Well, not often, and not like a new resident. Until I created a new character as part of the testing for a client. Starting with a fresh new inventory, I reported on my visit to the Gnubie store the other day. In the Gnubie store, the creators of items make them for the store, and charge $0 or $1 Linden at the most for the items that they sell. It is well organised, and well ordered. You won’t find any creator’s sales items given away free, and notices ask people not to sell the items that they gather there. Gnubie store gets an A+ for honesty, organisation and generosity.

Fast forward to today, and I visited a freebie place which could not be more different….

GamersBrand has a professional logo and a private island and a lot of visitors. The traffic on the island today is 86,514, and that doesn’t surprise me as there were 90 avatars on the island when I visited, all exploring the island and everything it has to offer.

I visited the group website, but I must say that I was still a little confused about what they do. This is what they say about themselves: “GamersBrand Entertainment, LLC is an internet network featuring web service, content, and community websites devoted to the gaming community. We offer a wide varierty of online entities satisfying many needs of the online global market.” So far, so good. A little further down they say: “Our overall goal is to create a variety of entertainment sites to offer a variety of services in order to satisfy the need of an ever growing global marketplace.”

GamersBrand Island in SL consists of walkways linking vending areas containing piles of boxes. It is fairly confusing when you first arrive: some of the boxes have prices on them, and yet seem to be selling for $0 Linden. There is a huge range of stuff… clothes, shoes, jewellery, textures, sex stuff, combat stuff, almost anything that an avatar might need.

I looked into some of the boxes, and they seemed to be giving away full perms merchandise. Now I was already starting to be fairly attentive to the range of material on offer, but what really caught my attention was the fact that a number of items came up with “unknown” creator, and others showed that creations from several different creators had been crammed together in a box.

After some digging around in the boxes myself, IMing people named as creators of objects in some of the boxes, and some pretty long notecard conversations with Doug Pau, who is in charge of GamersBrand island in SL, I discovered that:

- they are selling items such as the infamous sex bed, for free, a bed which has been the subject of repeated DMCA takedowns. To be fair Doug Pau did eventually remove the bed from sale, but the rose rug — which has also been the subject of successful DMCA takedowns — contains similarly illegal animations;

- they are selling items from shop-in-a-box deals, which they may have paid 20,000 lindens for, but which they are selling as individual items for $5 lindens, thus undercutting ordinary residents who have bought the same shops;

- they are giving away items originally from shop-in-a-box schemes, and don’t seem to have much idea about whose IP they are, or on what condition they were originally released. One set of jeans, which were all boxed by the same person, shows an outrageous number of lindens on the box, but is actually free. The jeans inside have a variety of creators including “unknown”. The creators I tracked down told me that they had been chasing down these boxes all over the grid, because the jeans inside were meant to be free, but had been packaged up as part of a shop-in-a-box scheme. I’d hazard a guess that some of the boxes being sold originate here and get sold elsewhere;

(There are boxes and boxes of stuff all over the island. There are shop-in-a-box scams all over SL, involving freebies or a collection of full perms material that people have picked up from yard sales, some of it exploited, some copied outside it’s licence, some just free. Some of these are being sold, full perms here, sometimes boxed up with a price on the box. )

- they are giving away a huge range of items, having received them from diverse sources, and not necessarily the original creator. There are literally *hundreds* of items over the island now, and the IP status of many of them is necessarily unclear. I was told that they do not sell things full mods, but this is demonstrably not true. Many of the items which my alt bought or copied for free, were full perms inside restricted perms boxes. I could pull full perms animations out of the pole dancer poles, for example, too.

I have started the process of tracking down the originators for some of the full perms items, to see if they are aware that their creations are being given away for free, or in some cases, sold when they are meant to be free, and I assume that process will continue for some days over the items I chose to look at. I am also hoping to make contact with the RL company GamersBrand to see what they have to say for themselves.

