The Lawbringer: Mailbag 4.0
by Mathew McCurley 
Jul 22nd 2011 at 5:00PM
Pop law abounds in The Lawbringer, your weekly dose of WoW, the law, video games and the MMO genre. Mathew McCurley takes you through the world running parallel to the games we love and enjoy, full of rules, regulations, pitfalls and traps. How about you hang out with us as we discuss some of the more esoteric aspects of the games we love to play?
Welcome to another exciting mailbag edition of The Lawbringer. I've pulled some of my favorite questions from my inbox this week to discuss topics like slander, libel, and that pesky idea about gold selling that I had during one the recent WoW Insider Show (I think it was the WoW Insider Show; I do a lot of shows sometimes) about the auction house. Somewhere, Basil has felt a twinge in his leg, as if a thousand voices cried out in unison and then were quickly silenced by the ringing of the auction house bells ...
If you've got a question for The Lawbringer, send it along to mat@wowinsider.com. Be sure to include some sort of subject that lets me know that you're asking a Lawbringer question, because otherwise it will probably get lost in the millions of potential tags your email could be filed under. A long time ago, I was reading a post by venerable internet man Merlin Mann about managing your inbox and fighting with the notion that email needed to be sorted and dealt with quickly. It's been years since then, and I hate my inbox more and more every day because I never listened to Merlin.
Slander or libel?
Reader Cassy writes:
Hello,Cassy, I wish this question were easy. First, we look at the definitions of slander and libel. Second, we apply facts to rules and see where we come out. Let me also preface this by saying that I haven't followed much of this type of law due to the fact that I've concentrated mostly on contract, entertainment, and commercial litigation in my time as an attorney.
I have a quick and "easy" question for the Lawbringer:
If you type something insulting toward another person in WoW chat, is it slander or libel?
Slander is traditionally used to define harmful statements spoken or uttered in transitory mediums. Things don't linger with slander (other than the words ringing in your ears). Libel is defamation through written words, printed in a newspaper or magazine, but not actually spoken. The concepts have their roots in England when publication became more widespread and it was necessary to curb people's just printing whatever the heck they wanted to -- because print stays, presumably, forever.
The internet shook everything up, as usual. When you're online playing a game and you type from your character, you are "speaking" more than you are "publishing" your thoughts to be read by all. What if you're commenting on a thread or message board? Are you "publishing" those words or "speaking" those words? At the end of the day, slander or libel comes down to the form associated with the defamation.
The answer is that it's still being decided -- sometimes it's slander, sometimes libel. In the United Kingdom, where defamation law is a bit more plaintiff/victim-friendly, they've started on the path to saying that internet defamation looks more like slander in certain contexts like message boards or comments. But there was a case in California in 2006, Barrett v. Rosenthal, that said that websites cannot be sued for whatever libel that was written by other parties, so we probably still believe in the United States that the written internet word is still libel.
The big difference between slander and libel, really, is what you need to do to prove either of them. Libel has a higher standard to meet than slander, so proving libel is a more difficult thing to do. It is easier on the plaintiff to prove slander, which is why European countries (at this point) are more lenient than U.S. courts.
So which is it? You could argue for both. It's slander, because WoW speech isn't exactly a fixed publication medium. WoW speech is very transitory, and there is a level of anonimity behind your character/avatar that might cloud the process. On the other hand, words are written and disseminated, then published to the players, which might strike the libel bells to a judge. Remember, in the United States, truth is a defense to defamation, so if Magekillazz the moron rogue really is a lying, awful loot ninja, you didn't defame him.
Reader Shumoo wanted to ask about my newest "get rid of gold farming, drive prices down" scheme in WoW:
Heya Mat,Thanks for the email, Shumoo. I had thought about it for a while after making the comment that combining auction houses across servers would be a way Blizzard could cut down on the number of people who would want to purchase gold from a third-party grey market seller, and I still believe that this could work. Much like how battlegroups are no longer a thing, and all of a region's players are grouped together through the Dungeon Finder, Blizzard could potentially link all of the auction houses together to create a massive supply increase.
On a recent podcast (I think) you said that you thought that combining the auction house across all servers would reduce gold selling. What did you mean by all that?
Shumoo
Supply and demand is at the heart of the auction house, with a bit of market control and price fixing thrown in to the mix. Just ask Basil or Fox, who write about the auction house in WoW -- it is a living, breathing, functioning economy that is awe-inspiring in a game like World of Warcraft.
