We are talking here about software problems, poor coding practices that result in unstable software that does not work as intended and causes system instability as a result. If problem lies elsewhere it is not *your* software problem.

If I write a video game that causes loss of life (played while driving?) or massive financial loss (crashes a company laptop) I don’t want to be held liable. The second case might take some explaining. After all, if I make a physical toy that explodes and causes damage, I am held liable. Why shouldn’t I be liable for my computer game doing likewise? My excuse here is that it isn’t a failure of the computer game that causes the problem. It is a failure of the OS and the hardware.

What worries me about the use of the “no liability of any kind” clauses is that, at some point, something really, really bad will happen as a result of software failure. Take, for instance, the radiation therapy machines that killed people due to bad software (the name of which escapes me at the moment). If something caused massive financial loss or loss of life, and it was traceable to poorly written software, I can see those non-warranties going the way of the dodo.

IMO, if the software industry wants to avoid broad regulation from the government (because I think that’s where we’re going once the EULA gets normalized), it needs to start self-regulating. If that means slowing down development cycles, making security part of the each state of the life cycle of software, and possibly having something akin to clinical trials for software, then so be it.

But something’s gotta give.

Could the EULAs for MMOs draw public attention to how crazily abusive these things are? Sure. Will they draw enough attention to trigger massive change? Probably not on their own.

Which is why you shitcan their account for the specifics AND the grace-of-the-company clause. And the grace clause, if properly worded, will stand.

Regardless, if a company was ordered to stop banning people for a specific reason (which was illegal.. for example, banning anyone over 45 because they hated old people) and they didn’t, then that would be potentially actionable ANYWAY.

Indeed, but that’s beside the point. The point is, if an individual or an organization manage to get the current EULA invalidated in court, they won’t have any license to access the game at all. And beyond that, they will even have lost the right to fire up the client.

And while certain governments may indeed limit the kind of provisions set forth in an EULA, I doubt that this could somehow force a service provider whatsoever to provide service to a customer they do not wish to have. To put it in very naive terms, if it comes down to that, while there may very well be a court order throwing anti-RMT provisions out of a standing EULA, I’m highly sceptical that such an order would also deny the MMOG the right to tell the other party “OK, if it’s like that, here’s your subscription money back, and your IP range is banned from our game.”

But that hardly invalidates my comparison to the prohibition of performance-enhancing drugs in athletic competitions, and I think my parallel is closer.

Let me explain it – I thought it was obvious but apparently not -

1) People buy things via RMT that make their characters more powerful and competitive.

2) This makes it so that in order to keep up, unless the other person is that much better of a player (or has that much more time to spend “training” / leveling up / farming) – anyone who wants to remain competitive must also participate, whether or not they want to.

Feature 2) is not found in the “war on drugs,” but it is found in performance-enhancing drugs in athletic competitions.

Feature 2 means that even if using RMT spoils someone’s fun – they have to do it if they want to remain competitive – and many games have PvP and are highly competitive that contain RMT.

If, RMT was restricted to PvE only, in cases where resources were not competed over either (opposing groups trying to ‘camp rare drops’ or the like) but fully instanced – AND when the existence of RMT didn’t make it more difficult to just play the game by providing a faster, albeit less fun, way to get tougher that so many people took that there were not a critical mass of players teaming up to do it the regular way – then it would be ok, but I doubt that would happen.

I would not stoop to saying “but it’s in the EULA” is a reason for banning RMT – it’s evidence that someone in the developer/publisher/lawyer of the former thought that there was a reason to ban RMT. What I’d wonder is, what was their reason and is it valid to accept that they had a good one, or not?

But my own opinion that RMT is a bad idea is that RMT makes games less fun for me if it provides a competitive advantage for people using it, and if it doesn’t, I don’t care.

Right now I try to stick with playing games where RMT doesn’t – wouldn’t – provide any advantage that I notice while playing. Mainly for me this means sticking with games where the ‘grind’ is for “xp” rather than “gold” – untradeable.