Ingame cash -- time for a change?

Selling names for in-game currency isn't against the ToS, it's just not supported. If someone scams you or if the developers added the name you bought to the blocked list, customer service will not help you.

Thanks for the clarification

Im speaking to the logic, pick your real world example and you would NOT be ok with this. The same logic applies and thats the point. The “delete the $” idea would punish far more honest players than dishonest players. Thats a fact. Therefore its NOT a good solution.
The logic behind the idea is terrible. Fix the gold spammers before going after the honest players. If you dont solve the root cause then no action taken will fix the issue.

If they had to take some of my ingame money to fix hyper-inflation? you bet your *** id willing give it up.

But not in any other circumstance you wouldn't. If the bank tried this you’d loose it. If your job tried this you’d loose it. Etc
Thats the flaw in the logic.
You can be hypocritical if you choose but you must see when you extend the same logic elsewhere your argument holds no water.
Im simply proposing to atk and fix the actual root cause issue. Why would you willingly take from players and willingly give up what you have aquired honestly? What will it solve?
The answers are you shouldnt and it wont solve anything. If the root cause is not fixed, then the $ will be back in a matter of hours/days. Punishing honest/all players solves nothing. Fix the root cause or what are we even talking about???

Or it's there because - instead of actually resetting the cash limits - what the developers did was let anyone who had more than 25 billion at the end of the SNAFU keep that much of that money, even if they didn't originally start with that amount before the SNAFU.

Most (by which I mean the vast majority of - the actual banned cheater's list was fairly small) of the people who became overnight multibillionaires during that time didn't do so because they themselves were cheating - they did so by selling items through the broker at ridiculously inflated margins to people who bought money from gold spammers.

Which makes them a direct beneficiary OF the cheating, without actually being on the list themselves for having actually done the deed. Those people, by and large, got to keep their cash (or a ridiculous portion of it) because they "earned" it - which was only possible because of the cash glitch, but hey, here we are now. It's "hard work" nowadays.

The amount of gymnastics people are doing to avoid addressing that point makes me wonder where their in-game cash is actually from, and in and of itself does a fairly solid job of indicating that "where", but hey - they "earned" it, right?

You cant say you want to fix a problem when you benefit and are arguing for keeping it broken, If they do another progressive tax, remove the cash cap limitation and dramatically increase all the prices in-game and add some gil sinks. Youll lose some money but the entire game will be better for it, and if they lose you as a player for a positive change, then youll be a acceptable loss.

I only have about 500 mil so i doubt i’d be effected. Its principle for me. Whats being asked for is going to punish more honest players than dishonest AND wont even do any good since for whatever reason, people seem to be willingly blind to the root cause. Till thats solved, this is nothing more than an exercise in futility smh

I can because what you said was false. Plus they wouldn't loose me as a player. If they come after honest players while letting the dishonest go free i will just buy from them, and i will buy billions upon billions rather then the measly 500 mil i got honestly.
Thats the difference between us. I want the actual issue fixed. The spammers. You have a perverted obsession with punishing honest players and have a delusion that ignoring the spammers an letting them run free and punishing honest players will somehow make the game better.

The actual root cause problem is the spammers an them injecting $. FIX THE ACTUAL PROBLEM AT ITS SOURCE.
Im the one advocating an actual fix. Your advocating punishing honest players for some distorted reason. Not sure why some of y’all willingly are ignoring or disregarding the root cause (perhaps your a customer of theirs) but i want the actual prob fixed.

Awhile ago in an announcement thread

Economy Actions

As most of you likely know by now, we recently disabled the trading of cash, mailing of cash, and use of the broker while we addressed an issue impacting the game's economy.

An exploit allowed a small number of players to inject trillions of fake cash into the game, substantially ballooning broker prices and item values, as well as allowing these bad actors to accumulate unfair wealth in both cash and items.

This is not a simple problem to solve. This fake cash has thoroughly scattered throughout the entire player base, even to those completely unaware and trading legitimately. Having this much fake cash presents numerous long term problems for all players.

To address this, we have taken three actions.

• We fixed the exploit.
• We took action on the offenders' accounts.
• We performed a one-time "progressive tax" to remove most of the fake cash.

Exploit

We fixed the exploit as soon as the steps became available to us. If you become aware of an exploit in the future, report it in the Task Force X subforum, where only developers can see your threads. Include as much information and steps as possible.

Do not continue to do the exploit. If you have done it in a good-faith attempt to find the steps, let us know the details so we can take that into account.


