I have no idea about the exact status of legality. My intuition would tell me that the method used for gathering gold and selling it (using bots to farm and spam) is illegal, but that the sale itself (selling ingame gold / items for real life cash) is dubitable but not really illegal. The clause is usually that the deal is not for the ingame items (as those belong to the company running the MMORPG) but for the time spent to acquire them, thus paying the work and not the items / gold.

True, however any sales along with account sharing are forbidden in the EULA. You're totally right though, since EULA isn't law.

I am not sure if MMOs hurt RTS. WoW for example picked up LOTS of players who never touched a single computer game before. And if those watch WWI by chance and stumble across an entertaining E-Sport like Starcraft - why couldn't people appreciate both things at a time (playing several sports is hard; watching several is easy)?

Because it's difficult to appreciate PvP without understanding what's truly going on, and for that to happen requires a lot of time investment. Even with its enormous player base, WoW esports are still extremely minor because the vast majority of players simply don't care about hardcore competition. And I don't think it's possible to be hardcore about SC and WoW at the same time. Take Yellow for example.

JWD

United States12607 Posts

August 05 2008 22:11 GMT

#23

Thinking about it some more, the only way KeSPA can absolve itself here is if Blizzard stepped in and made a power-play requesting that they not allow a company that profits from WoW to own an SC team. That's actually a very likely possibility.

Wasabi

United States3085 Posts

August 05 2008 22:20 GMT

#24

--- Nuked ---

Jibba

United States22883 Posts

August 05 2008 22:32 GMT

#25

The "young audience" thing could also be a bad translation. Can any of our awesome resident Korean translators find the real announcement?

Aesop

Hungary11305 Posts

August 05 2008 22:37 GMT

#26

Well, I think the "young audience" thing could be argued like this:

1. It is bad to communicate to the young audience that services selling Gold and Items in MMORPGs are acceptable institutions. (see reasoning above why not)
2. Accepting such a service as a sponsor for a Pro-Team communicates that such a service is acceptable.
3. Thus such a service should not sponsor a Pro-Team.

pubbanana

United States3063 Posts

August 05 2008 22:52 GMT

#27

On August 06 2008 07:37 Aesop wrote:
Well, I think the "young audience" thing could be argued like this:

1. It is bad to communicate to the young audience that services selling Gold and Items in MMORPGs are acceptable institutions. (see reasoning above why not)
2. Accepting such a service as a sponsor for a Pro-Team communicates that such a service is acceptable.
3. Thus such a service should not sponsor a Pro-Team.

Yes.

Buying items for online games has become a sort of social problem in Korea. In games like Kart Rider or whatever, you need to pay actual money to buy items to be competitive. Stories of kids stealing their parent's credit cards and buying shit for their games were getting pretty common a few years ago.

anotak

United States1537 Posts

August 05 2008 23:24 GMT

#28

I know that WoW Gold dealers in China have been linked to malware and spam. It's the same shady part of the internet that includes malware, child porn, online drug sales that should require doctor's approval in most companies (most common example is Viagra), spam, etc.
In fact, I wouldn't suspect it's that much of a stretch to believe that at least some of the people involved in WoW gold are associated with members of various russian mafias as the malware/child porn/spam rings in Russia are.
Not to mention from what I understand, other people's accounts get hacked and then items get stolen that way and resold.
All of these problems online fuel or are fueled by these inter-related things.
And while, ItemMania might be SLIGHTLY more legit than these deals, I still don't trust them.

RivetHead

United States842 Posts

August 05 2008 23:32 GMT

#29

Well I trust that ItemMania is a legit company, meaning that they don't deal in MMOs that the games' manufacturers don't approve of, like WoW. I am assuming they are mainly used for the million and a half korean mmos that around, and thats potentially a hugely profitable market. Cause lets face it, if you though WoW was bad with the grinding, you should play some of those damn Korean mmos like lineage and ragnarok (and those are the ones that we get here in the west, i bet the true korean ones are even more hardcore).