Quote:Original post by Deyja
Imagine the trouble if someone on AOL buys your game, pays for a subscription, then can't connect because AOL is banned.

If you charge for subscriptions, you can easily just cancel the account and ban that credit card from creating new accounts, so the problem doesn't need to be solved via site bans, and therefore this situation wouldn't arise. Site bans are primarily a tool for games that cost nothing to register an account.

Quote:In the case of a retail/subscription game, a ban can't affect any other player for legal reasons. You can't even ban a different account from the same IP unless you state that condition specifically in the EULA.

You're just speculating here: citing 'legal reasons' means very little when there are apparently no explicit laws on this and, as far as I am aware, no case precedent either. It's also far from clear that a EULA has any legal significance, although obviously you would be entitled to a refund on any purchased game you can no longer play. Again though, the point here was not to propose a single solution to fit all situations, but to address the problems associated with games that cannot easily uniquely identify players in any other way.

Quote:Original post by KylotanIt's also far from clear that a EULA has any legal significance, although obviously you would be entitled to a refund on any purchased game you can no longer play.

No, it is actually very clear. The EULA is a contract that the user agrees to (either by shrinkwrap or clickwrap, or similar means), and as such it is binding as long as it's terms are not against morality (for example, an EULA stating that you owe me your first child is void).
If you violate the terms in the EULA, you terminate the agreement and cannot claim any refounds. In fact, you are even bound to immeditately remove your copy from your computer, or you may be made liable (in theory).

However, there is one notable exception regarding the EULA: underage players *cannot* agree to your terms in a legal way, which is a real problem. Technically, you would have to forbid usage of your game to underage players except with their parents' consent (which again is hard to prove).

A possible solution could be to require a credit card number, as usually only adults own credit cards. Also, in some countries, it is possible to get age/identity verification for low cost or no cost either at every post office (e.g. Germany) or via government-sustained, specialised organisations (e.g. UK).
However, this may cost you a significant amount of users, as most everyone won't bother jumping through loops if he can just play another game instead.

The general problem with all of the above is that legal action costs money. You pay in advance, and maybe, possibly, you get something back, if you are lucky. The burden of proof is yours, too. All in all, it does not look so good, nobody bothers to file a lawsuit because of this.


However, regarding other "against the rules" stuff, such as cracks, hacks, password theft, DoS etc., things are looking better every day. Several countries have been having laws that somehow outlaw these activities since the late 1990s, but the conditions under which they were considered "criminal" (if at all) were somewhat ridiculous. For example, in the USA, hacking someone was perfectly legal until September 2006, as long as he was not either a federal institution, a foreign company, or inter-state communication was involved AND the damage provably exceeded 5000 dollars (or there was a chance of terrorism being involved). Worse yet, many other countries (mostly Balkan and Asia) seemed to ignore the issue alltogether.

The CoE Convention on Cybercrime (CETS 185) in 2001 addressed those issues. It has to date been signed by 53 countries worldwide, and 17 countries have since then undergone ratification, most of them becoming effective mid/end 2006 or early 2007.
This includes the USA, several European countries, and several Balkan countries. It is only a matter of time until the remaining 36 countries undergo ratification as well, making computer crime effectively punishable as *crime* anywhere.

The big advantage of computer crime being treated as "crime" is that the government takes over prosecution, it is no longer your problem alone, and it does not cost your money to file a lawsuit. This is indeed *very* good news. :)

Quote:Original post by Damon Shamkite

Quote:Original post by KylotanIt's also far from clear that a EULA has any legal significance, although obviously you would be entitled to a refund on any purchased game you can no longer play.

No, it is actually very clear. The EULA is a contract that the user agrees to (either by shrinkwrap or clickwrap, or similar means), and as such it is binding as long as it's terms are not against morality (for example, an EULA stating that you owe me your first child is void).

The key point is that the EULA is typically something you can only examine after you have already made the purchase, and therefore as a customer you're prejudiced against rejecting it at that point. In particular you don't know the conditions before you purchase. In the eyes of some courts, this makes the contract 'unconscionable', as it is a contract of adhesion, ie. "a standardized contract, which, imposed and drafted by the party of superior bargaining strength, relegates to the subscribing party only the opportunity to adhere to the contract or reject it." [link]. EULAs are likely to fall under this banner, depending on whether the judge in question thinks it's reasonable for a user to be expected to reject a contract for an item he already purchased.

Quote:However, there is one notable exception regarding the EULA: underage players *cannot* agree to your terms in a legal way, which is a real problem. Technically, you would have to forbid usage of your game to underage players except with their parents' consent (which again is hard to prove).

This varies from territory to territory. For example, in the UK, a contract is binding no matter how young the child. Otherwise it would be largely impossible for children to use shops.

A contract requires notice, (mutual) consent, and fairness.

The decision in Combs versus PayPal was mostly based on the unconscionability of PayPal's terms, not so much on the fact that it was an EULA or wrap agreement. The plaintiffs certainly challenged all three frame conditions. However, they were entitled right in only one of their claims (which was something like "even if we have agreed, it is still outrageous and unfair, and therefore void"). And, as I have to say, rightly so.

Most EULAs indeed read more like "you owe us your first child and your other offspring shall be tainted over seven generations if... (some ridiculous condition), or you have to pay a contract fee of 50,000 dollars if... (some other ridiculous thing)" rather than some fair conditions that everybody would certainly agree to.
While the issue of fairness exists for most (if not all) EULAs and Terms of Service, it does not mean that an EULA as such is questionable or invalid


The problem of notice is easily solved by having a "agree" button at the download site (better yet, letting the user type "agree", so he cannot pretend an accidential click) or a "by breaking this seal..." notice on the package.
This procedure is unquestionably valid, the same strategy has been very successfully used by hardware/hifi manufacturers for many years ("warranty void if seal is removed").
However, here is the point about fairness again. As you correctly objected, the user has already bought the product before he had a chance to read what he will have to agree to. To make the contract "fair", it must therefore be allowed to return the product within a given time and get refunds (EULAs like that do exist). Alternatively, you could be presented with the fulltext EULA before purchasing (easy if a package is downloaded).


