CNN Piece on stealing items in MMOs

[Mark Crump]

http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/fun.games/08/15/microsoft.games.reut/index.html

best quote:


"Those of you who are working on massively multiplayer online games, organized crime is already looking at you," said Dave Weinstein, a Microsoft security development engineer at the company's Gamefest video game development conference.

[Mr Nash]

Lineage has been getting hammered particularly hard as of late:

http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2006/07/id_theft_rmt_nc.html

[Charles]

Yeah, I've totally been thinking about scooping Domo's chest.

[Dave Long]

Mr. Weinstein is a poster here.

[Dave Weinstein]

You've seen through my cunning alias.

[Mark Crump]

The reason I thought the quote was hilarious is it provoked images of the Corleone Family telling Clemena to go knock over an MMO player.

"Joey over there is gonne swim with the Murlocks unless he hands over that sword."

[Sharpe]

Hey, Dave actually got some quality quote-time on CNN.

I'm curious how this will affect future MMOs -- I can see virtual crime being a problem for games where the players have a lot of assets - a highly popular game like WoW, or a persistent online account system like XBox live, or a package multi-MMO setup like Sony has. Does that mean the costs of setting up really popular MMOs or other popular and persistent gaming modes is going to be higher because of the costs of securing against virtual crime.

Also, since the #1 prophylactic measure seems to be *never give anyone your account info* I wonder if games will start to figure out programs or incentives to discourage account sharing and swapping?

[Dave Weinstein]

The slide deck and audio recording are now available at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx/presentations/

[Matt Perkins]

That CNN page doesn't load for me... CNN can't find the page on their site, though their header loads...