At first glance, you may think that this is no different from a hundred freebie and yard sale places where things that ought not to be given away free are given away and things that ought to be given free are charge for…. But I would remind you that this is a commercial company who wishes to promote online gaming and provide what the player wants. Is this what *you* want? It looks as though they have decided that making a splash in SL and maybe a fast buck too, given the number of avatars on their island, is worth the chance that the odd creator or three will notice them and start to ask questions. Well guess what? I am a very odd creator and I ask a lot of questions when I see something that is this wrong going on.

Now you know, I feel I ought to be investigating everything there, but honestly! I could work at it from now until Christmas and still only cover a small part of what is there, because they didn’t do what they ought to have done. In the end I decided that I couldn’t investigate all … but looking more closely at the big box of textures demonstrates nearly all of the types of situations which arise with the many items on the island.

It’s a BIG box of textures… 10,000 and more it says. It has a price of $499 on it. Bargain! But wait, it is actually “selling” for $0. So… I look at the box and it tells me that lex Fitzcarraldo is the creator. I buy a box. A folder with many boxes opens in my inventory. 302 ultimate interior textures, 100 beverage textures, 100 churches and temples and so on down the folder..

Looking into the boxes, 302 ultimate interior textures all show lex Fitzcarraldo as the creator of the textures in that box – many of them 1024×1024 textures. So … if lex Fitcarraldo intended his textures to be sold for $499 dollars, how come they are set for $0 on GamersBrand?

But wait a minute… here are Linden textures, textures from Gnubie by Jai Nomad, bundled up together in one of the boxes, and without the Gnubie store terms and conditions. The box says $200, although it was inside the box with $499 painted on the side which I bought for $0.

Another box from inside this box… Drift Monde textures – never to be resold, I know, I’ve read the agreement – a whole series of Drift Monde’s textures. So… in one package we have Drift’s textures which she sells full perms on condition they should never be resold or given away… Gnubie textures which need the licence with them… textures that are the IP of the originator of the boxes, which he appeared to intend to sell bundled with the others for $499, but which are huge…. I only opened three of the boxes out of about 30 in the folder. Many have such a lot of textures in, it is quite painful to look at items in the box, and I didn’t want 10,000 extra textures in my inventory.

GamersBrand appear to me to have demonstrated no concern for the right ordering of their business in SL… the impression I get, is that if it looks as if they can attract traffic and do it on the backs of the SL creators, they will. They have not spent the necessary time in ensuring that they are not selling things or giving away things they ought not to. I have emailed the RL company for their opinion on it. When I receive a reply you can be sure I will let you know. Meanwhile, if you are as appalled as I am by what you find on GamersBrand, abuse report any IP infringements but why not email them to tell them how you feel?

Remember what they said about themselves? “Our overall goal is to create a variety of entertainment sites to offer a variety of services in order to satisfy the need of an ever growing global marketplace.” In SL that seems to involve infringing the IP and rights of creators, and promoting poor business practices. Frankly, if Gnubie store is an A+ model of what a freebie store should be, GamersBrand is the Z- what-not-to-do example to us all.

I can’t finish without a word about the lack of protection from Linden Lab of our IP as creators. Some of these items were created by people who have been issued with more than one DMCA takedown notice. Shouldn’t deliberately exploiting someone’s IP in this way be a once a warning, two times you’re suspended and three times you are out sort of deal? And shouldn’t a Linden be taking a very close look at GamersBrand Island for themselves? Is it REALLY necessary to make the individual creators issue DMCA after DMCA to take this company out of business in SL until they can tell a freebie from a full perms object and know how to work out whether something retains full permissions? Can you hear me in Chicago?

While I haven’t resorted to drinking yet, somehow, we have to make ends meet. Unlike other MMOs, there are no monsters to slay for gold and no treasure to hunt. In fact, I remember back in the day when Basic accounts actually had a stipend. It wasn’t much, but it got you around. Now, the poor just get poorer. Sounds a lot of real life doesn’t it? I wonder when we’re going to start inviting those guys in Entropia to come over and do the jobs we don’t want to do. Land of the free right? Well… maybe.