Account Actions

We cannot and will not directly comment on what actions have been taken on player accounts. We do want to be clear that appropriate actions have been taken. We also want to be clear that these actions in the future can range from removal of items, cash, or characters, to temporary suspensions, to permanent bans.

Exploiting has a significant impact on everyone in the game and we take it very seriously.


Progressive Tax

As mentioned, virtually everyone in the game has now accumulated fake cash, even if completely unaware of the issue and trading or brokering legitimately. Our goal with this action is to remove as much of the fake cash as possible, impact as few people as possible, and be as fair as possible.

Our goal is NOT to fix all of the economy's issues in one go. We are specifically focused on removing this recent influx of fake cash.

We also want to maintain some of the scale of wealth legitimately present in the game. You may have less cash after this tax, but for the most part you will still have more than the people you had more than before, and less than the people you had less than before.

What are Progressive Tax Brackets?

Here's how that works (and, look, this is basically how the US and other tax systems work, so if you're confused at all about how progressive tax brackets work in real-life, this could be doubly helpful for you! If you don't care how it works, you can skip ahead.)

In progressive tax brackets, you pay a specific percentage of tax on each chunk or bracket of money.

• You might pay 0% on your first $10, then 10% on your next $20, then 20% on your next $30.
• In this example, you would owe $0 from the first bracket, $2 from the second, and $6 from the third, for a total tax of $8 on that $60 you started with.

NOTE: Being "in" the highest "20%" tax bracket does NOT mean you pay 20% of your total (that would be $12, not $8). You only pay the higher bracket's percentage on the money in that bracket. The lower percentages still apply to the money in the lower brackets.

Our Brackets

We have settled on six tax brackets for this one-time event, totaled at the ACCOUNT level, which are as follows:

• Cash below $500,000,000 is not taxed at all.
• Cash between 500,000,001 and 10,000,000,000 is taxed at 5%
• Cash between 10,000,000,001 and 15,000,000,000 is taxed at 10%.
• Cash between 15,000,000,001 and 20,000,000,000 is taxed at 20%.
• Cash between 20,000,000,001 and 25,000,000,000 is taxed at 25%.
• Cash above 25,000,000,001 is taxed at 100%.

This means that most players fall into the first 0% tax bracket entirely, and that the wealthiest people will have about 22 billion cash after taxes.


Final Note

We recognize this type of action sucks for everyone, and that many will feel unfairly or innocently impacted. We strongly believe that taking no action is worse for everyone, and that this is the least-bad and most-fair way to address the situation.

A progressive tax and increasing the price of everything in game is the ONLY way to fix this problem, and nothing you say will change the truth as much as you don't like it. You can be innocent YOURSELF, but that doesn't mean the money you gained came from legitimate sources, if you wanna buy it from a illegitimate source, go for it. Its not my account at risk.

Well, there ya go. Punish honest players and dont fix the root cause thus the prob wasnt actually fixed.
For the last time i want the actual issue fixed not the after effect. Its called root cause analysis and if you dont solve the root cause permanently then your just covering up the issue temporarily an we will be rite back where we are now.
Bottom line is, devs did this already yet here we are so apparently they solved nothing otherwise we wouldnt be having this conversation lol
And again, iant honest players left alone. I dont wanna buy from spammers, i want that issue solved.
Thnx for proving my point that the root cause is what needs fixed

Yes and no, if you try to take your character with all of the games assets attached to it, (like taking your dcuo character and trying to make a show about it, with ingame assets shown. Yea Daybreak will likely want all revenue made from that, as it is their assets. Names arnt "IP" unless they belong to an property holder IE "Superman" "Batman" "Captain Marv- i mean Shazam!"

I mean they are kinda their "soft" IP, i mean if you had a show about about a character named ObsidianChill that looked exactly like its DCUO counterpart, your name would be used to strengthen their argument as why it infringes on their IP as your name is linked to their IP.

However if you change your character to no longer resemble DCUO's assets, then they cannot go after you, if your character name doesnt infringe on Daybreak or WB IP / assets.

To put simply..
Daybreak owns this version of Roll Ryuko due it it being made up of Daybreak's assets


This Roll Ryuko is my intellectual property as its my own work.

You mean the fact this game was built around allowing premium to buy gear? making it so that anything essential never costed over 2,000 cash? With the game having no cash sinks? So the system generates cash and has no effective way to flush it out as quickly, so money just accrues easily

This. DCUO Economy is the worst economy I ever seen in a game, even WoWs economy is doable because Blizzard is always trying to add some random sink.

