The Shrine

http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/05/30 ... i-wrongdo/

Personally, I think this is a good thing. I'm fine with stuff like Steam that basically requires you to be online all the time in the background, but I really hate this 'always online even if you want to be offline' deal. I know people always say 'you can't do anything about it Blizzard already has your money' but it'd be good to see EULA proven wrong in the court. They're not law and most tangible goods you're expected to be able to get a refund if it totally failed to deliver, even if the reason is fairly arbitrary. When I buy something from Costco they don't usually even ask any question as to why you return it and just suck up the cost. Yes the argument is obviously for a game you still have the game, but in this case since Diablo 3 is an 'always online' game, it'd be trivial for them to refund you the money and then remove the account key as a valid one, and as far as I can tell you would not be able to play the game again. If someone went through the effort to have an emulated server I'd think it'd take less effort to just pirate the game outright.

I saw a site that talks a lot about piracy, and one thing I really agree is that you should ALWAYS offer a full refund to your paying customer. Someone who is going to go through the effort to demand a refund would just pirate your game anyway, and even if you did manage to keep his $50 this time, you can be sure this guy is going to see it as a personal mission to destroy your company if he felt he got burned so it's just not worth the money. You can't just say, "We have your money and you're banned, haha". It doesn't matter what your EULA says because you've just made an enemy and you almost certainly are going to lose more than $50 in the future, a lot more if that guy actually has friends. I saw some salesman thing that says each customer you alienate is like 50 (or 5, or 10, or whatever) sales lost, and while you can debate the actual number the point is rather obvious. Looking at the D3 forums, it seems like they're turning some of their most staunch fans into bitter haters and it's just not worth $60 or $100 to do that to your most fanatical fanbase. Yes there's always the argument 'what if someone just plays the game and ask for a refund after he play it'. But if someone is that determined to not spend money he would have an easier time just pirating the game.

Don wrote:http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/05/30 ... i-wrongdo/

Personally, I think this is a good thing. I'm fine with stuff like Steam that basically requires you to be online all the time in the background, but I really hate this 'always online even if you want to be offline' deal. I know people always say 'you can't do anything about it Blizzard already has your money' but it'd be good to see EULA proven wrong in the court. They're not law and most tangible goods you're expected to be able to get a refund if it totally failed to deliver, even if the reason is fairly arbitrary. When I buy something from Costco they don't usually even ask any question as to why you return it and just suck up the cost. Yes the argument is obviously for a game you still have the game, but in this case since Diablo 3 is an 'always online' game, it'd be trivial for them to refund you the money and then remove the account key as a valid one, and as far as I can tell you would not be able to play the game again. If someone went through the effort to have an emulated server I'd think it'd take less effort to just pirate the game outright.

I saw a site that talks a lot about piracy, and one thing I really agree is that you should ALWAYS offer a full refund to your paying customer. Someone who is going to go through the effort to demand a refund would just pirate your game anyway, and even if you did manage to keep his $50 this time, you can be sure this guy is going to see it as a personal mission to destroy your company if he felt he got burned so it's just not worth the money. You can't just say, "We have your money and you're banned, haha". It doesn't matter what your EULA says because you've just made an enemy and you almost certainly are going to lose more than $50 in the future, a lot more if that guy actually has friends. I saw some salesman thing that says each customer you alienate is like 50 (or 5, or 10, or whatever) sales lost, and while you can debate the actual number the point is rather obvious. Looking at the D3 forums, it seems like they're turning some of their most staunch fans into bitter haters and it's just not worth $60 or $100 to do that to your most fanatical fanbase. Yes there's always the argument 'what if someone just plays the game and ask for a refund after he play it'. But if someone is that determined to not spend money he would have an easier time just pirating the game.

Your post is a little confusing.

1) Refunds. To a certain extent this is dictated by Blizzard (or the terms of whatever PoP the product is obtained from). But some Countries have consumer protection provisions in place. For example, Canada has the Consumer Protection Act(s). In any purchase over $50, I have 10 days to 'change my mind' and get a full refund (obviously, stuff like food is exempt . So when Future Shop tells me "No" to returning software, I tell them with a straight face to fuck off. Because most companies put their return policy on the reciept, it actually becomes a contract...which entitles the consumer to ignore the policy....which is funny. Further, in the case of Online purchases, that would fall under the Electronic Transactions Act, affording the same level of protection.

Beyond that, Companies take on certain responsibilities when accepting 3rd party payment methods. If a product is defective or not as advertised, I can request Visa do a chargeback under that heading. It then falls on the company to address the complaint to reverse.

