuff and my character damaging me in some sense? Shouldn't they have to prove that I damaged them before they are allowed to damage me?

Nope the EULA allows CCP to turn round and ban you for any reason they see fit. It's not your stuff or your character as it's all the property of CCP, you agreed to that when you clicked accept on the EULA, legally you wouldn't have a leg to stand on.

Of course RMT hurts the player.

RMT stops money which should go going CCP, therefore its lost revenue that could be otherwise spent on the game that as a player I pay for

1. Which one?
2. But does it compel?
3. Who is CCP exactly? Is that who is doing the banning?
4. What is "banning"?
5. Do they ban me or my character or my IP address or my credit card?
6. Even just because I play naked or am a vegetarian? (I'm kidding. I eat meat. Sometimes, I'm naked when I eat it.)
7. Are you saying that someone from Goonswarm could not write a book about how they took down Band Of Brothers, because CCP owns that story and those characters? What if they put it in the "non-fiction" category of the bookstore?
8. What if I never clicked "Accept"? What if I am not the "end user"? What if I am legally incapable of entering into a binding contract because I'm ******** or a minor or something else?
9. I haven't got a legal leg to stand on . . . in which jurisdiction? I don't have a legal leg to stand on . . . in reversing a ban or in regards to being compensated for my damages should the gaming company breach our contract? (I think that recurring payment would come back and bite a company in the ass, as it indicates an ON-GOING agreement, rather than a simple one time transaction.)

^ that's what a lawyer would do with the entire EULA. This is a brand new field of law. Even something as simple as "Thou shalt not kill." isn't so simple as that, so "Thou shalt not gold farm."? The legal framework for how these things are supposed to work is not set. Remember when companies opened up online casinos and it took a while for the government to react and go "Durrr . . . wait, gambling is illegal!"? A "EULA" or any sort of legal agreement is often a lot like birth control. It works 99.9% of the time, but that one time it malfunctions, you end up paying through the nose for what should have been just a cheap thrill.

That brings us back to the main point. You can control what YOU do, but you can never really know what someone else will do, and once you start trying to control them, you are bound to run into all sorts of problems.

Well, 9 pages and its still in General Discussion, so I'm assuming this legal discussion still has something to do with spaceships.

Can I suggest a real space lawyer mediate from here on, and perhaps provide a TL;DR for all the preceding drivel? I hear Babatunde B Babatunde has a lot of spare time on his hands.

Edit: Benny may have already supplied the TL;DR