Gifting Rules - Development Log #472

Michi talks about last week's release and the rules of PRO license time gifting.

Michi (molp)

We released the PRO license time gifting features last week. As usual, you can find the release notes in the forums.

It took a bit longer than I expected to integrate my work with the API endpoint on the backend side that Martin provided. Testing the feature turned out to be tricky as well, as we don't have a staging or test environment for all backend systems. I had to resort to using two of my test accounts, buying them a proper PRO license and test the feature. Luckily, I could do that on the Prosperous Universe test server, as it uses the same account backend as the production one. After finishing the tests, I disabled gifting on the test server, because I don't want players to test the gifting feature on the test server only to notice that their PRO time on the production systems changed as well.

During the weekend, a discussion around the limits and rules of the license gifting emerged, and I want to this week's devlog to clarify some questions.

The first question that came up was if it is allowed to trade PRO license time gifts with resources from outside the game, for example, money, cryptocurrencies and so on. The answer is a simple no. In our ToS in §3.7 we state:

The user is not permitted to sell, rent, or transfer their account, virtual currency balance, premium features or any other virtual game items to a third party or to transcribe those things to someone else’s name [..]

The second question is similar, but refers to in-game items, e.g. is it allowed to trade PRO license time gifts with in-game money, contracts, items and so on. This surely is more of a gray area, but we want to be clear though: it is not permitted to exchange PRO license gifts for in-game valuables.

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, which we don’t think are 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 hope that clears it up, if not, let us know!

As always, we'd love to hear what you think: join us on Discord or the forums!

Happy trading!