Class action versus IGE

by Tateru Nino Nov 10th 2007 at 6:30AM

Filed under: World of Warcraft, Economy, Events, real-world, MMO industry, News items, Legal

Benjamin Duranske at Virtually Blind kicks off coverage of another virtual worlds lawsuit. In this case, it's a third-party beneficiary contract class action claim (Whew. Try saying that three times fast) against IGE and their alleged actions in World of Warcraft.

The plaintiffs allege, basically, that IGE is gold-farming, spawn-camping, devaluing gold, spamming chat, and generally screwing up the experience for everyone else.

Blizzard might well agree with them, having little truck with this sort of thing. IGE of course, becomes subject to the World of Warcraft Terms of Use, and EULA as soon as they create a character for any purpose.

The plaintiffs claim damage as a class as third-party-beneficiaries on the understanding that the WoW ToU and EULA are supposed to protect players as a whole (and Blizzard) against just this sort of thing.

While third-party beneficiary contract claims are generally pretty hard to argue, Blizzard supports the class-action, and that could make all the difference if they are willing to come to the party.

* Disclosure - IGE is one of our sponsored links.

Correction: Okay, complete screw-up. No, IGE isn't a sponsor - Weblogs, Inc. and Massively has no connection to IGE at all. None whatsoever. This is the hazard of doing too many things at once. I got confused, and made a mistake. You may now throw fruit and vegetables at me. Hopefully that's my one embarassing screw-up for the week.

Tags: benjamin-duranske, blizzard, eula, hernandez, hernandez-vs-ige, ige, legal, terms-of-use, virtually-blind, world-of-warcraft, wow

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Ghen said on 7:18AM 11-10-2007

Well its definitely interesting, but there's a million and a half lawsuits every day. I'm not sure this guy can claim personal damages though unless blizzard actually joins the plaintiff team and sits at the table with him.

Jack said on 7:53AM 11-10-2007

Well I never buy gold of that or any other site, but hope they do not loss that trail, I not want this site to loss one sponsored link. Its way to good, keep the news coming Massively ;)

Krystalle Voecks said on 10:03AM 11-10-2007

Just as a heads up, there is no connection between Massively or Weblogs, Inc. and IGE. We use Google for the embedded search function, and -they- have IGE as a sponsor.

This is also why we are working very hard to remove all Google ads from the site. As a company we do not, nor will we ever, support the use of gold sellers or paid power-leveling services in MMOs.

RogueJedi86 said on 9:55AM 11-10-2007

Does anyone know what ever happened with Blizzard's lawsuit against Peons4Hire? Blizz made a post saying they were suing them, then we never heard anything else about it.

Nick said on 1:01PM 11-10-2007

If I'm not mistaken IGE doesn't actually directly farm for gold or items in the games that it sells gold for. They rely upon third party farmers who bring the items and gold that they have farmed to IGE who buys them at a substantially lower price than what they turn around and resell them at. If this is true then this lawsuit is probably going nowhere fast.

Benjamin Duranske said on 12:38PM 11-11-2007

The plaintiffs allege that IGE employees actually do the gold farming.

They may be defining "employee" fairly loosely, but that's the kind of thing that isn't going to come up until the late stages of the case, so is unlikely to undermine their claims even if the people who farm aren't given paychecks directly by IGE. And legally, if IGE is paying people money for gold (which they are) there's a reasonable argument that they're employing them, even if it isn't a traditional employment relationship.