Regarding mutual consent, it gets more complicated. Consent from your side can probably be assumed, since you want to make money. You make money by selling your licenses.
However, if the user is a child, you may face nasty surprises because people *will* exploit this fact as much as they can, and they *will* tell you that the agreement is void.
To make matters worse, the actual laws are indeed very much different in different places (as you pointed out).

For example in Germany, you have something like:
1. children (up to 12):
Not contractually capable, any contract is void (but yet, stores will happily sell goods to children...?), generally not liable (although in some but not all cases, parents are liable for their children), not condemnable
2. juveniles (13+):
Partially contractually capable (it is unclear what *exactly* this means, what exactly they are allowed to do), condemnable under a special "juvenile" law.
Older juveniles (16+):
Partially contractually capable AND can buy alcohol, but no spirits and no "alco-pops", and can go to driving lessons since last year (also, many shops (illegally) sell any kind of alcohol to 14 year olds nevertheless...), not condemnable under adult law, but this is nevertheless done on occasions (requires a psychiatric expertise).
Older juveniles (17+): may, since last year, and in company of an adult (with certain age and penalty constraints), drive a car
adults (18+): contractually capable, fully liable and condemnable

Now... getting back to "consent" again... how to you tell how much someone is able to consent to your contract? (The above may even be inaccurate because so many things were changed during the last 2 years). This can be a real problem.


I don't have profound knowledge of the UK legal system, so I have little choice but to believe your statements, but I should indeed be *very* surprised if "pacta sunt servanda" was really enforced for children. Sure enough, children can buy candy in a store, and this *is* a kind of contract.
However, a child is certainly not allowed to purchase a house, or to sign a cash value life insurance contract on its own, and the parents would be obliged to fulfill? This sounds a bit surreal. An EULA has more a character like the latter, not so much like buying a candy bar.

Quote:Original post by Damon Shamkite
I don't have profound knowledge of the UK legal system, so I have little choice but to believe your statements, but I should indeed be *very* surprised if "pacta sunt servanda" was really enforced for children. Sure enough, children can buy candy in a store, and this *is* a kind of contract.
However, a child is certainly not allowed to purchase a house, or to sign a cash value life insurance contract on its own, and the parents would be obliged to fulfill? This sounds a bit surreal. An EULA has more a character like the latter, not so much like buying a candy bar.

What I said was perhaps a little misleading; usually a child in the UK can enter into the latter form of contracts, providing they are judged to be able to understand them, but it is not necessarily binding upon them. In other words, they are allowed to buy a house at the age of 16, but the seller would be taking a big risk in doing so! The contract exists but is unequal. In some cases the child must agree to the contract becoming binding once they reach the age of 18. It is quite complex from what I can gather. I don't know how such a EULA would work here: if a company cancelled a 15 year old's MMORPG account on the basis of the license not being enforceable, yet that child was legally allowed to purchase the boxed product in the first place, it could result in an interesting legal case.

I don't think it's *that* hard to ban someone from an online environment, even with a very simple per-account ban only.

A ban is usually something used to prevent a player to harass other players. Since the main pleasure in online games are, to my point of view, the community, the friends, and the social interation, loosing a character is a hard thing. Plus, your character is often the representation of the time you've invested in the game: level, experience, stuff, title, etc, are way to materialize this time into the avatar. This make it more valuable, and thus harder to loose. In commercial games, you can add real money to the character value by banning the cd-key.

Since the character is a high-valuable thing to the player's point of view, the account ban become something fearful.

The counterpart is also a problem. If someone, even if he'll loose his precious character, do bad things in your virtual world, you're gonna make him more furious of being banned, and more angry against your game, so he will probably try to create new accounts to express his anger.

In spite of that, I don't think that any automatic ban (IP ban, ranged IP ban, MAC address ban, or even hardware GUID ban and other big-brother ways of ban) is a good thing to implement.

Chain account creation is much more painful than banning them. So the first to be bored is gonna be the abusing player. And if the banned player choose to create a new account and to play nice with it, and eventually, w/out telling to everyone that he is that newly banned player, why ban him again? Everyone can have a second (and third, etc) chance, no?

In short: the more the player loves his character (because of social and/or time investment), the less he will do shit. The longest the account creation process is (like with email confirmation, unique email use, etc), the shortest the banned player is going to make new ones.

If your game doesn't include any time/social investment reward (leveling, experience, roleplay power, etc), it's, I think, more a chat than a game.

PS : Really sorry for my english. I do my best.

Quote:Original post by Tynril
A ban is usually something used to prevent a player to harass other players. Since the main pleasure in online games are, to my point of view, the community, the friends, and the social interation, loosing a character is a hard thing.

But people who want to cause trouble often no longer care about all that. Therefore a character deletion is not a big deterrent.

Quote:If your game doesn't include any time/social investment reward (leveling, experience, roleplay power, etc), it's, I think, more a chat than a game.

I don't think that's important. You can punish someone by deleting their character, and they just come back to harass people - whether the loss of their character was a big deal or not is unimportant once you've reached this stage. They now have nothing to lose (no character left) and everything to gain (exerting their power over other players and showing your inability to stop them). Your main aim then is to reduce the negative impact they can have on you/your players/your server.

Quote:PS : Really sorry for my english. I do my best.

Your English is fine, don't worry.