For now, it seems like I’ll be mopping up blood for a little bit of cash. Oh, how the mighty have fallen. Don’t be surprised if find me on your street corner panhandling and hoping for just a couple Lindens to feed my new addiction.

And in case anyone was wondering… that pool of blood was a couple casino owners jumping from a highrise. Yeah, it’s a sad day today. Oh, so very sad.  If you’re waiting for me to sell myself, give me a couple days.  I have to get used to sleeping in a cardboard box, and begging from Evansmom for scraps.

My prediction?  Next on the list to go is the sex world of Second Life.  Hipihi here we come.   We’re not all that far from it really.   And if that’s the case, then count on me to be on the first wave of the mass exodus from this virtual world to escape into another.

Who needs voice chat and all those features?

Not I.

Not I.

I’m busying mopping up the blood.

Y’all know I am a simple country boy so the first thing I had to do was put Bragg’s complaint and Linden’s answers on the same page to see just exactly what was being admitted and denied. That wasn’t as easy as I was expecting it to be because the only copy of Bragg’s complaint I was able to find are scanned copies, so no cut and paste. I had to type the body of the complaint out, and since I have done that I figure I may as well post it here and let you have a look at what has been admitted to or denied. You can take a look at Bragg vs. Linden Saga Continues and read it yourself if you would like.

Most of it is a waste of time and doesn’t get to interesting until the counter suit is reached, but there are a couple of things that we should be aware of. The first being that Linden Lab deny that Second Life is a massively-multiplayer-online-role-playing game, but admits that it does share certain characteristics with such games.

Bragg’s complaint draws heavily on using Philip Rosedale’s own words and marketing strategy and his often use of the terms “buy” “sell” “own” virtual real estate. In Lindens answer to Bragg’s complaint Linden Lab is posturing to be more like a “hosting” company by stating that “virtual land” is not property, but “a license of access to Linden’s proprietary servers, storage space, bandwidth, memory allocation and computational resources.”

I have to say that Bragg probably has caused this shift in the “often stated virtual land stance” as it was never talked about before as a hosting service. Now the “official” word is analogous [Similar or equivalent in some respects though otherwise dissimilar] to ownership in “virtual land.” I would say we all pretty well knew we weren’t buying LAND, but that is exactly how it sounded when you heard Philip talk or read most anything about land ownership on the Second Life website. But Linden Lab is now having to change their story in an attempt to defend a legal position in a “real world” court system.

Another interesting aspect is that Linden Lab’s “legal eagles” are still calling heavily upon the Terms of Service agreement, including areas which the Honorable Eduardo Robreno has already decided are unconscionable and “unenforceable.”

Where this really got interesting to me was the counter suit filed by Linden Lab.

LINDEN RESEARCH, INC.’S COUNTERCLAIMS
AGAINST PLAINTIFF MARC BRAGG FOR:
1) FEDERAL COMPUTER FRAUD, 18 U.S.C. § 1030
2) CALIFORNIA STATUTORY COMPUTER FRAUD,
CAL. PENAL CODE § 502
3) BREACH OF CONTRACT
4) BREACH OF THE IMPLIED COVENANT OF GOOD
FAITH AND FAIR DEALING
5) CALIFORNIA STATUTORY UNFAIR COMPETITION, CAL. BUS. & PROF. CODE § 17200
6) DECLARATORY RELIEF

Their Preliminary Statement left me scratching my head and wondering just what Bragg actually did to “scam” their system. Here is the Preliminary statement:

