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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.
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."
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.
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