MMOG Currency Seller Owns Media Network ?

The interview on Okratas we mentioned yesterday was mostly funny. Game currency seller IGE responded to the honest (if ham fisted) questions of a reporter with harsh marketroid speak. A reporter at Warcry responded with his own reactions, expressing publicly some of the distaste the average MMOG player has for IGE. Since then threads started last week in various online communities have started to appear on online news sites, shedding some more light on uncomfortable realities about IGE. Namely, that the currency seller apparently owns gaming media outlet OGaming. Read on for more.

Ogaming is a hub site much like Warcry, with a sub-site about most of the major Massively Multiplayer Games out there. Some enterprising /whois work by the original author of the WowCensus thread led him to realize that OGaming was registered with the same street address used for IGE's New York Office. OGaming's registration information was updated on the 10th, and now displays the name and address of a proxy registration service. Further damning is the thought that at one point a page on the Ogaming site claimed to own Thottbot.com, a universally respected and utilized tool for World of Warcraft in-game information.

The page that once claimed this (an advertising page) is now blank, with the words "under construction" displayed there. The Internet Archive's last update for ogaming.com is this time last year, so there is no way to check on the authenticity of that claim. If it is true it's disquieting to say the least. Thottbot is a massive database of in-game quest, item, character, and drop frequency information. Thottbot's information was gained through the goodwill and work of World of Warcraft players. The popular UI enhancement, Cosmos, included a plugin that sent information from the user's playing experience back to Thottbot. This included locations of enemies, the types of loot dropped, items the character had, and other specific details. While Thottbot claims to only keep information that is pertinent to other players, with the revelation that they may be owned by the disreputable IGE their trustworthiness is out the window.

This revelation didn't stay quiet for long, with MMOG sites CorpNews, Grimwell.com, and Allakhazam all creating discussions of their own about this weighty topic.

The authenticity of this story is hard to prove or disprove at this point, with the OGaming.com and Thottbot.com domains having a proxy listed under their contact information. But if it's hard to believe that IGE would go to the trouble of owning a media outlet and a popular plugin, think again. Garthilk writes "Cindy Bowens, community manager for Sigil Games online and Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, outlines their stance on secondary market items, and how they deal with IGE. Most interesting is the fact that IGE approached Sigil, and had offered to cut Sigil in on the revenue that IGE might make in the future."

Update: 02/15 20:07 GMT by Z : Drey pointed out in the comments that, at least for the time being, Google still has a cache of the page listing Thottbot as an Ogaming site.

Comments

"Page under construction"

[Drey]

Google's cache still has the page which is now mysteriously blank.

http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:s7q2fzgQjeM J: www.ogaming.com/data/2115~VIPClub.php+thottbot+oga ming&hl=en

Re:Non-player

[Qzukk]

Well, lets show a hypothetical situation that will cover who they are what they do and why they're bad.

Let's say that to earn a certain rank in Game X, you have to get a special item Blizzrt's Tail in order to prove your strength and valor, yadda yadda. Obviously, you get this by killing Blizzrt and taking its tail. The problem is that there is only one Blizzrt in the game world at any one time, so it becomes more a test of "waiting your turn" than of strength or valor.

Now, what IGN does is called "farming". They get 30 or 40 players to all stand around in the cave that Blizzrt lives in (where it appears every time its killed, this is its spawn point). Every time Blizzrt appears, they immediately start to kill it, and take the tail for themselves. Over and over, without respect for the other people who need to kill it in order to advance.

But thats ok, if you can't get a sword in edgewise to score a tail for yourself, the IGN crew will be more than happy to sell it to you on ebay for real money, since they seem to have just "stumbled across" a few hundred extra. Now getting that tail isn't about patience or valor, just about shelling out enough dough on an auction site somewhere.

Now whether this is bad or not depends on how much you care. If you say "its just a game" then consider it as frustrating as waiting in line at say... McDonalds. You have 11 kids in front of you, and they think its real cool to keep you from getting your food by ordering a glass of water, getting it, then getting their buddy in 11th place to let them cut in front for another glass. Unless of course you slip them a buck to get to the front of the line.