It is significant, yes, but with such things come the ultimate problems. Supply of BOE epics and crafting materials keeps prices high, until a Chinese bot farmer or resource gathering exploiter floods the auction house market with cheap raw materials, sending prices plummeting. After the cheap goods leave the market, prices return to higher "normals," and the cycle continues. BOEs works in a similar fashion, but the costs associated with raid BOEs stay relatively high, and many players feel the need to spend money on gold in order to compete for these better pieces of BOE gear.
So what is Blizzard to do when the auction houses get out of control with their prices based on supply? Increase supply tenfold. Linking the auction houses pits every seller against each other, not just in the server but across the region. Supply skyrockets and prices instantly decrease because of the amount of people contributing to the market itself.
The downside is that it kills local economies and creates massive player inflation because now players have more money to spend on the not-auction house. That feud you have at the Orgrimmar auction house with the glyph seller who undercuts you by 1 copper is now 500 glyph sellers who undercut you by 1 copper. The supply could greatly outweigh the demand.
You could solve player inflation by requiring a certain gold investment into items to always have a cost associated with them, like the Sands of Time for the Vial of the Sands, which creates a floor for the cost of this item based on the gold investment beyond the craftable materials. That's one theory, anyway.
It's not totally fleshed out and it probably isn't the best solution, but I could see region-wide auction houses being a positive way of getting rid of the supply and demand problem in WoW. Prices go down because more people are allowed to participate in the same market, and players have an easier time finding the pieces of gear they need and materials they want to purchase without potentially breaking their banks (both real-life wallets and gold coffers). The market would find new highs and lows, since markets adapt. Just a thought.
See you guys next week, and remember to send your Lawbringer questions to mat@wowinsider.com!
This column is for entertainment only; if you need legal advice, contact a lawyer. For comments or general questions about law or for The Lawbringer, contact Mat at mat@wowinsider.com.
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, The Lawbringer
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
jfofla Jul 22nd 2011 5:11PM
AH Prices vary greatly realm to realm or even faction to faction depending on progression.
It would be interesting to see the effect high pop high progression realms goods would have on the Third World market of smaller servers.
Sarducci Jul 22nd 2011 5:22PM
Region wide AH would even out market cycles, but it is not clear to me why you think it would eliminate supply problems? supply goes up but so does demand. As far as I can tell, this would enable gold sellers. When a farmer floods the market with his goods, it will be absorbed by the demand of all servers, so prices for the farmed item wont go down. So on average, said farmer will make more gold. People will still want to buy gold, because those raid drop weapons that average 20k gold on all realms, will still average 20k gold once all realms are linked. so...what are you getting at, here? LInked AHs would make it a lot harder for speculators to make gold, but would have at best no impact on gold sellers.
Homeschool Jul 22nd 2011 5:55PM
@Sarducci - For high-velocity markets, like current crafting mats, you're absolutely correct. The supply and demand would increase roughly equally, simply evening out some of the spikes you see in lower population realms. The place you'd see the most improvement is in smaller markets - old crafting mats, rare items, etc. The supply and demand of these is so volatile that prices can fluctuate unpredictably and dramatically.
feedback Jul 24th 2011 5:11PM
I agree with Sarducci completely. Combining markets will increase both demand in supply, so there will be no change in the average price of items on the Auction House. Let's say in five different realms, the market demands for Twilight Jasmine are 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 units respectively. The market supplies are 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 units respectively. So the average demand is 4 units and the average supply is 8 units. Now add all these realms' demands and supplies together because you are combining the markets into one larger one. The total market demand is now 20 and the market supply is now 40. Both are five times larger. As long as the ration of demand to supply stays the same, so will the average price.
@Homeschool: While you are probably right, I don't think your point is very relevant to curbing the selling of gold. Old mats are a smaller, niche market. Gold sellers focus on automating the gathering and crafting of materials that people use everyday in current content, or they hack accounts and liquidate the stolen goods. The only time they would sell older mats are when they have hacked the account of someone who possessed them - which is not that many people, so not a great way to sell gold.
The Dewd Jul 22nd 2011 5:28PM
Wouldn't cross-realm auction houses go against Blizzard's implied desire to limit the amount of gold you can move from one realm to another (like the limit of what you can send with a transfered toon)? I realize that people currently buy expensive luxury items (Harris Pilton bags) and sell them as a slight loss to "transfer" money anyways. Or would that no longer matter because a region-wide auction house means a region-wide economy which negates the concern?
thebitterfig Jul 23rd 2011 11:17AM
Well, I figure a large part of the reason for limiting gold flow across realms is because AH are not linked, and a massive influx of cash could destabilise the local economy. Linked AH would mean linked economies, and the effects of transferring substantial amounts of gold would be lessened.
