Innocent until proven guilty

So, another blogger accepted a donation in WoW gold. Certainly, that's perfectly innocent in that no real money, good, or service was exchanged. It was a tip.

His opinion is that doing that is perfectly within TOS, and that even IF banned , he could prove his innocence. His belief being that we have rights and are "Innocent until proven guilty."

That works in a court of law because the prosecution has special abilities that can be brought to bear. Money is trading hands? They can get a warrant for your financial records, etc. Blizzard can't do any of that. Selling WoW gold for real money isn't a crime of any kind.

Certainly, the TOS clearly specifies that your rights as a customer are granted by them and can be revoked by them at any time. Of course they try to be fair about it and will allow you to appeal. They also have the ability to investigate only what goes on on their network. They cannot, for example, get a warrant for your bank or credit card transactions to find out if you really bought that game time legitimately or what have you. Their only real tool is to look for patterns of activity that points to possible out of game connections. There is no “Burden of proof” on Blizzard as if this were a criminal case. They do not have to prove you are engaged in RMT, mere suspicion is sufficient.

And accepting donations is going to look pretty suspicious. Suddenly you have a character that gets sent gold in the mail for no reason and can now afford to buy game time and vanity items? Let's assume they buy the whole “Those were donations!” line. You're still on a list. The first time you buy an item from another person that is being watched, action will probably be taken.

The more donations you accept, the greater the chance of that action being taken. It's just a bad idea to paint a target on yourself like that.

This leads me to my point. How draconian should a game company be in their “donation” policy? On one end of the spectrum, anything goes, and no records are kept or analysis done. That was the way it was done at first before anyone even heard of RMT and the world was viewed as innocent and pure. On the other end of the spectrum, totalitarian control where every transaction of any kind is analyzed to be sure it's value for value. Obviously, that would be unacceptable for players, as they would feel like they're being watched “Rockwell” style.

I think trades should be value for value with in a range of about 50% to 100%. Some transactions should be exempt, like transactions within the same account and transactions within the same guild, assuming guild hopping is not evidenced. Some transactions have to be investigated, like if you send your girlfriend's character 50K for a pet as a “Birthday gift.” The cost of that investigation is part of the cost of doing business. Some transaction patterns would be highly suspicious to the point of warranting an immediate ban, like hundreds of “gift” transactions in a month.

Now, you could come up with theoretical scenarios for pretty much any of these bannable events that are perfectly innocent, and that would be unfortunate if innocent people got banned and had to appeal. But you can't just throw up your hands and say “Welp! Can't do anything about RMT.” You have to investigate and be ready to ban.

This is a reason why I like the concept of the RMT token. If done right, (As I detailed in an earlier post.) and in conjunction with transaction analysis and investigation, RMT can be made to be so painful as to be not profitable.