Ingame cash -- time for a change?

You own the intellectual property of your character. As the creator you inherently own it. Its name, concept and likeness are your's to copyright and trademark and create with as you choose. You don't relinquish your creator rights because you recreated (published) your character in a video game.

You don't own your account on their server. They're free to ban you for violating their TOS. You then lose access to your account and any characters on it. You still own the intellectual property of your characters, just not the harddrive space your account takes up on their servers; when they ban you they're terminating the service contract between themselves (the service provider) and yourself (the consumer). You're still free to recreate your characters on another platform or somewhere else.

I'm not sure how you've connected intellectual property rights and copyright to digital services account bans but they have no relationship.

The connection is easy, you say we own something, that something is taken away, then what are we supposed to do to get what we supposedly own back?

Also I would not be able to recreate my character on another platform if it was banned. If I did indeed hold the IP to ObsidianChill and that account was banned I can never again create "ObsidianChill" on another server because that name is taken. Which means I don't actually own it in the eyes of Daybreak/Dimensional Ink or you would be allowed to recover your name if the account was banned to use it again later. Similarly if I made my daybreak account name ObsidianChill and was banned I couldn't remake the ObsidianChill account on a different daybreak game because that name would already be in use etc

Again, you don't seem to understand the difference between having access to a service you pay (or no longer pay) for, vs creating a concept/music/work of art/and so on.

I can't explain copyright law to you, even in rudimentary terms, if you don't have a solid understanding of what intellectual property is. I would invite you to do some research on the topic. I suspect it would answer your questions. I wouldn't know where to begin and point you though.

Selling character names for real world money is against the TOS last time I heard. It's one of many ways people gained their ingame wealth. Zod knows why anyone would pay real world money for an ingame name though.

...Anyhow, none of this is relevant to the discussion and has nothing to do with fixing the ingame economy.

I've literally said that twice, it was people who wanted to argue over the semantics of the verbiage of the rule points in the TOS just because it doesn't outright say name of your character.

That's easily solved. Put me on ignore.

And no, he doesn't appear to have this topic locked down. And that's not shade either. Copyright law is incredibly complex. Unless you work directly with it somehow, you're not likely to get it intuitively.

It was more a general statement than directed at you. If you said this, you're correct on this. I should have put some ***s to seperate.

You seem nervous desperate. Wonder why.

Welcome to a forum, where we are allowed to give our own feedback regardless of who does and doesnt agree with it. We all have ideas on how to make dcuo a better game, and so here we are to voice that.

Obsidian doesnt know what hes talking about when it comes to ownership, because he doesn't own his own character, his character is based in Daybreak assets. Some forum users here actually do own their own OCs inspired by DCUO that are original works completely unbound from DC's IP and Daybreak's assets meaning Daybreak cannot legally pursuit me for use of my character as it doesn't exist in their ecosystem, and doesn't have likeness to their assets

I'm sure he's very fond of you too, and coming from you...That. Is. Hilarious.

Side note; it's the first time I'm seeing Chill's latest sig and it's very sweet looking.

Then dont take it from me
https://www.quora.com/How-exactly-does-a-country-overcome-hyperinflation

Inflation happens when the money supply in an economy grows faster than the real output of goods and services.


The money supply is more than just currency. It includes bank deposits and various kinds of liquid assets, multiplied times how often money is exchanged. So if the average dollar changes hands twice during a year, it counts as two dollars in terms of the money supply when we compare it to the annual output of real goods and services.


This is important, because once inflation reaches a significant level, hanging onto money means losing a large percentage of its buying power. So people play "hot potato" with money, trying to trade it for things of value as quickly as possible. This creates a vicious circle, causing the "velocity" of money to accelerate, which thereby increases the money supply and makes inflation even worse, which makes people want to spend money even faster.


Hyperinflation also undermines confidence, increases hoarding, and makes people less willing to invest in the long term, so it cuts economic production, leading to 'stagflation,' economic stagnation + inflation. Economic stagnation also makes inflation worse. Remember, inflation happens when the supply of money increases compared to economic output. So reducing output hurts as much as increasing the money supply. This creates a second vicious circle as growing inflation slows production, which increases inflation.


The slowing economic output also reduces government tax income, which increases the pressure on government to print money to be able to pay its debts and cover its necessary expenses, and this creates a third vicious circle.



When you add all three vicious circles together, they create a lot of pressure for continued inflation at ever increasing rates. So what does it take to bring it under control?


SLOWING INFLATION
Ultimately, money comes from governments, which these days means central banks, and governments and central banks can do a number of things to put the brakes on inflation:

• Require banks to hold a higher percentage of their assets as cash and to lend a lower percentage
• Raise interest rates on loans to banks to "above market" levels
• Raise taxes
• Reduce government spending
• Reduce the production of currency (coins and printed bills)
• Institute government controls on wages and prices
• Sell assets
• Increase the production of goods and services
• Institute a tax on physical commodities held for the long term
• Threaten to jail or shoot speculators and confiscate hoarded goods
• Start a war and conquer and loot another country
• Abandon the old currency and switch to a barter economy
• Create a new currency backed by real assets or a stable foreign currency

The first five are the normal weapons of choice. They all reduce the money supply or reduce the pressure for increasing it, so they will always work if used vigorously against comparatively normal levels of inflation - say, 15% or less. If done right, the cost is often just a short, sharp recession followed by a quick resumption of growth.


