The Mana World Forums

Hi TMW Team,

Recently I stumbled upon a conversation that seemed to indicate that certain very rare items would/could be made available for hard currency (Euro's).

Whilst this can, and does happen in some on-line games, particually when items are not available by other means, I would like to know what the TMW Team position on this is ?

My personal opinion, is that it can open up a whole can of worms, (see "Bragg v. Linden and Rosedale"), and operates in very unchartered legal waters.
Even to have certain items available only by donation, perhaps to fund TMW Hardware, Bandwidth or Development, carries an element of risk.

Looking forward to hear what the teams position on this is.

Regards
ikms

If we do, it will only be a token item, nothing that affects game play in anyway.

Regarding trading items for hard currency: Is there really anything we can do against it? As long as noone admids it there is no way to prove that any money transfer outside of the game took place. Just don't complain when any of your possessions you bought from someone for real money get lost due to a bug, a game feature or GM intervention.

Regarding buying items for "donations": I am strictly against it. Should it become impossible for us to provide tmw for free I would rather prefer to take monthly subscription fees from everyone and provide a fair game where everyone is equal instead of giving advantages to people depending on how much money you can pay for the game.

Hi jaxad0127,

Just a further suggestion, that any of these "token items". EG Items that are not available to everyone in the game, should be made untradeable and undropable. They can be sold to an NPC is they are not required.

This way, they will have no effect on "game play", and still retain their uniqueness.

regards
ikms

Another way I would approve to fund the TMW server (should it ever become necessary) would be the Street Performer Protocol.

It means, for example, that a new content update will be unlocked on the server when a specific amount of donations has been collected.

The development and its copyright and disclosure practices would not be affected (only the server requires donations - the development is done by volunteers and thus needs no money). That means that 3rd party servers could pull content right from svn (or git in the future) and release it before us. There would be nothing wrong about that because it would encourage people to play TMW on a different server and thus release stress from the official one.

Here's a thought: What if we somehow applied the BitTorrent method of Seeding/Leeching into the server with bandwidth? Somehow make everyone who connects "concede" a tiny bit of bandwidth.

Hi Crush,

Should it ever become necessary, there is nothing stopping 'the team' from selling "TMW" items, under some licence agreement.
I would love to buy a "TMW Shroom Hat", "TMW Calendar" or perhaps other TMW Merchandise, if it were avaiable.

I would be glad to look into it if you ever require assistance ?

P.S. I dont like donations for items either, and I dont like a monthly subscription fee (if it every became necessary), since it has no regard to an individuals ability to pay.

I would freeze the trade in unobtainable items, investigate the trades that have occured, and see if there actually are any potentail "Black Market" activities occuring 'within' the game. (Much like the real world, large amounts of GP's moving around, Very Rare items moving) - all before we go to the New Box.
We cannot do anything retrospectively, without knowing all our facts, but we can stop any further manipulation of the game.

Regards
ikms

ikms wrote:Hi Crush,

Should it ever become necessary, there is nothing stopping you selling "TMW" items, under some licence agreement.
I would love to buy a "TMW Shroom Hat", "TMW Calendar" or perhaps other TMW Merchandise, if it were avaiable.

I would be glad to look into it if you ever require assistance ?

Regards
ikms

We were talking about buying in-game items, not real world items, but that might work too.

kr0n05931 wrote:Here's a thought: What if we somehow applied the BitTorrent method of Seeding/Leeching into the server with bandwidth? Somehow make everyone who connects "concede" a tiny bit of bandwidth.

A distributed system would be very unfeasible for the netcode of a realtime multiplayer game.

1. the latency would be horrible
2. extreme cheating potential
3. there isn't really much to share anyway because most of the data clients receive is individual.

I could however imagine a peer-to-peer system like bittorrent for downloading updates.

Crush wrote:

kr0n05931 wrote:Here's a thought: What if we somehow applied the BitTorrent method of Seeding/Leeching into the server with bandwidth? Somehow make everyone who connects "concede" a tiny bit of bandwidth.

I could however imagine a peer-to-peer system like bittorrent for downloading updates.

I think that's what he meant. This could still be used maliciously, but with the hash we have in the updates file, that chance is greatly reduced.