Drysta Jul 22nd 2011 5:21PM
Heh. Couldn't help but think of that Sue Sylvester line from that Glee show the wifey watches:
"As soon as I figure out the difference between slander and libel, I'm suing you!"
My only concern (and I've thought about the pros of AH on a wider scale in attempts to figure out how to make it viable - not that those wise souls at BlizzHQ would listen to me) is that it could end up with the same problems felt with the Euro. The larger, more populated realms end up dominating while the smaller ones take the brunt. Now, on paper, logic would suggest it could work, but, in actuality, I think it would cause a much bigger economic crisis in Azeroth.
Great questions, great answers as always. Certainly food for thought!
briker Jul 22nd 2011 5:24PM
Oh man, my auctioneer scan would take fooorreeevvveerr.
Drysta Jul 22nd 2011 5:28PM
Haha. I can see it now: Estimated scan time left 17 minutes.
[General] [Combat Log]
This realm will be restarting in 15 minutes. We apologize for any inconvenience.
/facedesk.
Homeschool Jul 22nd 2011 5:33PM
While I think it would make the AH game a LOT harder (as your odds of finding a niche market are then about non-existent, and buying out your competitors might require more funding than a single gold cap allows), it also solves problems for normal buyers and sellers, as your chances of finding/selling that odd specialty item or one-use glyph are now boosted by the sheer mass of buyers/sellers out there. Chances are, there will ALWAYS be someone buying/selling that item, and you won't be forced to vendor it / farm it.
Another thing I wish they'd do is re-balance the AH deposit, which (I'm assuming?) is based on the vendor value. It's semi-ridiculous to have a 10g deposit for a green L60 item - the only people buying these are (dis)enchanters, and often the product is worth less than the sale price or the loss from a non-sale. Merging the auction houses would allow them to use more comprehensive logic based on supply/demand to determine deposit value.
Ralkor Jul 22nd 2011 7:21PM
Er... No. Supply will increase massively, demand will increase drastically. The averages of supply and demand will remain the averages; in fact that's exactly what you'd be doing by merging all of those markets. The only major difference is that there would be no outlier markets. Microeconomics gets weird when you get close to 0 supply or demand, because slight fluctuations are a huge percentage of the supply or demand; some realms, generally low-pop realms, have certain markets like that. Merging all region AH would eliminate those cases. So you would have something close to perfect competition. Prices would be very stable, with the only major fluctuations caused by actual changes to the game itself. Prices would not go down from current averages except in rare cases due to the elimination of niche markets on various realms. But those would likely be countered by realms where the average goes up. Overall volume traded would go up, which may have been what the author was thinking of, because realms with an overabundance of supply would meet those with an overabundance of demand, but average price would not change. Personally I think it's a bad idea because it eliminates a lot of the AH game.
cygnus Jul 22nd 2011 9:02PM
Agree. I believe Mr. McCurley only thought in the supply while disregarding the demand. If we think the next scenario:
Realm 1:
Item A: 3 sellers / 30 buyers = 1/10 = 0.1 ratio
Item B: 10 sellers / 5 buyers = 2/1 = 2
Realm 2:
Item A: 1 sellers / 5 buyers = 1/ 5 = 0.2
Item B: 15 sellers / 5 buyers = 3/1 = 3
Unified:
Item A: 4 sellers / 35 buyers = 4 / 35 = 0.11
Item B: 25 sellers / 10 buyers = 3/1 = 2.5
The AH unification will only bring the prices to the average, and Realm populations are so big that the deviation of each won't affect heavily to the average result.
TLDR
If realms have 10 sellers and 20 buyers each, the result of unifying the AHs wont affect the supply/demand ratio.
Sally Bowls Jul 22nd 2011 6:22PM
I think that battlegroup AHs will happen for the same reason as the Battlegroup BG & LFG queues: if you are in a low-pop server, you still get access to BoEs, Living Embers, MC mats, recipes, etc.
For many reasons, including dubious design choices, the WoW population is declining. The AH is the last missing piece to delay needing to do realm consolidations.
Eirik Jul 22nd 2011 6:24PM
I'd be interested in Basil's take on the idea of a unified auction house.
A couple of things that might not have been though of, or chewed through sufficiently...
1) More items would sell as some servers get access to new items (unmet demand). Money (gold) would flow out of servers that could not supply those items into those that could.
