Killing Floor 2 EULA threatens to revoke licenses for trolls

Killing Floor 2 EULA threatens to revoke licenses for trolls

Online cheaters and “cyber bullies” could lose access to the single-player game, too.

Kyle Orland – Apr 24, 2015 2:25 pm | 128

The corpse on the right just had his license revoked for "cyber bullying."

In the never-ending battle between online gaming’s trolls and the moderators that try to make servers harassment-free, the developers at Tripwire Interactive are threatening to bring out a rarely used weapon. According to the game’s EULA, when players are found cheating, griefing, or “cyber bullying,” Tripwire “will revoke your CD key and ban you from the KF2 servers and tell your mom!”

Parental threats aside, banning problematic players is one of the most common punishments for bad behavior in online games. But Tripwire’s threat extends past the online portion to a full revocation of the license for the game, single-player included. “Your license will automatically terminate, without notice, and you will have no right to play KF2 or any KF2 Mods against other players or make any other use of KF2,” the EULA warns. “End of story.”

Technically, the legalese in many EULAs include similar language giving the publisher the right to revoke access to a purchased license for many different reasons. Valve can ban entire Steam accounts that violate its subscriber agreement, and WoW players have lost access to their accounts after using bots. Federal courts have upheld these kinds of EULA provisions in the past, too, affirming that you merely own a revocable “license” for many games you “own.”

But Tripwire is surprisingly upfront and straightforward about threatening to take away access to the entirety of Killing Floor 2 for players who engage in cheating, “‘griefing,’ racist bigotry, sexism or any other forms of ‘cyber bullying,’” or players that operate servers that enable the same.

Steam threads discussing the EULA have already garnered thousands of comments between them, with players irate about publisher overreach matched roughly evenly with players lauding the no-nonsense, troll-busting policy.

Tripwire Vice President Alan Wilson waded into the argument himself in his own Steam Community thread, suggesting that this game-revoking power will be reserved for the worst, most serial offenders. “[The EULA clause] is there so that, if at some point in the future, some individual gets utterly out of control and is being abusive to enough thousands of people to come to our attention – we can actually take action,” Wilson writes. “People are worried that we can “take your game away”. Well, yes, we can. We’ve sold around 10 million games over the last 10 years,” Wilson writes. “We have, I believe, taken away games from about 2 people. One of those was later convicted as a hacker in court.”

Rather than removing these trolls from the game altogether, we think Tripwire might have been better off following the lead of Microsoft and Rockstar in sequestering problem players in their own servers, where they can only grief each other. While not being able to play a game you bought is definitely a strict punishment, being forced to play a game with only the most vile parts of the Internet is arguably much worse.