Re:Open Question (Score 2)

While I personally think paying real-world money for virtual items is ridiculous, I do believe in the idea that people should be able to sell their accounts with their characters intact. Everquest, Civ II, and the software for my digital camera are the only reasons I have my Windows partition. I retired from EQ about eight months ago and then returned. My account was still on reserve (though my characters would have expired had I not deleted them by hand) because it was tied to the activation codes on my CDs. If I had sold the CDs without selling the account, the new owner would not have been able to play the game without contacting me first. Also note that the Everquest EULA was amended to ban the sale of characters and in-game items after it had become standard practice. They freely tweak the EULA and require every player to click the 'I accept' button every time they play the game (or restart after every client crash). This guarantees that people are agreeing to things they haven't read, because even periodically reading the EULA every couple weeks may mean missing a change in the licensing (and there is no copy or changelog on the client machine). And for the benefit of the person who posted the portion of the EULA above: Let's try continuing that happypuppy article with the following: "You hereby grant us permission to download Game-related files to you. You also grant us permission to access, extract and upload (i) Game-related data as part of the patching process and (ii) data relating to any program that we, in our reasonable discretion, determine interferes with the proper operation of EverQuest." That's a piece of legal dung that no Open Source user or decent lawyer would accept, and it's one I missed being added in the time I was away. (It was also, according to The Register, hastily scrapped after an obvious outcry by users.) It's also one more reason I'll be happy to chuck everquest off my hard drive if I get into the Anarchy Online beta next week. (Yes, I'm addicted, but I'm not willing to use the online equivalent of dirty needles. I've already told Sony to fsck themselves over their predatory banning of people who post stories based on their characters in forums Sony doesn't own (see The Register again, Oct 6, 2000), and their unwillingness to honor Windows refunds for Linux users. My next laptop will NOT be a Vaio.)