It’s not unknown, however, for players to conspire by holding two accounts, one of them on each side. You’re not supposed to do that, but some people do. There aren’t really in-game economic benefits to such collusion, at least not yet. Once Blizzard puts in its new “honor system”, where player-vs-player conflict will actually have more in-game economic consequences, then such collusion may become more than just a mild bit of mischief.

What sort of things did the people communicating cross-faction by code in Warcraft want to say?

It’s actually kind of inspiring. The rules of the game specified war yet they chose dialogue.

Unless they were conspiring to stab their own various sides in the back, of course.

Consider this analogy: My housemate and I lease a delightful Saab convertible from a dealer. Either we lease it jointly, or I lease it in my name and make a private agreement with him to share its use. Without my consent, he then goes out and sublets 100% use of the car to a third person (i.e., thereby preventing me from using the car at all either). Other than whatever differences may exist in the specific contract language in the car lease as opposed to the game agreement, it strikes me that the legal analysis should be essentially the same.

And in Korea, famously mad for online games like Lineage and Starcraft (yes, the latter’s not massively multiplayer and persistent)…

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4397159.stm

The row is thought to have blown up partly because China has no laws that cover the theft of virtual in-game items.

This is in contrast to places like South Korea which has a section of its police force that investigates in-game crime.

I don’t know what that means.

In World of Warcraft, there are two factions (the Horde and the Alliance). Players from the two factions aren’t allowed to communicate across faction lines—they can’t talk to each other, mail each other, group with each other, etc. Some enterprising players discovered that, while the game garbled their speech for players on the opposite side, it didn’t garble digits or punctuation, so someone developed a code to allow cross-faction communication. The latest patch put an end to that.

Also… does anyone wonder whether any of these embed Milgram-like experiments?

See http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=564801

In short, it may be criminal as a species of computer trespass, if the access to the account was unauthorized. However, the salient question would be the calculation of damages, and the question of whether game values should be recognized as property rights held by players.

There’s an interesting jurisdictional issue in this also—our original article in the California Law Review on laws & virtual worlds alludes to it, but we’ll be fleshing it out more in a future article.

That’s the one part where I’m not following you.

But if your question is that there has to be an ingame transaction, and that’s where the Powers That Be could intercede…well, they do. The try to identify this activity, and when they do, they summarily close the account. A few weeks ago, they closed 2,000 accounts for this reason. That’s $15 a month, each, that especially because these “players” were professionals, the income was practically guaranteed. As mentioned elsewhere, maybe you’ve missed it, but employing some developing-world people to “play” the game to get gold and items to sell on eBay is actually a profitable business model since you get that labor for, say, $1 an hour but make a good deal more from that labor.

But upon re-reading your comment, I think you’re asking if the player community can’t deal with the problem vigilante style? Well, they really can’t because most of these games are designed to prohibit that kind of game play because a surprisingly large number of people will play that game that way, doing nothing more than making other players as unhappy as possible, if they’re allowed.

But lots of people do agree real world buying of in game items is a problem