Lawyer: Dead Space 3 Resource Exploit Might Be Theft

[Therumancer]

I never got Meta Knight being OP. He has priority and speed but very little range and power, not that hard to deal with when playing as most characters.

I'm not a big Smash player, but it's sort of like the issues with Ken, Ryu, and Sagat in Street Fighter. The amount of power their moves and stats give them is disproportionate to the difficulty of pulling those things off. Your basic fireball or "hyper" is a very versatile tool that can be used in a lot of differant ways even if it's not the strongest move in the game, ditto for the dragon punches, especially for the amount of effort it takes to pull off. Your basic down, forward, punch movement is incredibly easy to master and involves far less inputs and timing that the techniques needed by most characters to counter things done with it.

Once you get to a certain level of play, you begin to lose touch with how things are for most players, and how complicated some of the things your doing by reflex are, as well as how long it took to get into the mindset of
thinking a couple of moves ahead on exchanges and combos. You have to be pretty bloody good for any kind of a "tier" list to even remotely apply to you, as what can be done by each character in absolute terms in no way involves how easy that is to learn to pull off reliably.

For most players, at a typical level of play, a character like Metaknight is overwhelming because he's so bloody easy to use compared to what works to counter him (even if the people doing it don't realize it) as a result he pretty much stomps all over tons of players. It's right up there with almost everyone playing a shoto (or sagat) online, or at least when a new Street Fighter game goes online and the population hasn't reduced itself down to a more dedicated base of serious players.

I've oftentimes felt that fighting gamers/brawlers need to be better balanced with more consideration for number of inputs to power of a given move, combo, etc. To be honest I've always felt a lot of the problem with fighting games, and part of what holds them back from being taken more seriously in a competitive sense is that too many of them involve "newbie" characters designed to be very easily playable and a bit of an equalizer for that reason, either that or involve moves and movesets that have been grandfathered in because "they have always been that way" rather than being balanced more against the realities of the game.... and this is coming from someone who pretty much blows chips at fighting games. I'm just saying I understand, and even empathize with the problem. Not every issue I speak on nessicarly benefits me or my personal level/style of play.

I've played very, very, little of the whole "smash" thing but from what little I've tinkered with and seen, yeah, Metaknight probably needs to go, or be rebalanced. But then again as you might guess, I feel the same way about a few extremely iconic Street Fighter characters as well, which many would call heresy. Your basic fireballs should be there in Street Fighter for example, but should require a more complicated set of inputs and more mastery to use than they do now given their power level (in terms of versatility, as opposed to raw damage).

 

[Smooth Operator]

Damn right!
You evil bastard consumers how dare you not be hustled by EA, theft is what that is, terrorism even!

 

[Strazdas]

I guess all those trainers and cheats are theft also. you know, spawning a crystal in your singleplayer starcraft campaing is stealing definatelly.

Most EULAs have the stipulation that if you don't agree to it, then you can return the software to the store or manufacturer for a full refund. (This is required by law in most places)

Wait... ill stop laughing..... now ill tell you that you woudl be laughed out of the store if you ever tried returning a game on such grounds.

 

[Headdrivehardscrew]

...and this is why I generally believe 'IP experts' to be unpleasant and bad sports.

The publisher of the game just said it's OK, as it's basically farming. Why does some unknown IP expert have to voice her opinion on this one? Slow business? An acquired perception of what is right and what is legally exploitable?

That would be pretty low.

 

[VoidWanderer]

Is it still called theft when they tell you you can do it?

 

[nodlimax]

Can you imagine a world without lawyers?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWTp0BnNq00

 

[hawkeye52]

The english criminal law legal definition of theft is

"Dishonestly appropriating property belonging to another with an intention to permanently deprive"

As far as I can see there is to much of a gap between the resources of which you use to buy guns with since the resources are free and the items which you can get naturally using said resources without paying for them through microtransactions.

This would be closer to fraud in my mind then theft but even debating legal issues in something as benign as this is pointless to begin with

 

[mooncalf]

Interesting that bakeries are mentioned because this reminds me of the case of the begger and the baker.
A baker has a beggar arrested for enjoying the smell of a baker's shop, demanding that he should pay for it. The judge agreed - but not the way the baker expects - ordering the beggar hold his few coins up to the baker's ear and shake them. The sound of the money for the smell of the bread.

 

[TheCaptain]

For the record, according to german law neither the Dead Space situation nor the bakery example wouldn't fit the definition of theft. Once, "theft" only applies to things, not hypothetical damages caused by not buying some in-game items. Second, it's not theft if you've been given the change money willingly, if mistakenly.

 

[Gilhelmi]

I tell you, that lawyers are the bane of any society.

