Washington Post: What's So Bad About Cheating?

Mike Musgrove, Washington Post Technology Columnist, does not understand why cheating is bad. I hope his golfing buddies know that.

Mr. Musgrove doesn't get why we enjoy MMORPGs. Some people would say that disqualifies him from writing about MMOs. I disagree. Musgrove admits his ignorance. Then he thinks that maybe MMOs are only boring in the low levels, so maybe he should try a power leveling service.

He pays $24 to a Hong Kong gold farm to get his "World of Warcraft" character leveled to 20. Unfortunately, he finds the game just as dull. There's just no pleasing some people.

But even after asking around, he just can't see why power leveling would be bad. (He calls power leveling meatbots "proxy fighters." Isn't that adorable?) He quotes the absurd self-justification of his HK gold pirate:

"The practice is analogous to someone who maintains a beautiful garden but doesn't always have enough time to perform all the yard work himself, and therefore hires a gardener," [HK/Singapore gold farming firm IGE's chief operating officer, James Clarke] wrote in an e-mailed response to questions about the company. "Some purists might call hiring a gardener 'cheating,' but we believe most people are quite comfortable with it."

Uh huh. I guess some purists might think hiring a gardener is cheating, and most people are quite comfortable with gardeners. What does that have to do with cheating in a game? Does this guy really think most WoW players are comfortable with the idea that the lvl 14 rogue in their PUG is an underpaid Chinese sweat shop laborer? Should I not care that someone paid money to "accomplish" in a moment what I worked (well, played) hard to accomplish?

I've made a big deal of the fact that MMOs are not competitive games. I've suggested that MMO players are meant to share strategies and resources, and not hoard them. But this raises the question, so what if someone buys levels? Or gold? Or items? Isn't that just "sharing?"

The only way to answer a question like this is to ask, "How does it affect the game?" The kinds of sharing I'm talking about take place in the game, between characters. It's part of the game itself. Power leveling and gold farming involve transactions outside the game, between players, made for out-of-game benefit (money). That's what makes it cheating.

When playing Monopoly, I can state in front of everyone that another player and I are ganging up on a third player. That's not cheating. But if I steal money from the bank and pass it surreptitiously to the second player, in exchange for non-game-related favor later, that's just plain old cheating.

Of course, Monopoly is a competitive game with one winner. WoW is a cooperative game with no winners. But they are still both GAMES. And if you don't play by the rules, you're not playing. You're just taking up bandwidth that could be used by people who actually want to play.

I'm not surprised that a Washington Post columnist lacks the internal ethical compass to recognize cheating. He's probably one of those people who thinks that because Alberto Gonzalez didn't break the law, he didn't do anything wrong. Power leveling isn't illegal, therefore it must not be wrong.

Link. Via MMO Gaming.

China Cracking Down on QQ Economy

Via /., The Wall Street Journal Online reports on the Chinese government's concerns about the QQ coin.

Created by software company Tencent for their QQ instant messenger, the QQ coin is now used by many East Asian online service providers, including MMOs such as Tencent's own "R2Beat," as currency for the purchase of service time and virtual items.

Then last year something happened that Tencent hadn't originally planned. Online game sites beyond Tencent started accepting QQ coins as payment. The coins appeal as a safer, more practical way to conduct small online purchases, because credit cards aren't yet commonplace in China.

At informal online currency marketplaces, thousands of users helped turn the QQ coins back into cash by selling them at a discount that varies based on the laws of supply and demand. Traders began jumping into the QQ coin market as an opportunity to make a quick yuan off of currency speculation.

State-run media reported that some online shoppers began using QQ coins to buy real-world items such as CDs and makeup. So-called QQ Girls started accepting the coins as payment for intimate private chats online. Gamblers caught wind, too, and started using the currency to get around China's anti-gambling laws, converting wins in online mahjong and card games back into cash. Dozens of third-party trading posts sprouted up to ease transactions, turning the QQ coin into a kind of parallel currency.

It can't be easy, trying to segue from Authoritarian Socialism to Authoritarian Capitalism, at the very moment that technology is destroying both traditional Authoritarianism and traditional Capitalism.

Rink.

PS: You find the best things on the Internet. I was Googling "MMO QQ" to find out which MMOs accept QQs, and I found a scientific paper, "Naked singularities, event horizons, and charged particles," which contains the phrase: "when the inverse square gravitational and Coulomb forces are exactly equal, giving the condition Qq = Mmo..."

eBay Finally Bans Gold Sales -- Chinese Economy Collapses

The ongoing war to put an end to organized cheating in MMOs has seen another victory.

Online auction house eBay is finally implementing their own policies, and "delisting" any attempt to sell in-game items and currency that does not have the specific permission of the copyright holder, i.e. the game publisher.

While I'm not usually a big fan of copyright enforcement when it gets in the way of consumer fair use, this is a special case. Gold farmers and their customers don't contribute to a game -- they destroy it, cheating in a way that ruins the enjoyment for other users.

The issue of who owns virtual property is an important and complex one, and I'd hate to see game companies abusing copyright law to control intellectual property created by users. But that's not what is happening here.

I also dislike it when eBay bans auctions to satisfy the wishes of some corporation -- for instance, when I couldn't sell my Japanese Dreamcast on eBay. My Dreamcast was a block of atoms that I had purchased fair and square. I owned it, and I had the right to sell it.

But when a region-locked console gets sold by a consumer, no one is hurt, not even the console manufacturer enforcing the policy. Gold farming hurts everyone.

eBay FTW.

Player Makes WoW Cash Through Prostitution -- No, Really

In a story about gold farmers, a Korean online newspaper mentions the adventures of Rob Conzelman of Philadelphia, whose WoW character "VillageBike," earns gold as a prostitute. She stands outside of inns wearing nothing but a bikini, and other players pay her to go upstairs and lie down on a bed so they can lie down on top of her.

I have to admit that VillageBike looked hot even on my extremely low-resolution screen. She could compete with Lara Croft -- the first and most successful attempt at profiting from horny gamers -- any day. Before long, a level 20 Mage approached with a predictable clunker: "Village bike, huh? Can I take you for a ride?" he asks. "Sure thing, baby, we can take this party upstairs for 5g," answered....

Why do I have a feeling only 14-year-old n00bs are paying for this?

Conzelman has a column on Dragonfire [warning: heinous, deplorable, and wholly unnecessary Flash interface), and discusses his activities there. Conzelman claims he could earn $4 real-world an hour this way, although he doesn't reveal if he actually has.

And you thought this kind of thing only happened on "Second Life."