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Online Game Encouraging Spam
An anonymous reader writes "Outwar.com (an online game) has posted instructions on how to spam their unique link using underhanded and fraudulent techniques such as misleading URLs in forums and emails." Evidently by having people click on their link, players gain in-game power. These tips seem to directly contradict their stated spam policy. Shady.
Outwar has been doing this for a long time... various sites with similar demographics (for example, http://www.newgrounds.com/) have had to deal with the issue of spamming Outwar links for years. In most of those places it's bannable, or whatever the equivalent is.
Unfortunately, there's really no way to police something like this... a game that's designed such that the more people you can get to click on your links, the better you do. All you can really do is try to keep people from posting them.
This is my sig. There are many others like it, but this one is mine.
So the purpose of the game is to get people to click on your links. Each page is a PHP page which makes an MySQL query.
I dare say that being put on Slashdot will bring the server to it's knees.
FAQ
The purpose of outwar is to develop your character by gaining power and earning money.
How do I gain power? Every time someone clicks on your secret link, your character will gain power. Try placing your secret link somewhere people will see it; such as in your profile, away message, or a web page.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
The game involves getting people to click on the link once every 24 hours for as long as possible, but this isn't the ultimate goal. I played an Outwar variant called Kings of Chaos for a bit, so the following is based on that game.
The actual game works like this: More clickage = more gold = more stuff = higher rank. Every unique click gets you one soldier for your army, and every soldier increases the amount of cash you earn every turn. More gold lets you outfit your army with better armor and weapons. Better armor lets you defend against attacks by other players, which lets you keep your turn-based gold longer. Better weapons let you overcome other players' defense and steal their turn-based gold. The more gold you have, the more stuff you can buy so you can attack and defend better so you can get/keep more gold, ad nauseum. Your ranking is determined by the amount of weapons and armor you have.
As you can imagine, the game is dominated by players who get the most people to click their links. There is little to no actual skill involved beyond that of hidden link spammage or social networking. Unless you hook up with one of the player alliances who trade clicks or have a popular website where you can post your link, the game turns you into a link whore that goes around spamming "PLES CLECK LINK KTHX."
RTFA, they explain how to make that either not appear, or appear as something else.
Dark Nexus
"Sanity is calming, but madness is more interesting."
The whole point of Outwars is effectively the same as the point of spam, too. The idea is that you get people to click your link. More clicks=higher score. It's always been exactly like spam, just without the penis enlargement (or should I say pe..n''is en'lar;ge.ment) and such.
These tips seem to directly contradict their stated spam policy.
As sleazy as I think this is, it does not technically violate their anti-SPAM policy which forbids sending unsolicited e-mails, and posting off-topic messages to newsgroups.
The page in question just suggests that you add the links to existing messages, not that you create new ones just to promote the links. They specifically tell you not to post messages to random message boards, and that mass e-mails are considered SPAM.
Of course, I would never buy a game that promotes "how to trick your friends", but that's just me.
Oh man, but do they do it. About a year ago, the AIM chatrooms still somewhat existed, and I went into Gaming or Computing chat every now and then.
Once outwar started, spam came left and right. People set up bots, and reporting them didn't do any good. Outwar does not care for their own spam policy.
After a while, I stopped chatting on AIM. The spam was unbearable. When there weren't porn bots, there were outwar or "Kings of Chaos" bots. Sometimes they tricked people by setting up a redirecion link, or threaten to only stop if their link was clicked.
Ugh. I HATE Outwar.
This is completly old news. Many, MANY people have been doing this for a long time. Geez, welcome to 1999.
Flat Screen TV for F
Web page hit counters aside, I remember having a similar game spammed in one of the board I frequently went to. Someone set up an account to post the link to a game just like the outwars one. This one involved vampires, you being bitten by one, becoming a vampire, and recruiting people through clicks.
While things at first were not that bad, this particular poster kept spamming it, trying to hide the real intent of the link by claiming it was to something related to the site, and even signing up new accounts to spam the forum. We tried to get the site runner to do something about this potential problem, but they ignored it and had a similar "don't spam, nudge nudge wink wink" type disclaimer.
Since the runner didn't want do anything about the spamming, those of us who posed there had a lot of fun screwing with their system. Fun things include filling their "victims" part with names like "FUCK_OFF_SPAMMERS" and "*Referral's Name* Eats Shit," seeing how much crap we could feed their system, seeing if we could break their code(which was easy since their programming was very shitty(i.e. they didn't put any boundaries on character input)), etc.
I also recall that newgrounds had a similar problem, a lot of people were making flash movies that would just open their outwars referral link. Newgrounds solution was to ban any one doing stunts like this, and people who spammed outwars html links. I haven't gone back there, so I don't know how well they combated that.
Allow me to take a moment to clarify: there's a huge difference between the game under discussion, called Outwar and the jetpack-based shooter (ala Starship Troopers, the book) called Outwars, which predated Outwar by half a decade. Singletrac the company is now defunct, but were a bunch of game developers having a great time making great games. Unfortunately, Outwars wasn't one of those great games. But it was a pretty fun game that didn't involve spam :)
Disclaimer: I'm listed twice in the credits for Outwars, once as the network admin, and once as a model. The guy we'd planned on shooting didn't show up, so they stuck overweight, slightly-German-looking me in instead.
Matthew P. Barnson
I learn what I think when I read what I write