This Counterclaim arises from a fraudulent scheme perpetrated by Marc Bragg and persons acting in concert with him to obtain money through a scheme and artifice involving unauthorized access to Linden’s proprietary computers that host the online digital platform, or virtual world, known as “Second Life.” As more fully alleged below, Bragg – who is a licensed attorney – and his confederates, knowingly and with intent to defraud, without Linden’s permission, obtained, used and altered data and computer software in a deliberate exploit to gain unauthorized access to Linden’s server software in order to manipulate and subvert Linden’s standard system for making so-called “virtual land” available to its users through its land auction system. Linden sells rights to such “virtual land” – which are equivalent to access rights to a designated and dedicated portion of Linden’s hosting servers, computational resources, and memory allocation – through auctions that are open to all residents simultaneously, with a set standard minimum bid of U.S. $1,000.00. The objective of Bragg’s scheme was to obtain access to “virtual land” that was scheduled to be auctioned by Linden in the future and thus before it was available to any other users, and to acquire it for as little as one U.S. dollar rather than whatever winning bid (in excess of the minimum opening bid of U.S. $1,000.00) might have resulted from a legitimate auction. After acquiring the “virtual land” through this fraudulent scheme, Bragg intended to subdivide it, sell it to other Second Life users, and potentially obtain thousands of dollars in U.S. funds in ill-gotten profit. Prompted by the fortuitous discovery of Bragg’s and his associates’ anomalous auction transactions, Linden personnel investigated, and placed Bragg’s Second Life account on hold before he was able to profit from the scheme. When Linden told Bragg that it had placed his account on hold pending their investigation of his activity, Bragg threatened to sue Linden, in an attempt to dissuade Linden from continuing its investigation into his fraudulent scheme. When Linden did not capitulate in response to Bragg’s threats and remove the hold on his account, he immediately retaliated by bringing suit and – incredibly – demanding that Linden refund him his “expectation interest in the profit” he hoped to gain by reselling the fraudulently-purchased “virtual land.” Linden brings these counterclaims to recover the losses it incurred as a result of Bragg’s scheme, and to ensure that Bragg is appropriately punished and forever barred from Second Life.

There are several thing in this counter suit that has me lil mind a spinning — I think I will tackle it tomorrow

Rich explained things are very busy there in Atlanta, with them preparing to change to larger offices, and trying to  roll out the new avatars, clothing and graphics.  Which I thought he said would be done before last Thursday, but either I misunderstood or they ran into more trouble than they thought they would. “Tisirin” told me he would be happy to answer a few questions, but  suggested that I wait until after the new things were placed in world…. which I agreed to do.

Tonight I went into Kaneva and saw the announcement that the new avatars and clothes would be released in world Tuesday June 19.

After seeing the picture above I am not getting the warm and fuzzies over these new avatars,  but I guess they will be better than the avatars given by Second Life before we purchase new skin and hair etc….

The signs stating Stress Tests will be taking place 3 days a week are still in place, so at this time it appears that people will still be able to “earn” reward credits.

More and more friends have been talking about the lack of things to do and accomplish in Kaneva and wondering just what opportunities will become available to them once Kaneva comes out of beta. Of course most of those contacts have been complaints, and I have passed these along with a few others to Rich Weil and received an email telling me that he was working on getting the answers from the proper people more in the know than himself.  We are going to try to get together Wednesday or Thursday on the phone to discuss these and other Kaneva matters.

• 3D immersion not possible… lack of control of your viewer… gaps to wide for the subconscious to fill to feel a sense of virtual being real.
• about new features being announced as coming soon, and no one knowing what the heck soon means.
• the change of the economy where all your credits were converted into reward credits… which can be used to purchase things, but those things can not be sold or given away.
• not know if purchases with “bought” credits can be sold or given away
• lack of ability to create
• lack of control over texturing
• lack of folders to organize pictures, textures etc.
• The inability to receive responses from Kaneva staff
  

Kaneva, up to this point has been a major disappointment, but I am still holding out hope that another virtual world can become responsive to user’s needs.

Keneva’s New Forum

Keneva has happily announced the opening of new and improved Official Kaneva Forum, but actually getting keneva responses are still few and far between and spam has sat on the forum for days.

I did find this on the Forum and since I can not find the TOS any longer (serves up an error message) I thought I would publish this here.

Kaneva Rules of Conduct

1. While in Kaneva, you must respect the rights of others and their rights to enjoy the world. To this end you may not defraud, harass, threaten, impersonate, give unwanted attention or cause distress to other users.

