I never believed in the "you can play this game for free" interpretation.

No one plays this game for free - someone else pays for you and you agree to reward them with ingame money for their generosity.

ISK has real life money value because it is traded as such and the conversion rate is defined by players. If PLEX is in demand, then clearly it has value, no? The most fundamental way to obtain PLEX is to spend RL money on it.

PLEX is kinda like RMT, though what you trade ISK for isn't real money, it's an item that has real-life value. Hence ISK has real life money value.

Maybe I am wrong, but that's how it makes sense to me.

Everythgin you can buy with money or Time has a real life value. Is daydreaming anyone that believe otherwise.

Well, to that person as I suggested it might then have a value, correct, but what if you are the player that never spent one cent on any PLEX, and you lose over a one year time span let's say 5 bio isk, did you lose physical money then too?

Please read before you reply, don't just read the title.

If I lose a carrier that I paid nothing for, plus I chose to play out of my own free will (which most here do) so you cannot consider this a money/time investment, then why would I be losing money?

calculations and stuff...

No trolls on this one please.

It depends on the context. When news outlets report "$300,000 worth of stuff destroyed in EVE Online batlte" it helps with giving a perspective on the effort that went into building the sandcastles that were mercilessly kicked down.

EVE is ultimately a video game, of course. All the time you sink into it is worth as much as the time you spend watching TV or playing games. It's an entertaining social activity, nothing more.

I can see the upside to your point, but the downside is that following such news comes a lot of handwringing about "gilded ages" and "rich white guys playing games". I'm expecting a headline "20 titans destroyed, women and minorities impacted the most".

So in addition to the bad reputation of the game for the other reasons, comes this equally bad impression that we are all rich playboys with money to burn for our jollies while children starve to death in that gap between our mansion and the 5 car garage.

It does not take much effort to see how easily and how stupidly "the masses" (say it fast and what does it sound like?) misinterpret the "ISK destroyed = $$ spent" metric. It becomes yet one more thing I had to explain more than once and such one more reason why I don't tell anybody I play this game any more.



The Cyclone is my favorite ship. I have a Cyclone in RL (a Mercury Cyclone GT - very rare) and I look forlornly at the EvE sticker I bought 5 years ago with the intent to put it in the back window of the car.

So in addition to the bad reputation of the game for the other reasons, comes this equally bad impression that we are all rich playboys with money to burn for our jollies while children starve to death in that gap between our mansion and the 5 car garage.

Why do people believe ISK has a real life money value?

TL:DR - Time is money. And what people want have real value.


Honestly, what I do not understand is why people do not get this.

The courts get it and in the end their opinion matters more than any random group of forum trolling gamers :D

Regardless of what game EULA's say or various forum lawyers claim, EULA are merely terms in a contract between the player and the gaming company.

Courts throughout the world are starting to assess in-game assets as a thing with real world value (usually assessed by time take to acquire it) in criminal, contract and equity law.

I am trying to understand the logic here of the many eve players that believe ISK has a monetary value, but first, my two cents.

The courts get it and in the end their opinion matters more than any random group of forum trolling gamers :D

Regardless of what game EULA's say or various forum lawyers claim, EULA are merely terms in a contract between the player and the gaming company.

Courts throughout the world are starting to assess in-game assets as a thing with real world value (usually assessed by time take to acquire it) in criminal, contract and equity law.

Citations and examples required.

The court ruled that:

- Virtual items have value in virtual of the effort and time invested in obtaining them
- The value in Virtual items is recognised by those that play the game (including the defendents who went to the trouble to take them)
- The Virtual items were under the exclusive control of the player GÇô who was relieved of this control

The court agreed that under the RuneScape terms and conditions, the virtual items in the game are owned by the publisher of RuneScape who grant the players have a GÇÿright to useGÇÖ. However it concluded that the items in question were under the GÇÿexclusive dominionGÇÖ of the victim until they were removed from them, hence the position of RuneScape being owners of the items (from the perspective of intellectual property / contract law) is GÇÿnot relevantGÇÖ in the context of the criminal case under consideration.Here the court made defence to money GÇô which is the property of the sate but can still be stolen.

For the moment, this matter is restricted both to The Netherlands and to the specific matter of theft. However in China and South Korea there have been similar types of cases which have made it to the courts, in these judges have displayed a general trend to grant more rights to players than are stated in their contract and to see digital objects as being akin to physical property in certain important respects. The fact that a case in the EU has got to such a senior court and has ruled along the same lines is likely to carry some weight with other cases that may occur in the West.

For details of the Chinese, Korean and other cases see tVPNGÇÖs white paper on Virtual Objects and Public Policy which examines both cases and statute in detail.

http://www.virtualpolicy.net/wp-virtual-items-public-policy.html

Example:

Supreme Court of the Netherlands Ruling: LJN: BQ9251, Hoge Raad , 10/00101 J

http://www.virtualpolicy.net/runescape-theft-dutch-supreme-court-decision.html

Well that seems to be one of the dumbest ruling I've heard of.

Shouldn't have even got to court, should have been sorted out by Runescape.

The main thing about that case is that it's about real-life coercion. As such, it easily falls beyond the scope of what Runescape can handle. Sure, the theft could have been trivially reversed, but a RL investigation would quite likely have been needed regardless to determine that the coercion itself took place. Otherwise, they would just have reversed (apparently) legal transactions on dubious grounds.

hence the position of RuneScape being owners of the items (from the perspective of intellectual property / contract law) is GÇÿnot relevantGÇÖ in the context of the criminal case under consideration.Here the court made defence to money GÇô which is the property of the sate but can still be stolen.

Ok, 2 points here.

#1. If you are gonna smoke that "Good Green" before and while posting, remember to take a break from time to time, else you get kind of loopy and things like the value of spaceships in a video game may start to worry you.

#2, If someone points out to you that you are a rich play boy playing a video game while minorities suffer, tell them you know a black guy (with a white girl avatar) that plays the game and he says it's ok for you to play EVE.
There, i just handed you a minority pass, useful to get through such situations and also good for a 10% discount at any barbeque joint, which should be easy to find as all of them or on Martin Luther King street in every big city in America.

If that don't work, then feel free to tell them to **** off then pick one of your cars from your 5 car garage and drive away.