2) EULA. Largely irrelevant. It is not a binding contract in any sense and I hope it gets beaten up in court often.

3) Terms of Service. This is a little different and what I think you meant. Blizzard can set and enforce Terms for the use of a service (in this case, access to their servers). If you violate their terms, they can deny you service. But....BUT you are, in most cases, entitled to a refund of any pre-paid portion of access to that service, and arguably, the cost of the initial game/client in the event you are "banned". They try to limit your rights via overt language, but if you read closely, you will see they acknowledge cases where this is not applicable (hint: everywhere in North America .

As for the actual story, I have no idea what Korean laws are but Blizzard should offer refunds, they can just disable refunded battlenet keys/accounts, no? If it was in Canada, they'd have to offer refunds. If they didn't, they'd get to enjoy being nailed with fines.

The US based stuff tends to have EULA/ToS/whatever that basically says they have your money and can terminate your account anytime you want, and for some reason this seems to be totally acceptable with everyone here too. It doesn't matter what the actual mechanism is called since in US nobody really challenges like that so if you bought Diablo 3 and it turned out they just shipped you a bunch of rocks instead of the game, in theory you're still screwed.

In Korea I think they're arguing that since you can't play the game even offline while the official server is down, and the offical server is down a lot and lag is bad, this product is basically defective and they want their refund. Blizzard has the standard defense of 'we have your money, too bad' but I'd like to see that defense challenged in court. I think Korea also has considerably stronger consumer protection laws compared to the US.

And yeah, the fact that D3 is always on DRM actually makes the usual argument of 'we can't refund the money because you still have the game' irrelevent. You must authenticate to their server to play the game even by yourself so you can just offer a refund and disable that key forever.

A while ago I saw this thing about a guy suing Lineage 2 and NCSoft argued that their EULA says you can only sue them if you lived in the state of Texas. That part got thrown out pretty quick (though I'm pretty sure the guy still lost). There are just some really stupid things game companies put in their legalese and it'd be better if they actually get challenged.

I think even a system like Steam would work pretty well for refunding. Sure, you can buy something, put it on offline mode, refund it, and then never get back online again to play the game but that seems like giving up way too much to just get a game for free.

Don wrote:I think even a system like Steam would work pretty well for refunding. Sure, you can buy something, put it on offline mode, refund it, and then never get back online again to play the game but that seems like giving up way too much to just get a game for free.

I've been fucked over by Steam's No Refund policy. I have an unusable copy of Fallout 3 that I would still like to get by $50 back from. Shit like that makes me glad I have a modded 360.

SineSwiper wrote:

Don wrote:I think even a system like Steam would work pretty well for refunding. Sure, you can buy something, put it on offline mode, refund it, and then never get back online again to play the game but that seems like giving up way too much to just get a game for free.

I've been fucked over by Steam's No Refund policy. I have an unusable copy of Fallout 3 that I would still like to get by $50 back from. Shit like that makes me glad I have a modded 360.

Well I mean like if Steam does offer refund after you play a game, it seems like even their relatively limited DRM should be sufficient. I'm not too familiar with how the offline mode works for Steam, but I think you'd pretty much need a computer that's never connected to the Internet to avoid the DRM since as soon as you connect to Steam it'd know that your copy is invalid because it was refunded and then it can remove it? I mean who would go through so much effort to just get a game for free. It takes less effort to pirate a game then having a dedicated computer that's never online.

Out of total fear of losing what I do not even want to fathom how much money worth of games, I have never pirated a Steamworks-protected game, but from what I understand the process isn't very complicated and just involves using a dummy account should they catch/flag you or whatever happens. Still not doing it. I think it involves extracting the game into your Steam folder, linking it to your dummy account by running it once, so Steam can finalize installation or some such, and then installing the cracked exe. So not an extreme amount of effort, nor a computer that must constantly be offline. When I was a teenager I once pirated a game that required me to disconnect my optical drives whenever I wanted to play it, in comparison Steamworks piracy isn't so terrible heh

I think this works because Steam offers some limited use of executing the game because of boxed physical copies and I'm unsure if you even have to run it once before you crack it. I think in the end you just be cautious enough to use a dummy account.

SineSwiper wrote:

Don wrote:I think even a system like Steam would work pretty well for refunding. Sure, you can buy something, put it on offline mode, refund it, and then never get back online again to play the game but that seems like giving up way too much to just get a game for free.

I've been fucked over by Steam's No Refund policy. I have an unusable copy of Fallout 3 that I would still like to get by $50 back from. Shit like that makes me glad I have a modded 360.

