and, it should be said - unsure if I could post it on the original thread, Ryan - Sponge’s Forum rules do not allow this sort of EULA infraction. Considering your posts, codeHusky, you should give it a read, specifically the “do’s and don’ts”. Up to the Sponge team, but it doesn’t take long in reading the EULA to see that this clearly is in infraction.
For this post, however: We aim to comply entirely with the Mojang EULA, to that end any plugins, services, posts and/or links suspected of violating the EULA may be removed at the discretion of the Sponge Staff or at the request of Mojang AB.
I just have a hard time believing that Mojang’s commerical use guidelines have any bearing over how people use in game items. If money never changes hands, shouldn’t only the EULA be in affect because of the fact that there wasn’t anything commercial about some in game items?
Don’t think you are defining correctly ‘commercial’ there. Commerce just means for them the exchange of goods and services - be it with soft or hard currency. Anything that would tie servers’ economies together is in itself a breach of the EULA.
The “commercial agreement” only really refers to making/managing/hosting a server, wherein it is public (or fee/access - they define this in the EULA as well) and you receive some form of hard currency for it. By that standard, your server is a commercial venture, and therefore subject to the EULA’s clauses… including cross-server economies.
When you start a server, you are required to change ‘false’ to ‘true’ in eula.txt. At that moment, you enter a binding legal contract, and are subject to all clauses in it. Regardless of what their section title is. And it can still totally unbalance the game without money changing hands on that server.
I’m pretty sure it’s been written that way because if “virtual money” is transferred to another server, it can become much harder to be certain that it still complies with the EULA. Essentially an attempt to prevent “virtual money laundering”.
I have to admit, Mojang’s updated EULA is a wild and wooly document, and puts restrictions in unusual places. Far from the restrictive legalese of some other game agreements, it’s supposed to be user-friendly, but it does appear lend itself to misinterpretation sometimes.
The way I’m interpreting and ruling that, is that the request itself is ok, considering theres a whole side thread linked re: the EULA violation of actually linking it to hard currencies.
If the request is fufilled with a hard currency link, it would be removed.
If it’s fufilled solely as a soft currency / inv sync, I’d let it stand.
If I created an inventory transfer plugin that various survival servers could use and then a server that allows you to sell your ingame items for virtual currency uses the plugin, according to the eula’s “literal” meaning that makes the whole thing not eula compliant anymore, even though that doesn’t make any sense. We’re supposed to be protecting against Pay To Play, not Ways To Play.
Yeah, EULA is indeed a pretty gray area. Best bet is to ask them directly, but note the EULA is currently under scrutiny for not defining very well the modded/vanilla servers. I guess in a sense, they went way too broad and purposely vague. That it makes sense or not however, is less of the debate than the actual read of it.
Fairly certain they intend on amending it, once they figure out the difference between vanilla and modded servers - as it stands, it’s too vague. Of course, the whole EULA thing was controversial to begin with.
I hope they amend it well around the sections pertaining to “soft currency”. I’d like to see cross server economies that are never touched by actual money technically allowed more than technically not.
Well yeah. As it stands (at least from my understanding), even server networks that sync in rewards/vouchers/money could fall into the soft currency clause, which is mind-boggling.