2. You may not use sexually explicit, harassing, threatening, harmful, abusive, obscene, defamatory, hateful, racially or ethnically offensive language, in any language.

3. You may not post or link to any sexually explicit, harassing, threatening, harmful, abusive, obscene, defamatory, hateful, racially or ethnically offensive imagery or content.

4. While in Kaneva, you may not spam or flood the chat, comments, or forums with repetitive text or obscene language.

5. You may not use information gathered on Kaneva to spam other Kaneva users with offers of goods or services.

6. You may not impersonate any employee of Kaneva.

7. You may not violate any local, state, national, or international laws or regulations.

8. You must follow the instructions of any Kaneva employee while in Kaneva.

9. You may not provide false information or intentionally hide any information when registering for your Kaneva account.

10. You may not misrepresent your age in any way if this crosses the boundary of the adult/minor threshold of 18 years of age. This includes: your profile, sharing your account with someone younger or older than you, chat in world, private messages, etc.

11. You may not attempt to interfere with, hack into, or decipher any transmissions to or from the servers running the Kaneva service.

12. You may not attempt to exploit any bug in the Kaneva service and you will not communicate the existence of any such exploitable bug to other users, instead immediately reporting any bug to Kaneva using the feedback function.

13. You may not release any real-life information about any other users or any Kaneva employees.

14. You may not create duplicate threads about the same topic on the forums. This includes threads about other threads that were closed by a forum administrator.

15. You may not create posts or threads concerning disciplinary action taken against any member of the community, including chat logs, personal messages, bulletins, or emails between that member and the Kaneva employee.

16. If you post material that is deemed to be of an adult nature that by rule should be restricted but you did not mark as restricted, then that material will be deleted.

17. Restricted items include: nonsexual nudity, profanity, substance abuse or graphic violence. Kaneva reserves the right to deem what is and isn’t restricted material.

18. Material that will not be allowed, restricted format or otherwise, includes but is not exclusive to the following: incendiary material, racial, ethnic or religious slurs and pornographic content or any depiction thereof.

19. A community owner is responsible for ensuring that all Kaneva Rules of Conduct are met within their community. Failure to do you so may bring about that community’s suspension or possible deletion.

Kaneva reserves the right to make changes to these rules as deemed necessary.

Tim Faulkner’s, of Valleywag, opening sentence was “Second Life may face a new threat, the need to apply and enforce real law in its virtual world.” While “The Second Life Herald” titled their post, “Unconscionable!” Court Blasts Linden Terms of Service, Holds that Philip can be target in Bragg Lawsuit. and “Virtually Blind” as lawyers do simply titled their post Bragg v. Linden Update: Defendants’ Motions to Dismiss and Compel Arbitration Denied, with CNet News Blog’s title being ‘Second Life’ publisher must go to court in property case. All the blogs pretty much had the same thing to say… there is of course the excepting that Valleywag, who seems to have a grudge hatred dislike for Second Life , seems to be big time jumping the gun on what the court may eventually rule.

I took the time to check out the 46 page legal order, where the Honorable Eduardo C Robreno states:

“Plaintiff, March Bragg, Esq., claims an ownership interest in such virtual property. Bragg contends that Defendants, the operators of the virtual world,(Second Life) unlawfully confiscated his virtual property and denied him access to their virtual world.”

Now this is where the order got may attention when the judge stated: (still on page one by the way)

Ultimately at issue in this case are the novel questions of what rights and obligations grow out of the relationship between the owner and creator of a virtual world and its resident-customers. While the property and the world where it is found are “virtual,” the dispute is real.

Basically this order says that yes Philip Linden will remain named in this law suit, (although Benjamin Duranske, an intellectual property attorney, believes it is pretty easy to establish personal jurisdiction and there are still ways Rosedale can escape from the case) and the TOS (Terms Of Service) provision calling for all disagreements with Linden Lab to be forced to go to arbitration was not valid. In fact the judge called the TOS “unconscionable” because they give Linden Lab unilateral and unlimited ban rights.

