Traditionally PLEX have been a special case in Eve, you couldn’t travel around with them, instead using a redeem/reverse-redeem system and remote activation to take advantage of them wherever you may be in New Eden. Now though, things are changing. Selected quotes from the Dev Blog follow, along with some quick thoughts from me:

Now what?

[...] Therefore we’ll be removing all the special casing surrounding the PLEX items and have them function and behave as any other regular item. At the same time we’re changing the behaviour of the Redeeming system a bit so that items can be redeemed in any station (you could only redeem items in NPC stations before).

What does that mean specifically

• We will remove the restriction on undocking from a station with a PLEX in your cargo hold

• We will remove the restriction that PLEX cannot be put into courier contracts

• We will remove the restriction that items (including PLEX) can only be redeemed into NPC stations

• We will remove the restriction that items (including PLEX) can only be reverse-redeemed from NPC stations

• We will remove the restriction that ETC can only be converted into PLEX while inside an NPC station

If you blow up a ship that happens to be carrying PLEX, it may drop the PLEX as loot or it may be destroyed in the conflagration (much like any other item in a ship’s cargo hold). The refund policies for PLEX will not be any different from any other item..

Are you crazy? Do you know how many people will emoragequit when they’re ganked with PLEX in their cargo?

Maybe we’re a little crazy, yes, but we truly think the benefits outweigh the risks here. One of them is to combat the perception that PLEX is a more valuable item than others in the game which, of course, it isn’t (anyone who has lost a titan/carrier/T2 BS/etc knows this full well). Among the risks of course is that people will start losing PLEXs’ en masse and cancel their subscriptions. We will be monitoring that extremely closely as well as all other aspects of PLEX trade/usage patterns. Remember, we’re not forcing anyone to undock with PLEX, in fact we’re making things a little bit safer (if people choose to use the option) by allowing redeeming of PLEX to all stations instead of just NPC stations. The choice and risk is always at the discretion of the player, just like it should be.

via EVE Online | EVE Insider | Dev Blog.

Reaction amongst the Eve community seems mixed, with both sides being presented on their discussion forum. It seems to me that whilst this may anger a few new players who are unaware of the implications of travelling with PLEX and thus lose game-time, the overall change is logical. The PLEX is effectively just an item worth 300 million ISK (which we can equate to US$15), and there are a number of in-game items worth significantly more that it is possible to lose. However, not everyone agrees as this blog post indicates:

Oh, I’ve been waiting for this one.  This has drama, rage quit, and QQ written all over it.

[…]

PLEX will be set free.  You can carry it around.  You can sell people contracts to carry it for you.

And, of course, people can take it away from you.

And that is where the fun begins.  Somebody scans your cargo, sees you’re carrying game time, and you are suddenly a high priority target.

This goes live Tuesday, July 13, 2010.

I cannot wait to see how this unfolds.  I want to read tales of PLEX piracy.

This is soooo EVE Online.

via PLEX! PLEX for Piracy! « The Ancient Gaming Noob

Will be interesting to see how this one evolves…

I’d like to take some time to speak with all of you regarding our desire to make the Blizzard forums a better place for players to discuss our games. We’ve been constantly monitoring the feedback you’ve given us, as well as internally discussing your concerns about the use of real names on our forums. As a result of those discussions, we’ve decided at this time that real names will not be required for posting on official Blizzard forums.

via World of Warcraft (en) Forums -> Open Letter: Real Names on Blizzard Forums

Oh, and the Cleveland Cavs owner committed one other faux pas I didn’t pick up on last night; via CNN:

Dear computer users: If you’re ever going to write a fuming letter, think twice before setting the font to the oh-so-mockable Comic Sans.

Take it from Dan Gilbert, the owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers, the NBA team that lost its star basketball player, LeBron James, on Thursday night.

After Gilbert posted a rant — in the cutesy Comic Sans typeface — about James’ departure on NBA.com, bloggers, newspaper writers and Twitter pundits lashed back with a collective message that essentially said this:

Unless you’re a fourth-grader, or being ironic, or the author of a comic book, or on vacation from the 1990s, never use that typeface.

via Cavs owner’s letter mocked for Comic Sans font – CNN.com.

