Through the past years, sales of virtual property such as items, currency and accounts have bloomed. Companies dedicated to farming or acquiring the virtual property of players and then selling them to other players have established themselves and have created a virtual market that is said to be worth $880 million US dollars.
Whether the so called "Secondary Market" operates within legal constraints or not has yet to be determined by an original precedent, but it is more or less clear that the companies involved do shady business. One of the major players in this act has just recently bought several fan sites of popular upcoming game Vanguard, the Online Gaming Network (OGaming) and popular World of Warcraft database "Thottbot". No connections between any of these websites and the "Secondary Market" have been established as of now. The intentions behind these sales remain unclear and extreme amount of speculations has spawned throughout the World Wide Web shortly after these happenings became public.
Since the original banning of virtual EverQuest property sales and adoption of the policy by many major MMORPG Developers, Sony Online Entertainment continues to be active on this front. In 2005 they announced their own in-game auctioning service titled "Station Exchange". Initially this service will only allow for sales within the EverQuest II Universe, but as the name of it is rather generic it is very likely SOE will integrate other games into the system sooner or later.
Burthorpe Games Room
The Burthorpe Games Room is located in the Basement of the castle in Buthorpe , one can choose from two classic games, with runes being used as game pieces. Runelink is similar to Connect 4 . Draughts is the British name for checkers. Jagex has confirmed that players will never be able to stake (bet) in-game items on these games, as it would lead to a new breed of cheating, and would detract from some of the skill of RuneScape.
Instead, they will leave the competitive nature of these games to a rating system, in which your score goes up if you win a game, and down if you lose. Jagex has also promised to add more games since the Buthorpe Games Room has proven sucessful.
RuneScape is a registered trademark of Jagex Ltd. Copyright 2006 runescapempire.com
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