If MMO's payed like this I'd probably play them---Well I will always have Final Fantasy games (excluding XI & XIV) .

They would have to do a little more than just take the initial disc. :mohawk: As to the comment about the developers rolling in and stealing back the disc. "NO! You can't play our games anymore, evil non-MMORPG playing person!"

Do you know what he's talking about? I am pretty sure he is talking about PLEX, where you basically pay for your subscription by allotting more game time (instead of having to pay subscription).

I'm not completely against paying for MMO's, provided that they're at least half decent, with a good community. I look forward to The Old Republic...

And I've never played WoW

This is how I think about it. You can pay 30 bucks for two months and then stop for a bit. At least that's what I would do.

Actually, it depends on a person to estimate his/her own self-worth and whether (s)he will buy a game even though (s)he realises what that game does or doesn't do. In this thread I was only explaining why I think that buying an MMO only to pay monthly fees to be able to play it is below my self-worth.


Actually, you do - not in the sense that you can buy a game and then go to court and sue the developer for not adhering to its rules, but in the sense that you can take care that every game you buy does adhere to that rules. If you do that - then you have it, and it applies to you. :shrug:


It does make a difference for you. It's only sensible of a gamer to have some decency in what games (s)he buys or not, and therefore I do, which makes a huge difference for me. Like I've said above.

This would be so great. One thing MMOs don't seem to have is competent GMs..

It's not semantics, it's legalities. Whether or not you own something is a matter of law, not of language, and your definition of ownership of a game has nothing whatsoever with the laws regulating ownership.

"Having something and being able to use it" is kinda a sensible definition of owning in my book. ("Legal owning" and property is an entirely different matter.) Legally and theoretically, there is no difference between "how much" you "own" a regular game and a pay-to-play MMO game. Practically and actually, there is.

So, "Having something and being able to use it" constitutes ownership?

So, if I borrow something from a friend, I own it?
If I lease something from a company, a car, for example, I do in fact own the car?

You cannot just make up the meaning of words that clash with the legal definition, because it is the legal definition that we are basing any decisions regarding ownership on.

OK, I'll mend it: "If you have something, are able to use it and have no intention of returning it/giving it back/giving it to someone else", then you practically own it. It doesn't constitute ownership nor do you legally own it but, practically, you do.


Besides, there are a bunch of situations where generally-accepted meaning of a word clashes with its legal meaning. That's just the way it is. :shrug: It may be wrong and not a good thing, but there it is. You can [censored] and moan about how it isn't so and that the legal meaning of the word is the right and true one, but you'll be wasting your energy in vain.

So, stolen goods are in fact owned by the thief?

Not entirely sure a lot of people would agree with you there.

See, whether we can decide the matter of game ownership is dependent on legal text that most people have never read.

They may not like agreeing with that, but it is so. If the police never arrest him and the stolen goods are never returned - he is their owner, not legally, but technically.

If the police ever catches him, the people whom these goods are stolen from have all the right to get them back, but until that happens, the thief is their factual owner, even though (s)he doesn't inherit the legal ownership. If you stubbornly disagree with this simple truth, you are just lying to yourself.

I am subscribing to my first MMO now - EverQuest II - and have done so since November. The game is very much fun, but I am aware of how much time it really can drain from you. And my personal experience is that even thought the game is very much fun and there is loads to do, I don't feel the sense of accomplishment after having played EQ2 for four hours straight as when I've played TES, Fallout or any other game. Because there is no end to it. It feels better having progressed halfway through a guild in Morrowind than it feels saying: "Yeah, today I've done five quests in EQ2. Five out of 6000 quests."

But what it comes down to for me is this: If the monthly fee is instead of spending it on magazines and weekday chocolate bars, then I don't mind at all. If I spend three hours playing EQ2 instead of three hours just fiddling on the net, then that's good. But if the fee is in addition to buying loads of crap and in addition to wasting time on the net - well, then it's not a good thing, and I will have to revaluate the entire issue.

But legally and technically the maker of the game can use methods so that whoever is not following their conditions (ie monthly fee, internet connection, et cetera) can be disallowed from playing the game. It's just like police catching a thief, or more accurately a repo-man taking your rented car away. Or even more accurately a repo-man taking the keys to your rented car away, but leaving the car there.

The fact of the matter is that there really isn't anything inherently objectionable about monthly fees on MMOs or DRM. Not an ounce of it is self-evident to the extent that we have grounds for boycott or whatever other petty thing we can do. Even Modern Warfare 2 made a big stink when it said it wouldn't have dedicated servers, and yet all that did was make some people who might have played and enjoyed the game scoff at it and turn up their noses. Or remember how Bioshock had, and still has, SecuROM? How many people have just outright refused to play what is an excellent game just because of some insignificant crap like DRM?

Actually, it's more like the police deciding that the stolen goods need to be returned, but not finding the thief yet nor knowing where (s)he is. To use your other anology, it's like the repo-man deciding that he should take the car keys away, but not having taken them yet, or possibly not even knowing where you might be with the keys and the car.

Now, there I just don't understand what you're talking about. You can't just say that someone's decision to boycott a game because of its horrible DRM is wrong because you wouldn't have made that same decision. The person who decides to boycott the game because of DRM obviously sees a reason to do it and has some grounds for it, be they self-evident or not. :shrug:

You act like that's arbitrary. These decisions are all made beforehand and laid out before you even bought the game. The stolen goods need to be returned the second they are stolen, not when the police "decide" on it.

And with DRM and monthly fees on MMOs, there is no question about where the owner and game is. That's why they want Internet connections so much, because through the internet they can find the game without fail. With an MMO they simply shut off your service until you pay the fee again, at which time they open the service.

This is ALL within the legal bounds of game licensing. When you buy a CD, you buy a license to use the game. The CD is, infact, just a courtesy to you. Lots of services, like Steam and D2D, just cut out the CD and make you download the game instead...but the license you buy from them is the same. Now you may own the physical CD they provided to you as a courtesy (as well as the box and manual), but you do not own the game or any other content on the CD nor the right to play it. These things are licensed.

Do they delete your character after some time has passed too?

That's up to their terms. Some don't delete the character because it's good business, and some do. Retention of characters is in no way a self-evident right.

It is arbitrary - if there were no laws, then nothing would need to be returned. I'm not trying to say that that would be a good thing, I'm just saying that laws, just like any other rules of society, are arbitrary. If they are not arbitrary then there's no point in saying that the stolen goods need to be returned the very moment they are stolen, because they shouldn't have been stolen in the first place. While I do agree that it's wrong to steal and that the stolen goods need to be returned right away, you can't say that an unnoticed crime is practically the same as a noticed one. If A steals B's watch without B ever noticing it (perhaps because he even forgot that he actually had that watch) and no one ever does anything about that nor tries to find the thief nor the watch, it practically becomes A's watch - fact.

But practicality is not legality.

Also: DRM serves to make that "practicality" as hard to achieve as possible, so that the law can be upheld when it needs to be. In the same way that we put our name on our shoes, or tracking devices in mail packages, or anything else is a prevention that's there to make sure it doesn't go unnoticed.

My point exactly.


Actually, there you're wrong. DRM does absolutely nothing to make the illegal owning and playing of the game any harder. The only people who actually suffer because of DRM are those who do abide by the law - that's the whole problem with DRM, and the very not-self-evident (as you've put it) reason that so many people decide to boycott DRMed games.

So you punish the many because of the few? That makes no sense what so ever.

I wouldn't say it wouldn't do anything, otherwise it wouldn't be so big.