We don’t normally think of anonymity as the default state, but it is. There’s 6.25 or so billion people on the planet. There are numerous occasions that we hand over our identification or give our names for one reason or another, but we generally do so only to people that we trust to handle them properly or that simply don’t really care who we are.

Do you know your barista’s full name? Do they know yours? Would you have any idea what their first name was if they didn’t wear a name tag?

We routinely caution our children not to give out their full names to strangers, or indeed to anyone that they don’t have a very good reason to trust (eg: a policeman).

If you ask the person serving you at the grocery checkout or your bank teller what their last name is, they’ll probably be reluctant to tell you. For many establishments it is against policy to reveal that information.

Large and heavily trafficked call-centres and customer-support services routinely assign pseudonyms to their staff to avoid issues of harassment. In smaller outfits, it’s rarer, but still sometimes done if a staff member has a particularly memorable, distinctive or unique first name – or if another front-line staffer has the same first name.

Why do we go through all of this?

Because we know it’s safer!

via Metaverse Journal | True Names: identity, safety and Blizzard’s Real ID

So the question switches to what is the solution, and the below from Randy Farmer basically summarises what I would argue for:

An Alternative Everyone Can Live With

There was/is an alternative – described in the Tripartite Identity Model post from two years ago: Implement Nicknames!

Sure, have a top-level social identity, but present it as user-controlled Nickname and allow users to share a variant of their real name – but don’t require it! Sure, if the Nickname is the same as their RealID, feel free to show an indicator, like Amazon.com does with their Real Name markers. Allow users to reveal what they wish – even provide incentives for them to do so, but don’t bind full disclosure on them. Even Facebook doesn’t do this!

It’s never too late.

P.S.: I can’t stop being amazed – Asking for help on a forum requires disclosing your real name to God, Google, and Everyone? Come on! You’ve got to be kidding!

via Habitat Chronicles: RealID and WoW Forums: Classic Identity Design Mistake.

Blizzard have responded, telling Gamasutra that “we’re listening”, but continuing to insist that the system is opt-in, because players are not forced to post on the forums and ‘their gameplay experiences will not change if they choose not to use the Real ID communication features in game’. Seriously? In the same discussion they also indicate that they will attempt to crack down on players using false identities, stating ‘our Terms of Use agreement requires that players provide us with accurate information’.

Meanwhile, players are exploring how they can use the parental control features to limit or prevent data being shared in-game using Real ID, and others are continuing to explore and expose the personal lives of Blizzard executives and staff, though to my mind some are going too far:. Here’s two (slightly out of context) quotes from the linked page, along with the disclaimer, scrubbed of personal details… to me that’s going too far.

NONE OF THESE POSTS ARE THREATS. I’ve seen people at 4chan and other places saying this site is filled with thinly veiled threats. It’s not. I do not wish to see any harm or harassment come to ANYONE listed here, even Bobby.

But hey, he’s a busy man. He’s got a wife and three young daughters, ages x, y, and z. The oldest is [xxx], she likes skiing. There are pictures of her that can be found, but I’m not posting them because I think I’ve made my point there. Anyone messing with his family or kids is a sick fuck, but you know what? There are a lot of sick fucks who play WoW

The beautiful family’s current address is either xxxx or yyyy ******** Way. They own or owned both but surely they don’t need two houses, do they? ******* Way, Beverly Hills, California 90210. They spent $171,708 for renovations a few years ago, nice place!

via What’s in a name?

But in general the point is well made around the net, you can find plenty of information about almost anyone with free tools these days, as I have shown friends in the past when pointing out their facebook profiles were open for the world to see, and just about anyone can be impersonated. Just a couple of weeks ago I came across this on twitter, using all my personal information (that is on twitter) for (I assume) spamming purposes:

Twitter have now removed the account, but it’s an example of how easily privacy breaches can occur, your identity can get stolen, and why it’s worth monitoring the google results for your name!

So Blizzard are now making it so instead of showing your character on those forums, it’ll instead show your real name with the option of attaching your char name too it (no option of not showing your real name).

Now I think it’s fairly safe to say that this is perhaps the dumbest idea that anyone has ever had ever.

To alleviate people’s concerns, Blizzard employee Bashiok decided to say his real name on the forums, his real name is Micah Whipple

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=25712374892&sid=1&pageNo=1 Post #16

So say hi to Micah Whipple

via WoW Riot | WotLK, Wrath of the Lich King, WoW, World of Warcraft, Arena Season 5.

