With the recent release of the license gifting feature, there has been a fair amount of discussion on Discord about whether it constitutes pay-to-win, whether accepting real or virtual payment for license time is permitted by the Ts&Cs, etc. My feeling is that the devs’ written statements on this (mainly the Ts&Cs) are a vague at best, and I think it would be good if everyone knew where they stood with this feature. So I wanted to ask if the team could make a clear statement:
Is it permitted for two players to enter into an agreement to exchange gifted PRO license time, for in-game resources such as materials, cash or promised gameplay behaviour [eg promising to provide shipping or governing services]?
Is it permitted for two players ot enter into an agreement to exchange gifted PRO license time, for out-game resources such as real money, crypto, etc?
I definitely take it from the consistent use of the term “gift” that the devs have no interest in enforcing or arbitrating any such agreements: if Alice promises you license time and you send her a million AIC, but she reneges, that’s a social problem between Alice and Bob, not a game problem. But that’s subsidiary to the question of whether such agreements are allowed.
Since we received many questions regarding the PRO license gifting, I’ll try to clarify this here.
No, this is not permitted. The ToS ($3.7) clearly states that it is not allowed to pay with real world currency for any in-game materials, items, and so on. This includes the PRO license gifts.
This is what most inquiries were about. Given the ToS, this seems like a grey area. We want to be clear though: it is not permitted to exchange PRO license gifts for in-game valuables (money, materials, …).
We had EVE-style License Trading on the roadmap since the inception of this game, but decided to remove it in favor of the “lighter” PRO license time gifting that we released last week. License Trading introduces a few negative effects into the game, that we don’t think is right for Prosperous Universe. We don’t want players with a big real-world purse to be able to buy in-game advantages from other players.
Instead the PRO license time gifting is really just what the name suggests: An easy way to gift a fellow player some PRO time.
We will update the guidelines and handbook accordingly.
I don’t see why the second ruling was necessary. A market for this is already prevented by the fact that every account can just receive 1 month gift and then never again.
So at most, each big player can give one new player a few millions for 1 month and then the big player is locked out forever. It does allow though a high supporter new player to sell 10 gifts for a few millions and quickly advance in game, … if they can find the old players who have not received a gift yet.
