Runescape News: Teenager Found Guilty of Virtual Theft
They can't legally buy and sell their characters on eBay, but it happens anyway. When it does, you can only hope that it's some cash-strapped, disillusioned gamer, because otherwise it really is a criminal gang.
As a Runescape player, I'm besieged daily with phishing attempts through my e-mail. They are written as if they come from Jagex, but they feed into an illegal site. The object is to gain my game account password. If they did that, then you can be sure that my in-game bank would be stripped of goods to be sold on the gaming black market.
The characters themselves are also desirable and if the player hasn't set up any security (recovery questions etc), then that can also be sold on. They are sold to impatient people who can't be bothered to play through the 'noob' levels, in order to get to the exciting things unlocked later on in the game.
In MMORPGs, it's not like ordinary video games, where the main fun is in making that journey for yourself. Instead, you work to get to even better bosses etc at the end, and there's no limit on the fun that you can have there.
I do love your analogy of a car replacing a horse and buggy. Welcome to the dark side of cyberspace!
JoHarrington, Oct 8, 2012
