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.

Comments

Online resembles real life more every day

[greywar]

Some games are just plain more like real life every day.

Re:Online resembles real life more every day

[Ayaress]

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.

Good

[vijaya_chandra]

It's good to have someone non-anonymous that you can sue for the spam you get

All your spam are belong to us

This is outrageous!

[Anonymous Coward]

This outrageous!

PS: Check out this neat website...

Funny Pictures!

Heh

[GigsVT]

So this "game" is to exercise those skills gained from years of hidden goatse.cx link posting, and to trick people into going to their ad-filled site.

At least if people have an outlet, maybe they won't post so many hidden goatse links. :)

Re:Heh

[{8_8}]

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 connection was refused.

[FooAtWFU]

Well, it seems that their server is down. I guess they got a few too many people clicketyclickclicking on the links. I can't say I'm displeased.

Note also that this is linkspam, as opposed to emailspam. Not that this makes it ethical or anything...

Not news, exactly.

[Incoherent07]

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.

Re:Not news, exactly.

[Lehk228]

just set up your server to mutate any outwar links into a link to a page containing hundreds of frames, each containing an outwar-server hosted image in order to suck up their bandwidth. salt on a leach.

Lame game

[scumdamn]

This is the crappiest thing I've ever seen. I mean, now not only do we have professional spammers innundating us with massive amounts of lame vi4gr4 but now every cretinous AOLer who plays this game will be telling all his friends "j00 have too see these funny pictures!!! Their great!"
If any of my friends managed to get a single power point from me I would rag on them for the rest of their short, pathetic lives. Every time they logged into their email they'd receive a deluge of the worst, most heinous spam and goatse links.

They left out a step

[Daetrin]

Step 1: Set up a sneaky and misleading links so you can trick your "friends" repeatedly to go to some stupid site for your benefit.
Step 2: "Send your friends the link" ... "they will have no idea it is going to bring them to your secret link page. You tricked them again!"
Step 3: Profit!!! (well, kind of anyways)
Step 4: Wonder why you have no friends anymore.

Uh, PHP + MySQL + Slashdot = dead server.

[EnronHaliburton2004]

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.

From their gigantic logo banner on their website:

[Takeel]

"Now serving NO Adware and NO ActiveX pop-ups!"

So...is anyone *really* surprised after that?

HOWTO: Trick your friends! -- How juvenile!

[Asprin]

Wow, a whole page on how to trick your friends into looking at ads. Good luck getting them to read you emails ever again! (Of course, it sounds like nobody over 16 plays this game, so the target audience is probably pretty gullible.)

I suggest we really fuck up the game.

[Dark Lord Seth]

By writing a script that will access a random referer ID. Considering it uses just plain standard HTTP, this wouldn't be much of an issue. Unfortunately, they got a system so that you can only click one of their damned links every 5 minutes, but I'm sure some rudementary IP spoofing will get through that. Ethical? No. Legal? Not really. Justified? Very.

Fight fire with fire.

Re:I suggest we really fuck up the game.

[maddugan]

Pick just one patsy.

Choose a player who sounds the most clueless from their forums. If they suddenly become the most powerful player what does any of the other players have to gain from continuing to play?

Rinse and repeat until the top players are replaced with all patsies.

Re:Not rocket science

[Dark Nexus]

RTFA, they explain how to make that either not appear, or appear as something else.

This is not technically a spam policy violation.

[StrongAxe]

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.

I get it...

[dmayle]

Oh my, I finally get it! Roland Piquepaille is playing Outwar! ;)

uh

[TheBot]

This is completly old news. Many, MANY people have been doing this for a long time. Geez, welcome to 1999.

Not surprising, referral based games encourage it.

[WiredOni]

I am not surprised at this announcement, people have been spamming these links through various online forums for quite some time now. They do absolute noting to fix this spamming problem, and their so called "anti-spam" policy is a joke.

The only way to succeed in these "games" is to get the most clicks, and to accomplish this you have to spam your link through various sites. Also these sites tend to offer prizes as an incentive for people to play and spam.

If they really wanted to kill spamming they would use a confirm system that only logs clicks after the link clicker registers to play. Of course that would greatly reduce the numbers of people clicking, viewing the site and its advertisements, would make it harder for the spammers to get anywhere, and pretty much kill the only fun thing about these so called games.

That is why sites like this love the referral based system, and set them up in their favor. They like this because they are able to blame the spammer and claim no responsibility for the spam, while on the side encouraging and helping people to do this abuse. Other fun things they can do with a referral system is can claim that they killed a spammer, only to transfer them to a new account or kill it till the heat dies off. Most sites like this allow the spammer to sing back up without any problems. They can also chose to ignore the abuse reports and allow the spammer to keep at it.

So it is easy to see why they do this, if they had to do confirmations through signups their game wouldn't last very long. The only way to get those clicks to their site and people to continue playing is by allowing spamming.

Re:Take 'em in Hand

[realdpk]

Wouldn't it be nice if Slashdot could do something like that for the free{ipod,flatscreen,colonoscopy}.com sites?

Outwar vs. Outwars

[Doc Hopper]

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.

Re:Take 'em in Hand

[DAldredge]

No, most of those are in the sigs and you can turn the display of those off.

Spam Games

[JavaLord]

These spam games are utterly worthless. A friend asked me to play Kings of Chaos which works the same as outwar with her for a little while. She kept telling me "Try it, you will like it". Bascially, the more clicks you get on your link, the larger your "army" growns and you gain more gold. But you can only click the link once a day. Most of the players on there have "buddy click lists" and just sit around clicking each others links all day.

Anyway, to make my army grow, I posted a few links here on slashdot, and also on the USENET. Within a day I had 800 soldiers (clicks) much to the amazment of my friend. I quit playing after that.

Several people here on slashdot said they reported me, but my account was never cancelled, nor was I warned. These games are nothing but spam factories and they have no regard for their users spamming their links all over.