According to Duranske, “There are a lot of issues raised by this Order, among them: the impact on the other provisions of the TOS, the possibility for special rights for participants in virtual spaces, and whether this will encourage other law suits.”

“Cyberspace” what is it? What should it be?

“Cyberspace” is not inside your computer, nor the computer of people you are interacting with. Is it really inside a server somewhere in between? Or is that server simply a device which allows us to enter into “Cyberspace” as would be some space ship which would allow our us to reach distant solar system?

“Cyberspace” is a truly a place, some say it is not exactly real (which can be neither proved nor disproved) that is really a destination. As much a destination as an alternative dimension, or another planet in outer space. This place is an earnest and serious place where millions of us enter and leave it everyday.

Some give “Cyberspace” considerable thought, write about it, negotiate over international implications, or regulate it. regulate it… regulate it… regulate it… regulate it… regulate it… regulate it…

Should “Cyberspace” be regulated by any government body? Would they also regulate inhabitants of some distant planet revolving around some distant star? Maybe the question should be … Would we put up with government’s from some inhabited planet to regulate Earth?

How much right do we as a community of humans really have trying to control regulate force our ideas onto any alternate universe, dimension, country, or state?

MMORPG gold farming, character buying and selling

We use a service called ReviewMe to allow advertisers the option to buy reviews and our very first review request came this week from a site with a service that showed players where they can buy gold for the cheapest price for the MMORPG World of Warcraft and Everquest. Since I’m the one who handles responding to these requests on behalf of the group, I need to make sure these advertisers fit the type of businesses we want to write reviews on and promote.

I immediately thought of the consequences of publishing a paid review which told players the places with the cheapest prices to violate the TOS of games and this wasn’t a decision I should make alone for the group and proceeded to contact all of the eight VTOR authors and poll them individually about the issue.

Though the site in question wasn’t a site which directly sold gold, only providing a service telling where to buy the gold at, it seemed a more gray area than a site which directly sold the gold and/or characters.

This would be an important milestone for our publication. If we accepted and wrote the review then we would be setting a precedent that these kind of sites were ok when in fact they aren’t ok with terms of service for games we like playing. We looked at the possibility of agreeing to write this one and perhaps only review, taking all the money and donating it to a worthy charity in-world. That idea appealed to a few of the authors.

Another concern was what if we decline the review, will this mean that we don’t receive any more paid review requests? As it turned out, before even making our decision, three more paid review requests came in. One of them Darius has already written on Wii Game Cheats.

What makes strategy guides and game cheat sites different from gold farming? A lot, actually. A cheat is usually something programatically that you can do or an easter egg in the game. Strategy guides and maps are not violations of any MMORPG games terms of service, but additional help for players to better enjoy the game and more advance faster.

As I mentioned in a recent post, I don’t visit many cheat or strategy guide sites. That’s not saying I never do so please don’t misunderstand, but I prefer exploring and learning things in games on my own. Still, there are times every gamer needs to reach for an instruction manual, map, strategy guide or tip website. That’s reasonable. There are also some sites which focus more on helping players through gameplay that stays within the TOS. I would like to think we’d continue to write about and share links to those type sites.

Also, I pointed out to my fellow VTOR authors that we were already tainted somewhat as I’ve seen Google Adsense ads running for gold farming and character sale related sites. Another VTOR author pointed out that this was a passive form of acceptance since we don’t get to choose which ads run on the site.

With Google Adsense you can filter up to 200 domains but it isn’t very practical watching for any gold farming domain and blocking it when there are thousands more than the alloted 200 that could be use. So if you see Google Adsense ads for gold farming — perhaps in this very post (how is that for irony) — it’s not because we ever approved the ads as a group, it’s because Google’s algorithm decided to show that type of ad.

The voting
I’m proud of the group as a whole and how everybody voted on this important issue. It wasn’t a straight up no answer from every author and those who choose yes did so pointing out different reasons why they felt we should consider writing reviews on these types of sites and ervices. At the end of the day we ended up with three no votes and four yes votes with my vote being the final undecided vote.

