Permanently Deleted

  • Awoo [she/her]
    ·
    2 years ago

    This is really interesting. Think Mihoyo would pursue someone for setting this up with donations to pay for costs? Do Chinese companies pursue things like that the same way the American companies do?

    A lot of videogames like Ragnarok Online have persisted quite well by operating private servers that are monetised with cosmetics and other features added by the server operators, presumably because the companies decided not to pursue the operators. I wonder how Mihoyo would be about it.

    • riseuppikmin [he/him]
      hexagon
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      Uncharted territory here with Mihoyo honestly. I'd be hesitant to go around screaming "I have a private server at xyz" if I were you, but if you throw one up for close friends and don't advertise it you should be fine (short of potentially being banned on your main if they do get aggressive and you're hosting on the same computer you're playing on). Related to that last front, the Oracle Cloud Free tier is great (4vCPU/24GB ram ARM instance) and you get to eat into Oracle's profit margin by only ever using the free tier.

      The people most under the gun would probably be people who host servers who then implement gacha-except-the-money-goes-to-me as well as the project leads itself (probably a good idea to download it and all the reqs now in case this gets nuked in the future).

      • Awoo [she/her]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Already have servers it could go on but yeah. This is real interesting, I have access to a crowd of people that play who would be interested and form the basis of a seed community.

        What's interesting in my mind about private servers for Genshin is that they could actually be much more social than existing Genshin is, since members would form a community on discord or elsewhere that they would play and socialise with one another via.

        I am however fearful of legal consequences. Might have to dive into the topic and see what grey area exists vs what has been established in my jurisdiction by other possible cases. I have a feeling the law would have very different takes when it comes to donations vs selling content Mihoyo sells vs selling custom made content designed by the private server like several Ragnarok private servers do for cosmetics.

        The game is also literally free to play, so that itself is an interesting one. So you're giving people a way to bypass shop purchases? Is that going to be covered by copyright or theft orrrrr? Could be interpreted as just cheating? There are tonnes of questions that are pretty unique to the specific model of monetisation Mihoyo has.

        • riseuppikmin [he/him]
          hexagon
          ·
          2 years ago

          I have genuine concerns that this project could lead to some really bad revision to reverse-engineering related laws and consumer rights (specifically because of what you mentioned- the fact that Genshin is free-to-play).

          I'm actually fascinated about what a court case would say about the legality of all of this because I think it's basically untested waters (that I don't want actually evaluated in reality because I think the result would probably be bad).

          • Awoo [she/her]
            ·
            2 years ago

            If the currency is something you grind for in the game... Like level up points. It's just cheating surely?

            If however the currency is not something you can earn through gameplay at all and only something you can purchase, then I imagine you can argue that it's accessing something that it should not be allowed to access without paying.

            But yeah. Real complicated this one. Completely untested legal area.