We have ZERO cash sink in DCUO besides Equip repairs and gear always costing 2k tops. This is the effect of a greedy subscription model where a very important in-game mechanic such as "cash" have to be used to sell membership with "cash cap" meaning that just a very small portion of the playerbase will be able to partake in the in-game economy AND, the devs not being able to rise the prices of DLC gear because premium players and F2P won't be able to purchase them, thus, what could be a somewhat ok cash sink is out of the equation.

That’s why I’m in favor of removing the escrow all together and the devs finding a way to add a cash sink into the game while also adding a way to actually farm cash.

Every single other mmo I’ve ever played had both a cash sink system and a way to farm cash. This was the very first game where it didn’t have either and the overall cash count for the server just went up.

Take away escrow and you open up a good portion of players to the games economy.

Add a cash sink and you add a way to balance the economy

Add a cash farm and you add a way for anyone to be in control of what they can afford without relying on rng

All 3 things are key to any in game economy

The only thing is the names that are actually selling are indeed linked to either an IP or have a direct relation to the real world. No offense intended but no one is going to pay multiple billions of dollars or $300-$1000 for Roll Ryuko but they would pay that for Zeus or Demon or Angel and you can 100% bet that if we could have names like Batman or Superman etc they would be selling for just as much. The very fact we can't have those names because they are apart of licensed IP outside of DCUO means that it would be tough to exclude character names from that list.



another Daybreak TOS rule clarifies a bit further as well, names would certainly be considered "Daybreak Game Assets" if one wanted to argue they weren't apart of Daybreak IP and thus would mean we can't sell, resell or make available character names for sale.

The "game assets" being referred to in the TOS are the files we download onto our consoles and PCs. Character names are *not* Daybreak's assets. Furthermore, a game's TOS can't supersede or contradict established copyright laws. In cases where it does, the part of the TOS is invalid.

Players do not forfeit their copyrights over their characters and creations--including their names. This is a myth that was started by less sophisticated players of MMOs 20 years ago. Your characters are yours. I haven't read it in years but IIRC the TOS goes into some depth covering that.

If people are paying thousands of dollars for a name they dont actually own and cant own, they have far more money then sense in my book.

Can someone own the rights to a word?

This is an interesting question and one I've enjoyed looking into. The short answer is there is no legal way for a person to own a word, and without the support of legal recourse, there is no way to enforce repercussions for perceived misuse or infringement. However, businesses and entrepreneurs can trademark common words under certain circumstances. The following two characteristics must be met before a company can own trademark rights to a common word:

1. The word must be an identifying factor of the company in its industry. For example, APPLE could be trademarked by Apple, Inc because people had already come to identify the company by that brand name in the computer and technology industry. It is important to note though that the company's trademark rights only extend to other companies in that industry. Businesses outside of computer and technology still have equal rights to trademark that word if they so desire.

1. The word must not directly relate to the industry of the business seeking trademark rights. Back to our Apple, Inc example: The word APPLE has absolutely nothing to do with computers or technology so it is available as a term to be trademarked in that industry. It would be inappropriate for an apple farmer to try to trademark the word because it would infringe on the rights of others in the produce industry to properly market their products. If only one fruit company could use the word APPLE in marketing, that fruit company would soon have a monopoly on the apple industry.

So while you cannot actually own a word, you can trademark one if it helps identify your business to consumers and it doesn't infringe on the rights of others in your industry.

I wanted to look into this abit more. Because your right noone would pay thousands of dollars for my name, but they would pay money for just the word "Roll"? How about "Wave"? What about "Rebel"? Those are my character names, they developed a verb naming scheme, but the value goes down if the word isn't ripped out of a Websters dictionary? But Batman or Superman dont follow the one word naming scheme, and somebody already owns the IP to said name. This whole naming "business" is a scam and a sham to me, people selling things that require no effort to obtaining or create, and they don't truly own it but are selling it.

How can you have ownership of your character when you can be banned at any moment for nearly anything that would deprive you of said ownership? So by your definition players could sue Daybreak Games and Dimensional Ink for recovery of their accounts if they were banned and have complete legal standing to do so. For example, if the reason given to the player was that they were banned for "cheating", which is an extremely broad term, DCUO support would not tell the player why or what caused the ban. So even if a ban or breaking the tos would supersede the player ownership that player in that situation would have no satisfactory reason provided to them why their ownership was removed.