HYPERINFLATION
However, taming hyperinflation is much tougher because the political cost of the usual remedies is extremely high. In fact, one reason inflation turns into hyperinflation is that populist governments get themselves into a bind where they don't dare take effective steps for cutting inflation in a forceful way.
So they try other things that sound good but don't work, and in many cases actually make things worse, like attacking hoarders and speculators and trying to manipulate the economy by government fiat. Wage/price controls are the classic example of an obvious-sounding "cure" that doesn't work and generally makes the problem worse.


Some of the other "solutions" on the list are very situational. E.g., most governments can't ramp up production on command, and trying to solve internal political and economic problems by embarking on a "short, victorious war" has a tendency to backfire. (Think Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait.)
Some anti-inflation measures that seem counter-intuitive do work, however. During the American revolution, The Continental Congress printed paper money to pay its bills, but had no power to collect taxes, so inflation became a major problem almost immediately, giving rise to the famous phrase "not worth a continental." However, during the war American privateers captured more than 300 British merchant ships and sold most of them and their cargoes in the U.S. This turned many of the privateers into instant millionaires, which was widely resented. But by adding millions of dollars' worth of goods to the economy, the privateers actually slowed the rampant wartime inflation and helped maintain the value of the Continental dollar. [Thanks to Morgan D. Kauffman for this example!]


HYPERINFLATION: THE END
The last two items on the list are usually not choices. They are what will inevitably happen when all the other measures have failed. When no one accepts the old currency any more, the old monetary regime simply collapses.


For example, as the Zimbabwean currency imploded, people switched to doing business in South African rand and U.S. dollars, in spite of government efforts to make people accept Zimbabwean dollars. Eventually, the government was printing Zimbabwean currency with ridiculous face values that was still worth nothing, and they gave up trying:

It is a problem, your just oblivious to it...

"There is no hyper-inflation in Ba-Sing-Se"

They could even make it so Membership have to pay less than premium / F2P for stuff. Like members get a 20% discount on repairs, 20% discount on vendors, but ffs, open up the cash to premium and free players, this aa outdated model and I condemn any mmo which does that, it just not healthy to the game as a whole.

Do other games have this model? I’ve personally never seen an mmo that didn’t have a way to both farm cash and drain cash. Dcuo is literally the first one I ever saw

Im 100% behind that, and thats a benefit to the legendary

Really DCUO needs to hire a good game economist to fix their mess. Part of that, I believe is to get more people into the economy and add more desired money sinks that aren't punitive. Hence hiring an economist with a specialization in video game economies. Guild Wars 2 has a robust economy and they had/have an economist on staff to manage the game's economy and yet they removed the need to pay for armor fixing and other minor fees for other desired/non punitive money sinks, so it can be done.

Yes. Overall there are a lot of aspects in the game in general that could use an actual specialist to help guide them. But for now the economy is definitely an issue

Didn't you sell names for illegal cash yourself? Lol, the hypocricy is big with this one

Once again - The hypocricy is big with your posts. You gather names just to take advantage of those who can't aquire them.

Do we need some more sinks for in-game cash? Sure, I won't deny that. Even without glitches or farmers it's surprisingly easy to build up in-game cash, and some of that needs to be drained off. Finding something beyond Mainframe maintenance or gear repairs to drain it? That could be the challenging part, especially since you'd ideally want it to be something players WANT to spend in-game cash on rather than just something they NEED to spend that cash on.

I don't see them messing too much with in-game cash caps or doing a wipe, though. In this game and others I've played with player-run economies, the devs tend to take a pretty hands-off approach to that part of the game and only step in when something really goes sideways. That's why I knew things got serious when they froze stuff up and announced the tax after that last glitch. But once that was over and done with? They've stayed hands-off again.

Star Wars Galaxies ended up having that problem, but the reason why ends up being a good deed that just went awry.

That game had something of an inflation problem when I started (speeder bikes ran about 10,000 credits, which always made me giggle when I'd rewatch A New Hope and see Luke saying they could buy their own ship for that LOL), but they did have a significant cash drain in housing maintenance. You could have multiple buildings set up as homes, but unlike our game each one needed its own cash supply to be kept up. Plus player cities and any services you set up in your city (cloning facilities, mission terminals, etc.) required cash to help keep things running.

Then we had that bad batch of hurricanes, and as a gesture of goodwill the devs turned off maintenance on houses so that those who were displaced by the storms wouldn't lose their in-game houses or cities. Problem was, they either never turned it back on or they waited long enough to turn it back on that things got a bit out of hand.

But even then, the devs didn't step in to deal with the excess cash that had built up because it was a player-driven economy.

The only other game that I played to max level that limit how much cash you can carry with your character was Star Wars The Old Republic, and the cap was 1 million, so you could do whatever you wanted still lol. Here we have up to 3k for preimum players, go figure. I think FF14 does that too. There is also RuneScape, the gold sink there is also awful to none, but at least f2p aren't locked behind gold limit, so they can keep up.