MMORPG Lucent Heart’s operator Gamania has announced its intent to pursue unprecedentedly harsh measures against those who wilfully abused a recent item replication bug on its servers.
As well as terminating their accounts and those of their entire clan, Gamania vows to pursue criminal charges of fraud against the dupers, with guilty offenders possibly facing ten year prison sentences.
The recent duplication bug forced Gamania to take the popular MMORPG’s Japanese servers down for two days whilst it scrambled to patch the issue.
Service has since resumed, but Gamania has vengefully announced its intent to mete out the harshest of retribution to those who abused the bug.
The least of this involves terminating the accounts of all those detected to have duped items, but they have more in store for clans (guilds) too; their official statement runs as follows:
“We shall investigate accounts used to replicate items, as well as those otherwise connected with the bug, and institute permanent suspensions and similar when dealing with them.
Additionally, where we can confirm that clans have intentionally involved themselves with the duplicating of items, all accounts associated with that clan will be subject to permanent suspension.”
This is but the beginning of their vengeance:
“With respect to all those who have violated the Terms of Service of their subscription with us, we are currently pursuing legal consideration of the possibility of pressing criminal charges under section 246, paragraph 2 [of the computer fraud law].
Please be aware that we will be pursuing not only those who directly duplicated items, but also those knowingly took possession of these items.
Those who bought the items at shops will not be pursued.
We will report on the progress of this action at a later date.”
If found guilty of electronic fraud under section 246 – paragraph 2, offenders face a prison sentence of not more than 10 years (presumably significantly less).
They already report suspending 73 accounts for dealing in the items at shops, and “permanently suspending” 12 for actual acts of duplication.
Those who doubt the seriousness of these charges should refer to the various previous cases of virtual fraud and theft which have resulted in substantial real-world penalty.
However, if successful this prosecution would represent the first for duping, as previous charges have usually stemmed from gaining unauthorised access through stolen passwords and similar.
Responses from other companies facing duping have thus far involved only bans.
With the financial worth of virtual items now legally recognised in many places as being just as “real” as many other long recognised “virtual assets” (for example, derivatives or other such financial instruments), it seems only a matter of time before the law and the taxman fully catch up to “protect” the financial interests of these companies.
The online response appears to be less than impressed with the legal response, seeing it as overreaction, though few are actually sympathetic to the dupers.
Some can’t help but point out that Gamania is a Taiwanese company which only maintains a token Japanese presence, which may have affected their ability to respond to the bug in a timely fashion.
criminal charges is a bit too extreme…
I can haz yur stuff plz? :3
I don’t know, for the company’s point of view, I those dupers are destroying the company’s profitability.
People duplicate stuff, the game economy gets destroyed. Then more people quit from the game. Then the company will probably lose millions. They will try to patch the game which will cost money. Even after the game is fixed, it will never be the same again.
Yeah, you can say that its the company’s fault for not making the game perfect. But its the player’s fault for intently exploiting bugs to destroy the game which causes the company lose significant amount of money.
Therefore, bug abusers are saboteurs who wants to take down the company. I think that is a crime and depending on the damage they made, I say it should be appropriate to put buggers to jail or make them pay in terms of damages.
Holy Jesus, this is even worse than RunEscape’s hammy policies
Great. Next they’ll have a punishment where some player kills another player in a PVP/duel match and the player who won gets a ticket to do life in jail for murder.