2) There's a reason for the term "AH PvP". Undercutting can become habitual, and there's a good chance that prices would settle at values that are not profitable.
3) Relating to the above, instead of a small number of people accessing the AH at one time, you have a quite sizeable number. Undercutting would be nearly instantaneous until a stable price had been reached.
Blizzard would have to implement something closer to a broker interface, allowing "purchase orders" simply due to the volume of items being traded. Currently, it's possible that the item you want to buy gets purchased between when you see it in the list and when you click "buy". With the greater volume of a unified AH, that possibility would rise to nigh-certainty on high volume goods.
Another consequence of the speed would be (IMO) that crafters would be (effectively) selling to traders, rather than to the "the general public", as people whose interest and time permits specializing in the market would be able to better any price asked by someone who did not so specialize.
"Buying materials, crafting, posting the results, and profiting thereby" would disappear as Traders would arbitrage the profit out of those crafting materials.
A WoW unified-AH scheme would NOT resemble the EVE Online market. EVE has skills specific to making arbitrage more profitable (reducing built-in losses). It also has skills specific to reducing the cost of crafting (again, reducing built-in losses), allowing characters to specialize into various aspects of crafting vs trading. It has less a single market than a "regional market" - with skills to increase one's effective "region" size. This means that there is also profit in transport of goods. It DOES have scarcity, which is related in large part to risk or limited resources. It has representations of capital investment (some manufacture requires outlay and risk of considerable amounts of cash).
Many or most of these EVE Online market elements are not terribly appropriate to WoW's setting, but make for a much more interesting market. And mind that the total population of EVE Online is 1-2 **orders of magnitude** smaller than WoW's. That has consequences across the board.
Kelenicor Jul 22nd 2011 7:24PM
@Eirik
The broker interface sounds like a great way to go. I find right now that the "auction" component of the AH is not all that active, considering most of the people on my server currently list items with the same bid and buyout prices. If you're going to go to a regional format for the AH, then the transformation into more of a brokerage (bid and offer pricing) format would be great. I would love to be able to put a counter offer on items, rather than watch it get relisted over and over again, never to sell. Of course, the next step is to start selling futures and options...
Eirik Jul 22nd 2011 7:34PM
"Regional market" doesn't make much sense in the WoW world, the way it does in EVE. WoW has too many ways of rendering travel instantaneous. "Global market" is a better term to use for "make all the AHs link to one another".
The brokerage functions I mentioned were strictly a mechanical response to the problem of increased traffic. I don't know how an AH that accessed 100+ servers at a time could operate usefully in a "you have to select this PRECISE item to buy it" model.
And there's always the funsuckers who post 30 x 1 item instead of (say) 6 x 5 items. Look for, say, peacebloom and see 30 pages of 1 peacebloom each.
cygnus Jul 22nd 2011 9:03PM
** supply/demand ratio of 0.5
cygnus Jul 22nd 2011 9:04PM
my mistake, down vote to oblivion
DarkWalker Jul 22nd 2011 9:14PM
As for linking the AHs, one way it could be done while avoiding some of the potential drawbacks is by automatically posting each auction in a Blizzard-controlled number of extra "random" realms. For example, suppose auctions are listed on two extra realms, there are realms A, B, C, D, and E, and someone posts auctions 1, 2, 3, and 4 on the "A" realm:
- Auction 1 goes for realms A, C, and E
- Auction 2 goes for realms A, B, and D
- Auction 3 goes for realms A, B, and C
- Auction 4 goes for realms A, D, and E
This way, Blizzard can determine how many auctions each realms see by controlling the number of extra realms; players get a larger AH without being able to predict where their auctions will land, and thus making it more difficulty to deliberately transfer funds and items across realms (remember that there are a couple hundred realms, so if the number of extra realms is small, it could take a few hundred auctions to get one to land on a desired realm); and cornering other realms' markets becomes mostly impossible because players in a realm can't actually scoop all the stock of a different realm, no matter how much gold they control.
BTW, another thing I would do is to list all items posted on the neutral AH also in the Alliance and Horde AH. It's in Blizzard's best interest to get more players to use the neutral AH for legitimate sales (and, thus, pay that AH's larger cut); this change would really help making the neutral AH more attractive for sellers.
than4prez Jul 25th 2011 3:10PM
That's only if the reason for linking Auction Houses is to increase supply. If it's to normalize the prices and is part of an effort to lose the bounds of servers, then it would simply be easier to link them all.