And the lawsuits keep flying. This one is a class action suit started by a user called Antonio Hernandez, who's suing IGE for gold farming in World of Warcraft.
Read the complaint - even if just for the first couple of pages.
Hernandez alleges that IGE is interfering with the the enjoyment of contracts between Blizzard and users “by selling World of Warcraft virtual property or currency […] generated by cheap labor in third world countries”.
Really, the sweat-shop imagery is getting tiresome. We don't mind when our shoes are made by people working in ridiculously dangerous conditions, but gamers seem to get really upset when someone engages in internation arbitrage to sell repetitive computer labour to US players.
Interestingly, he sets out the particulars of damage as:
If there's no link to USD (by their own arugment), their damages must be limited to USD$15/month.
Anyone know who's actually joined this action? It seems ridiculously hard to prove - it rests on tortious interference with contract, and damages alleged are likely to be limited ot the value of the subscription, discounted by the enjoyment that the players did in fact get - i.e., very close to zero.
There's nothing in the EULA that prevents *farming*, only selling gold. Farming, even on a super large scale, is a legitimate activity, and any ill effects which flow from it are Blizzard's responsibility (for what are essentially bad game mechanics, in my opinion).
There's no causal link between the loss that these players are alleging and IGE's allged wrongdoing. If IGE and all the individual farmers had wanted to, they could each farm the same amount of money and cause the same level of inflation (and restless nights!) without breaching the contract - the fact that they subsequently broke a contract with Blizzard has nothing to do with players having a less enjoyable experience. I can understand that some people don't like gold farmers (personally, I like the ability to bypass what i find to be the boring part of the game by paying someone else to do it for me), but they can't reasonably claim against IGE for this. Blizzard may have a case against people who break their contracts (we'll see about that shortly), but I really don't see that IGE is responsible to Blizzard's users. If anything, I'd complain to Blizzard about encorouaging game mechanics which are repetitive and boring, but that's not the basis for a legal claim.