Ebay Bans Virtual Booty

EBay has decided to prohibit the sale of online multiplayer game assets, otherwise known as virtual booty. Everyone has those gamer friends that sit at their computer with a headset on and are so wrapped up in a game, that if a real booty was in their face they wouldn’t flinch, and now players all over the world have one less source of income. Players around the world have been spending millions on virtual booty, naturally this is a big shock to the industry.

For those not familiar with booty, let me break it down. When someone plays an online multiplayer game, they most likely have to have an account; some subscription based and some free. The way they track your account is the registration key that comes on the game (and any computer software for that matter). During an online multiplayer game, your character goes through the game receiving experience, given opportunities to buy spells and buildings depending on the type of game. Basically experience is directly proportional to how many hours you play. What these dudes do that play games all day every day, is they slang their characters and their characters’ assets on EBay.

Why the hell would anyone buy these characters? Well if you have ever played a role playing video game, or a game that follows some sort of story line, you know how boring the beginning levels are. I, in fact, have given up on so many games because my A.D.D. ass does not have any patience and gets frustrated from easy, uneventful play. Many people are in the same boat and would go on EBay and buy up a character from a guy who’s played 100 hours and has the equivelent experience in the game. Instant baller. The most fun in a game is when you’re dominating, why not bypass all the boring stuff and start kicking ass?

It looks funny too. When transactions go down, one player tells another to meet him at a certain point in the game. They meet up, with other players exploring the world around them, then you see one dude drop a bunch of weapons and gold and the other guy walks over it and picks it up. Sometimes notices appear on the screen that display, “CHARACTERNAME1 drops $1,000,000,” then, “CHARACTERNAME2 picks up $1,000,000.”

In Asia, there are full businesses that run selling booty with employees doing what is called “Looting”, “Ninja Looting”, and/or “Scavengers”. They have these compounds where they house workers in dorm type buildings with one huge room that everyone reports to work in. These rooms are full of networked computers. What the workers do is play a certain online game and find some repetitive glitch where they can build players’ cache of weapons, money or experience then sell them online. For instance, in Super Mario Bros. 3 if you go through a level and walk all the way back to the beginning of said level, some coins reappear. All you would have to do is keep repeating this glitch and you will have a shitload of coins. Would you rather pay $5 for 500 coins, or sit and walk back in forth in the same level a hundred times?

The most popular massive multiplayer online (MMO) games in the US are Warcraft, Starcraft, Second Life, Diablo, and Star Wars Galaxies with many more titles across the rest of the world. Players sell shit from these games for anywhere between $5 and $2,000. Yes, two Gs. That is why its a big deal that EBay is pulling the plug on selling booty. They are apparently having trouble with legal ownership rights.

The battle is not over though, the IRS is more than happy to start taxing virtual booty.

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