I’m not going to publish his details here, but suffice to say just about every detail of his (and several other Micah Whipple’s) life was made public.

The background issue here though is one of privacy. From what I understand in addition to this implementation on the forums, they also have an in-game/in-world implementation of RealID, which allows you to see the real names of your game friends, and (importantly) friends of friends. Now we all know how well that went down with facebook users.

It seems the idea behind this, and one that Eve have also championed with EveGate, is a desire to create a social network around their player base. This is an attempt to compete with the social element of facebook games, and presumably to keep their players tied to paying a subscription to maintain their social network, rather than using something like Facebook which, for all its faults, is currently free. I happen to think it’s a futile attempt for much the same reasons as I have discussed here before, there’s too much social capital invested in Facebook even for somebody of the budget of Blizzard to compete. Even Google is a long shot I think..

Blizzard responded thus:

“I should point out that showing a real first and last name doesn’t provide any one the right to then seek out additional information on that name and post it here. That has been and will continue to be a violation of the forum code of conduct, and so bans and what have you are incoming. Fair warning. 

That’s just a blanket rule that applies to everyone.”

Which is all well and good, but doesn’t excuse them from the initial privacy violation. What is to stop somebody engaged in an in-game or forum dispute with another player looking up their personal information and then publishing it on their blog, on a guild forum (for harassment purposes) or on one of the many unofficial WoW sites. In all those examples, Blizzard are enabling the harassment, and at the very least are opening themselves up to bad press.

The initial idea of allowing players to connect with each other isn’t horrible (a friend offered the example of connecting with people he used to play with that are now on different servers etc), but why they are relying on real name, as opposed to some non-character tied username I don’t understand.

This is the same hold that exists in Virtual Worlds, and is one of the reasons I think there is a strong argument for better regulation of these environments.

But Google shouldn’t be the only party concerned about Facebook’s rapid ascent — the lack of a Facebook alternative is a threat to consumer choice, providing no escape route when things turn sour.

No real alternative

Facebook’s privacy issues over recent months have opened our eyes to a grim reality: There is no real alternative. While dissatisfied MySpace users hopped over to Facebook, there is no truly competitive social network to which disgruntled Facebook users can elope.

The demand for a legitimate alternative is so great that a project called Diaspora was able to raise more than $200,000 from Web users to develop its “privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all, open source social network.”

Until such a rival emerges, Facebook has little incentive to maintain user trust — the only option available to unhappy Facebookers is to delete their accounts and lose contact with their friends.

via Cashmore: Google building a Facebook rival? Let’s hope so – CNN.com.

Life in Brisbane is great, and my thesis continues to plod along at a steady pace; I have now submitted the Stage 2 and (touch wood) it seems to be proceeding through the administrative processes without problem. I have shifted focus a bit from Star Trek Online (which frankly doesn’t seem to be an interesting example of much — it’s a single player game with a bit of multiplayer functionality, and none of the interest that is attached to other environments for now) to Eve Online, which despite being around a fair while has yet to attract much academic focus, yet has it’s own policy committee and a relatively open discussion with players who shape the game far more than is possible with STO. I continue to look at Second Life & Project Entropia, and on the fringes am looking at some games like NationStates and A Tale in the Desert, which provide some interesting examples of in-game regulation. I have installed on this blog a digress.it mini-blog which will contain chunks of my thesis as I go, and I welcome constructive feedback on that as things progress.

It doesn’t look like I’m going to make it back to the UK (or Cyprus / Europe in general) this year, though family are coming out next Easter which will be nice, and I learnt today that friends of the family will also be out next Easter as their daughter is doing a year at Griffith on the Gold Coast, so will be nice to catch up with them who I haven’t spoken to in maybe 5+ years now. I’m planning to make a trip back to Europe next winter (Nov/Dec 2011), where I intend to visit Iceland/CCP, and have even got a good friend lined up to help out, which is something of a relief, and will be a great help. I also intend to speak to regulatory bodies in the gambling industry, however the details of that are still TBC. Not quite sure what else I’ll fit into that Europe trip or possibly a separate one over Christmas, but may stop by the UK, Cyprus and possibly Denmark for varying time periods — a lot depends on money/timings, and what terms are applied to any additional funding.