It's amazing how you continue to prefer digital distribution over physical media.....

Because it IS more convenient. They just need to fix some of the policies, like that.

It's the same deal with music. I do not like CDs. They take up a lot of space, and I've had a lot of it stolen (not pirated, but physically gone) one night, which really crippled my collection. On the other hand, I really wish they would promote a requirement of PDFs with the linear notes and covers. I don't like that the average MP3 album is going to just have a folder name, track names, and audio, maybe with a small cover JPG. I want the same amount of content as the physical media, and I want it at a cheaper price than the MPAA monopoly wants to sell it to me.

Just had a long-time local album store over here go bust. Around 15-20 years ago, I used to go to that place every week, usually buying . A year ago (before it disappeared), they were still selling the same shit at the same prices, with much less volume. (The electronica section was some small box that barely had anything of value.) I walked out empty-handed and I was not sorry to see it go. Adapt or die.

Shrinweck wrote:Out of total fear of losing what I do not even want to fathom how much money worth of games, I have never pirated a Steamworks-protected game, but from what I understand the process isn't very complicated and just involves using a dummy account should they catch/flag you or whatever happens. Still not doing it. I think it involves extracting the game into your Steam folder, linking it to your dummy account by running it once, so Steam can finalize installation or some such, and then installing the cracked exe. So not an extreme amount of effort, nor a computer that must constantly be offline. When I was a teenager I once pirated a game that required me to disconnect my optical drives whenever I wanted to play it, in comparison Steamworks piracy isn't so terrible heh

I think this works because Steam offers some limited use of executing the game because of boxed physical copies and I'm unsure if you even have to run it once before you crack it. I think in the end you just be cautious enough to use a dummy account.

Wouldn't it be easier to just find a cracked copy to install it on your dummy account in the first place? Usually getting the CD-Key isn't the hard part, because someone's going to figure out how to make a CD-generator or even find some keys people never used.

Assuming it is not possible to make something piracy-proof, it's got to take less effort to pirate something as long as that is possible compared to trying to get a refund, because the latter at the very least lets the company aware of what you're doing. Even if a company has a no questions asked refund policy, you'd probably feel a bit uneasy if you refunded 200 games in a month (and kept them on your computer somehow) because that's kind of like telling the company you're really stealing all these games, whereas if you just flat out pirate them nobody would be the wiser. Only people with legitmate reasons to refund a game would use the system because piracy, as long as it's possible, is always a more appealing alternative than repeatedly returning your games if that is your sole intention. Sure you will lose money on the guys who have impulse buys or like Sine's case, a guy who bought something that he can't play (in theory this is pure win for the guy selling!) but there is supposed to be value in keeping your customer happy too, which is why we can return things in real life often with no question asked.

Steamworks doesn't use CD keys most of the time any more, it's all done behind the scenes - the benefits of having the DRM built into the program that sells the game in the first place, I suppose. For boxed copies you can just enter the key into Steam and either download it from them or install it via your DVD. Pirated Steam games are extracted into your steamapps folder as if Steam had installed it itself. There's some stuff involved here that would take some first-hand experience for me to know. I'm not investigating the process any further heh.

Shrinweck wrote:Steamworks doesn't use CD keys most of the time any more, it's all done behind the scenes - the benefits of having the DRM built into the program that sells the game in the first place, I suppose. For boxed copies you can just enter the key into Steam and either download it from them or install it via your DVD. Pirated Steam games are extracted into your steamapps folder as if Steam had installed it itself. There's some stuff involved here that would take some first-hand experience for me to know. I'm not investigating the process any further heh.

They obviously just register the CD-key behind the scenes. It'd be hard to imagine why they'd do anything different. Most likely the moment you pay for XYZ game, Steamworks just tells self, add randomly generated CD-Key to your account for game XYZ, and since it doesn't go through you there's no reason for you to even see the CD-Key, but Steamworks needs it just for the purpose of bookkeeping. If you're to get a refund, Steamworks can easily tell itself to immediately invalidate whatever key it used internally to register. The only way I can see to get around it is by never going online so that your offline account cannot know that this game is no longer valid.

I wouldn't be surprised if Steam really does secretly authenticate to its online server each time you play the game, but I think unlike D3, Steam doesn't care if you don't authenticate because they know you need the Internet more than you need to play this game, so you'll definitely come back at some point. I know whenever something goes wrong with my network, I eventually get the popup "You're not connected to Steam, would you like to start in the offline mode". Yes during this time you could fool Steam if you were somehow able to get a refund, but again, I need the Internet far more than I need a free game so I got to come back to Steam eventually.