If I chose yes then I’d be committing VTOR to the review and need to explain our intentions why we were taking money for a paid review for a site that violates terms of service. Even though we would be donating this money to a charity, one of my concerns was that some (most?) readers would see this as siding with dishonesty. That VTOR would suffer an integrity hit. We’re trying to grow our readership, not chase it away.

If I voted “no” we’d be tied 4-4. Since our group had seven VTOR authors until recently when we added Darius (#8) we’ve never had a tie vote situation before. We hadn’t discussed or planned how to deal with ties. Our next meeting was this coming Friday and there was not enough time to make another vote on how to deal with ties. The more I thought about a tie, I was reminded that a tie was still not a majority, so that made a no vote mean we would decline the review and a yes vote that we would approve, write and publish the review.

Supporting shoddy work conditions
Whenever I started thinking about gold farming and power leveling the last couple days (the review decision window was 72 hours) I thought about groups of people behind player names working in small confined places making pennies on the hour. I’ve ran against groups camping monster spawn areas before and wondered if they were gold farmers. Always left a negative impression on me both that they were taking up a spot where people wanted to play a game versus making it a business. I also know how hard my own teenage son has worked over the last couple months to get his WoW character to level 70. And lastly, I remember how hard I’ve had to work personally to level up characters. I’ve never managed to get any character over level 25 in any MMORPG because of the time involved. I’m hoping LOTRO will be my first 25+ character since we’re going to have one lifetime account.

It is this spirit that fuels the Terms of Service behind these MMORPGs that prohibit this activity. While it might still be cheating to look up a code for unlimited lives or to have a higher level character buff you and give you powerful items, it’s not the same as paying money to completely skip the process of leveling.

Some find leveling tiring and boring work and would rather pay to play at higher levels than spend the time. I do understand and respect that point of view, but I don’t see how as a publication we can, Google Adsense type arrangements aside, accept money for this type of advertising and therefore be promoting these types of businesses. How indirectly or directly we support them is something the group needs to continue to ponder and come up with a published guideline so prospective advertisers will know in advance what types of businesses we’d like to promote on VTOReality.com.

Never say never
This doesn’t mean — nor should it be interpreted as — we’ll never write about gold farming or (gasp) link to these type sites in news/opinion posts but at least for the time being we are saying no. Since we are a group and we make group decisions, it isn’t only my vote this time — nor will it be in the future — that counts. I think that’s part of what makes this group blogging venture cool. The group was split on this issue and that’s how the record will stand.

With a 4-4 tie and without a majority, the review was declined. This coming Friday our group will ponder the other reviews we have pending and what to do when there is no majority in a vote. I’d also like to see us post on the advertising page what types of businesses advertising we will specifically not take for this site. If we make too many rules nobody will want to advertise, thus we need to be very specific about what types of sites and services we don’t want.

I’m proud of our group — yes, even the ones who voted that we should do this — because overall their individual comments showed careful consideration. I thought about sharing who voted what in this post as well as a few choice quotes but then decided I’d rather see each individual author speak for themselves about how they feel about the issue of buying and selling characters and gold. I don’t want to put words in any of their mouths or paraphrase their perspective. They can piggyback off this post for one of their own in the future or use the comments below. I hope they all speak out about the issue and elaborate.

At the end of the day, this is not something I would do if this were my own site and don’t feel comfortable promoting these type sites. When we started VTOR it was and remains a major goal to focus on the quality of the posted material. This was our first defining moment with a certain type of advertising where we really needed to think beyond the dollars and cents and whether it made good sense. I’m happy that it turned out the way it did.

Your turn
With that said, we’d like to open this up to readers for comment. Are we being too judgemental turning down these type ads? It’s too late for the one discussed herein, but should we have a more relaxed policy for these type ads going forward? Would you consider ads/reviews an endorsement by VTOR for these types of sites/services? Must admit I do, but I’m not sure how the rest of the group feels about that, or how you feel?

Please take a minute and share with us how you would feel about these reviews and/or ads appearing or not in the future.