Breaking News: Death of Taiwan, Macao and Hong Kong Region!?

I wonder why NCsoft (or its Asian surrogates) does not give the Taiwanese players the opportunity to move their characters to US/Eu/Kr servers. Surely if they are playing on US/Eu/Kr servers then they can apply US/Eu/Kr laws to shut gold marketing sites down.

What I find bizarre is that this new law apparently is designed to shield gold selling companies from legal liability. Were NCsoft actually planning to sue any of them? I really don't see how simply blacklisting the IPs of gold selling companies and open proxies can be illegal. Can anyone who groks the Taiwanese legal system (on guru? haha, I'm naive as a kitten) tell us what this law really says?

You're missing the point.

Previously ANet was banning botters and gold sellers from any county. Suddenly allowing one country to be a hotbed of botters and gold sellers, which is in fact confirmed since there are indeed gold farming sweatshops for almost every major online game in Taiwan, China and Indonesia, will destroy what is left of the ingame economy.

Legislation that prevents ANet from enforcing their ToS and EULA detriments the game as a whole and thus it is in NCSoft's best interests to restrict access of the affected area.

Comparing pedophiles to legal gold farming? You're not even comparing apples and oranges.

Sigh. Laymen don't understand the law.

Internet connections to a country are tenuous. The Taiwanese government would sue ANet/NCTaiwan because banning someone would be out of ANet/NCTaiwan's jurisdictional rights to deny service. You can't just switch servers and then be subject to the law of the country that runs that server. You have to satisfy sufficient and substantial continuous contacts, minimum contacts, and the long arm statute has to be able to reach into the state of residence to grab the person, and you have to satisfy some test that will get you minimum contacts, usually Burger King or stream of commerce plus.

Internationally, this is an even harder requirement to satisfy.

It's about control. Many companies will simply close up shop in an area that is deemed to be too much hassle to operate.

With a law like this the government has basically told ANET they can't do ANYTHING to deal with gold sellers in those countries.

It's stupid law, the goverment should be working on getting more jobs for it's citzens instead of promoting gold selling as an occupation.

Indeed. You provide ample evidence of this with statements such as:
Real experts plz.

First year law student. I'm as close to an expert as you'll get.

ANet and NCSoft have no right to enforce their contractual agreements if it is against the law in the jurisdiction they attempt to enforce them in.

Therefore they have no jurisdictional rights in Taiwan.

The Taiwanese government would be able to sue on behalf of it's citizens to recover for breach of what I'm assuming is going to be statute in Taiwan as of today.

EDIT: Last I heard they were all running trial accounts that they didn't have to pay for. Any truth to this?

You might need to pay a bit more attention in class.
First of all, let us be clear that you haven't read the law in question (neither have, nor indeed can, I), so this is all guesswork about what the law says.

Next, I am sure even a first year law student can see the difference between private and public property. Now black may be white in Taiwan for all I know, but I doubt NCsoft's contract with their customers actually transferred any property rights to the customers. NCsoft still owns all virtual data related to player accounts. (Correct me if I am wrong here, but only if you can provide citations.) It is this right that allows NCsoft to close up shop in Taiwan: if the players owned any of that data, NCsoft would be committing theft.

Hence, if Anet decides to terminate any account, they are legally in the clear.

What this law does or at least appears to do is to protect gold selling companies from lawsuits by NCsoft. I really doubt there was ever any likely danger of NCsoft being sued by gold selling companies. What would their grievance be? Loss of property? They never owned any! Denial of service? Nope, contract says (I presume) service can be terminated at NCsoft's whim.

(Arguing legal mumbo jumbo with anonymouses on a game forum is not how I planned to spend a quiet evening, so I'll let you have the last word.)

unfortunately I doubt that they (the people who can no longer play) will be able to do anything since---welll yes they bought the game, and yes they did get to play it, so anet/ncsoft has fulfilled their end of the bargain---so no suing will get them anything.
Now some loud protests might get some eyes to notice them.....


it truly succks, and my heart goes out to those who have just been screewed over by this----I hope things turn out!

From Gaile Gray:

I didn't realize that Taiwan has a law saying that gold farmers can't be banned? I'm sure it's obviously more detailed but I'm wondering what this law says.

Edit: Obviously I should have read up and seen Esan's posts. Has to do with virtual property.

omg, quit QQing!!!

It is not to get rid of bots, they just didn't renew the contract!

should we let them have Guild wars for free?

Could someone with the translation skills please get a hold of the Taiwanese laws(about botters and their accounts) that state their rights(LoL if they have any) within the country? I'd like to give them a read thru.

-T.I.A.

It's probably not April fools since China/Taiwan have been harsh on gaming... yeah..

You also clearly don't know what you are talking about. I think you are thinking way too far down the path of American-type property, and not with a very different culture/government/ideals of Taiwan.

Although Masao is not 100% correct, Masao is more correct than you. As to whether I am a lawyer, I'd rather not say (and that should answer that). And no, I don't feel like clearing things up.

As I mentioned before, the government won't function until 5/20/08, I doubt there would be any law that would apply before the new government function.(I'm not any law expert so I tried to google the new internet law, but I couldn't find any that would apply on 04/01/08.)

Most-likely, NCSoft/NCTaiwan is lying. The whatever law doesn't exist at all, if it does, please at least post it in the dev update or so.

The closed pve and pvp change DOES matter. Because of the small population of the Taiwan district, it is difficult to do trade between ourselves, and now the chance of trading in international district has even been removed( byebye, sell and highend forums). GvG doesn't matter much, but any other kind of PvP PUGS would die. RA sync would start growing in Taiwan district coz we have so few players in the district, why don't we just change our build and sync~lol. And lastly, no more deep pugs for me.

Now all the taiwan account have to accept another EULA. I didn't accept it. Many of us don't. We dunno if any of those rules would destroy our chance of getting our right back.

Tell me the truth! NCT/NCSoft!!!

Bah annoyance for me. Our guild was created in Taiwan (so we could have our tag in Chinese) and today Merchant, Rune Trader, Guild Lord, and Priest of Balthazar in the hall stopped working. There goes a two year old guild and hall.

Basicly what they're saying is that EU/US server and TW servers are quite different. for example, Payment methods, as the EU/US accounts are bought with a once off payment, but Taiwan accounts works on a monthly payment. and because of this, the data base is also a bit different. so now they're discussing with ANet how to provide service to each type of payment group.

I think they're trying to say here that monthly payment accounts stand a bigger chance of being a Goldfarmer/bot account. as they don't have to pay that much initially for an account, so they will just get multiple accounts and will probibly get just enough money to pay off the account and perhaps a little profit. well...if you understand what i mean

Its just Taiwan... 50% of the people in the US couldn't even locate it on a map, must be april fools!

I had two emotions upon reading this thread.

The first was a mild sense of sadness; sad because this is clearly an injustice, but tempered by the knowledge that GW is a computer game, and not significant in the larger scheme of things.


The second, unrestrained mirth;

Corporate lawyer at multinational software firm, anyone? Publc notary? Perhaps even a second year student?

so there goes all those pandas, onis, rain callers----all those minis that were sprinkled liberally over the Asian areas......

afya---i hope your protest works!!! Its a sad day in gw history, not because of the stupid minis but because of stupid governments. We are cheering you on!!!!

Asians don't have april fool's, why because we never laugh....and when we do we are faking

soooo this whole thing is cuz they are crying the cant Sell there Gold? wtf ,dont they have bigger probs to worry about.So theres 2 Gws now GW:The real version and GW: Rise of the bots?