Sure, they occasionally help keep the laws on the books, but more often then not, they take and twist the law however it pleases them to allow them to sue more people for money.

At least EA is not thinking about doing this.

 

[FalloutJack]

I don't even play Dead Space and I find this fucking ridiculous. Someone's looking to be disbarred faster than old Jack Thompson.

 

[Daverson]

If you go into a baker's to buy a bun and they give you the wrong change and you walk away knowing you have been given more change than you handed over in the first place, that's theft,

Not necessarily. While it's a nice thought that in this situation only the baker is capable of error, it's equally as likely that you accidentally give the baker more money than you thought you did, in which case, would taking the "excess" money be theft on the behalf of the baker?

A more accurate analogy would be: I once walked out of the bakery, and the baker didn't charge me for the exercise I got walking around his shop, am I a criminal?

(Capthca - "no brainer", it's always nice when the cosmos agrees with you =p )

 

[Zombie_Moogle]

The important part isn't the lawyers opinions of or knowledge of games, it's whether her interpretation of the applicable laws are correct.

I can understand the argument too, at least for DLC. Games are software, and since software is licenced rather than sold, if you are using features or content that you aren't granted by that license, your breaching the license, which could be ruled as a form of theft.

I think a discussion to do with valuation of digital assets, and what causes that value could be interesting, especially with the advent of trading systems like steam. At the moment trading is only for assets in multiplayer gamese, where items seem to have a more real value than in single. But what happens if items from a single player game are introduced? I think it'd probably cause massive devaluation of all assets from the given game due to their abundance and ease of aquisition, just like flooding a market with money. I think Yanis Varoufakis and valve would probably do a better job of working out such issues though.

However, if a large company believes that it stands to gain money from something, or need a scapecoat to blame the failings of an outdated business model on, and sees people getting around paying them for it, they will pursue whatever legal avenues they can find. We're better off having someone point this out early on, rather than the first thing we heare being one day getting a letter saying that because their game glitched, they will be sued thousands of dollars.

Isn't it a paradox to claim, considering that game software is licensed & supposedly not owned, that anything within the game can even legally be "stolen" as you don't own any of it in the first place? If the publisher still owns the game even after you purchase it, would that not invalidate any argument of ownership or possession of anything therein?

 

[V8 Ninja]

As you have stated Mr. Carter, this isn't stealing in the slightest. Rather, it is taking advantage of the idiocy of another individual/exploiting a broken system. Granted, there are definitely moral conflicts when doing these things, but there is nothing illegal about doing these things.

 

[survivor686]

Perhaps the lawyer is using the wrong imagery. Allow me to post mine

- Think of the game as a car. Other cars give you the basic amneties for free (AC, gearbox, seats, etc...). DS3 is the car that says it'll give you AC after 50 miles....or you could pay an extra $10 and get the AC right here an now. Now you find a button that activates the AC right here and now.

The car is still yours, the AC is still in the car. You haven't gone out and stolen the AC from the dealership.

Its not thievery if its on the damn disc.

 

[Togusa09]

Isn't it a paradox to claim, considering that game software is licensed & supposedly not owned, that anything within the game can even legally be "stolen" as you don't own any of it in the first place? If the publisher still owns the game even after you purchase it, would that not invalidate any argument of ownership or possession of anything therein?

No really. I think the 'theft' would be classed as any breach of the license that deprives the ip holder of income. Take shareware software for instance. Shareware is generally limited use software with either a locked feature set, or limited usage time. By cracking it, or resetting the system clock to get around a time limitation, you're breaching the initial shareware license.

 

[Zombie_Moogle]

Isn't it a paradox to claim, considering that game software is licensed & supposedly not owned, that anything within the game can even legally be "stolen" as you don't own any of it in the first place? If the publisher still owns the game even after you purchase it, would that not invalidate any argument of ownership or possession of anything therein?

No really. I think the 'theft' would be classed as any breach of the license that deprives the ip holder of income. Take shareware software for instance. Shareware is generally limited use software with either a locked feature set, or limited usage time. By cracking it, or resetting the system clock to get around a time limitation, you're breaching the initial shareware license.

I suppose my point is that theft implies taking something from someone else. That person no longer has that thing

But licensing (as opposed to sale) shoots that in the foot as the licensee never owns a thing. "Possession is nine tenths of the law" kind of deal.

I'm just thinking out loud here

Additional thought: Insurance companies already had laws passed making it illegal not to buy their product; who's to say someone else (eg: game publishers) won't try to as well? What if EA wrote it into there EULA that you were required to buy the sequel of a game when it came out? They already tried forcing players to work as QA testers for free, lest their accounts be shut down, so why not?