IP Banning and Online Cheating

http://www.massively.com/2007/11/29/broken-mirror-broken-dreams/2

This is actually a bit of controversy that happened with the MMO I'm testing for this week. Essentially, the Beta was open to everyone, but then the game's license got sold to a European developer who insisted that the NA version of the game commit an IP ban. This actually caught a lot of flack. Amusingly enough, the NA company started a petition to stop the IP ban. This isn't too shocking since they're essentially losing customers, but it's interesting that they'd start the petition themselves instead of letting enraged fans handle it.

The problem here is that in closed beta a lot of EU players made friends with NA players. Thanks to the ban, a lot of these friendships are essentially destroyed. The Asian version of the game I believe has no IP banning, although you have to be able to speak Chinese to play it. So, any connections internationally there are kept.

There's no doubt that all of this is legal, but it does bring up an interesting question of the social implications and the implied moral implications here. Are the European players outraged because they won't get to play for a while, are they mad because they see this as racist to ban a country based on IP, or are their newly founded American relationships in a couple of month closed beta that dear and precious to them? Sure. This is good business sense, but if the later is true, I wonder if you can't consider the IP ban to be somewhat immoral. The company is in its rights, but is it wrong to break up the community? What can be done to protect these communities from the reality of the outside world, and what happens to an online community that's still strong when it dies? What are the effects? It's not exactly urgent, and probably doesn't warrant a full in class discussion, but I thought it was interesting enough to get some comments on the blog over it.

I'm also enclosing a second article that's so minor it doesn't deserve its own post, but I thought it might be a handy reference for the next couple of weeks. I found it while doing random research. This is the article on wikipedia for online cheating and the forms it takes. It's all pretty obvious, but it's a nice reminder and reference document.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheating_in_online_games