Well I think that’s a wrap for now. As I move now past the stage 2 and onto the actual research I will post more, and I hope to start getting small sections (which may become papers in their own right) up into the digress.it system within the next 6 months or so.

Come on England!

http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2010/04/how-to-make-a-cool-2mm-in-one-day-with-a-sparkle-pony.html (from Mike Sellers)

Posted via email from Quick Hits

• Paid about 7 months worth of hosting
• Submitted formal PhD applications to QUT in Australia, and ITU in Denmark.
• Been accepted into QUT
• Sold all my stuff in Denmark (this blog temporarily housed a for-sale list )
• Spent a couple of months in the UK, visiting friends & family.
• Flown to Brisbane via Changi, Singapore (note to self: never do this in one trip again; 26 hours of travelling = feel like death)
• Re-purchased most of the stuff I sold in Copenhagen (hey, it’s newer versions and beat shipping it!)
• Dealt with a ton of administration here in Brisbane; everything from scholarships (entered incorrectly) to office space applications (still not got a desk), including health insurance, bank accounts, tax numbers, and a lot I’ve probably forgotten.
• Been to numerous orientations, all with useful snippets of information but couched between stuff I’m being told for the second, third or fourth time (the faculty orientation snuck in first).
• Started drafting an ethics clearance, raising numerous issues of project scope & methodology (more on this in a post next week).
• Started a rough outline of my Stage 2 application, which is basically a progress-check due in late May.
• Met some good people, ate at a couple of decent restaurants with good company.
• Attended lectures for the first time in a couple of years; primarily research skills (some useful, some not).
• Attended IT Lab classes for the first time in about 6 years; again useful snippets, but good people.

I think that’s about it. Now I’m settled (and actually doing things other than sitting in front of a computer moving numbers about 16 hours a day), I will try and update this again. Quick updates and random photos tend to end up on twitter (@dpwoodford), so check there too! Current plan is 1 or 2 updates a week, and I also hope to publish parts of my research as my PhD progresses.

In essence the PhD will look at the regulation of online environments, something I have previously considered in papers entitled Ludic Gambling: The implications of gambling legislation on online gaming and Governing Virtual Worlds: Empowering Players (Forthcoming, 2009/10).

Looking both at the economic and social implications of online worlds, I consider how different countries have dealt with their evolution, how game designers and the corprorate entities behind them have responded to regulatory efforts, and ultimately (and ambitiously) provide a manifesto for both how governments could/should look at regulating such environments, what can be reasonably expected of designers in terms of industry standards to prevent overseers being neccesary, and how players can pursue their own agenda and use their power as consumers to promote fair and safe environments.

I came across a blog from Ted Castranova at Terra Nova today, advocating the use of the Serio. This is the e-mail he sent out to his contacts (of which, it seems, I’m not one ;P):

No big news; I’m just letting you know that from now on I’m going to be sorting my Inbox using the Attent program, developed by Seriosity. Attent allows senders to attach a virtual currency called the Serio to emails. By design, Serios are in limited supply. An email with more Serios attached means more to the sender. By attaching Serios to messages, senders help receivers prioritize the flood of incoming messages. It’s the sort of thing that appeals to me: virtual currency, economics, scarcity, fun, etc.

Therefore starting today, I’ll be responding first to emails with the highest incoming Serio values. Look at it this way: If you want to help me give your message the attention it deserves, go to www.seriosity.com and get some Serios, then attach them to your message.

Apologies for cross-posting. Hope you’re all having a nice New Year.

Ted

My initial response to this was “Who uses Outlook?”, and indeed that seems to be a pretty common response in the Terra Nova comments, but even beyond that it seems a quite ridiculous idea. Basically, Castranova is an economist, and this idea applies economic theory to e-mail. By making people spend a “currency” on sending emails, it forces them to prioritise the emails they send and allows recievers to then read the more important emails first; in line with the principles of economic utility.

Castronova writes (at some considerable length) on Terra Nova on the reasoning for adopting it, but to me, it seems a fad. It’s the kind of thing that requires a significant proportion of people using it to be useful, and given that the current options are to either use Outlook or send an email via a web form, I’d give it’s chance of achieving substantial support to be virtually zero. Further, it doesn’t support mailing lists, and spam filters / filtering rules do a more than capable job of filtering ones email.

I may be proven wrong, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this is the last I hear of it.