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Blizard Sues Virtual Gold Seller
DaphneDiane writes "Blizzard announced that they are suing one of the heavily spamming gold sellers, Peons4hire. Peons4hire had recently been spamming players in World of Warcraft with multi-line messages advertising their power leveling and gold selling business. With the advent of the recently released 2.1.0 patch Blizzard made it easier to report and block these spammers. I've noticed a large decrease in spam while playing since the patch. It used to be that I would get nearly a dozen spams a night but I barely have seen any since."
For those of you who don't know what measures they took, there is now a report spam button and the servers filter out most of the messages.
The game needs a way for the player to communicate with other players.
Spam is unsolicited communication.
If you can't wrap your head around that.. well.. yeah.
It's not spam, as in unsolicited email. The game has a built in chat system for people to communicate and quest together. What they do is create a character with the 30-day free trial offers (my guess is they can't be tracked since there is no credit card). They then use macros/addons to harvest who's playing (character names) and send chat messages to all of them, advertising their website. They then delete the character and get another 30-day free trial offer and start again. What Blizzard has done is put in limitations so they can't do this anymore.
Does Blizzard have any real legal recourse here?
Violation of contract (EULA).
Digital Trespass (since they've been told not to come back).
Harassment
I'm sure a lawyer can find a better legal sounding way to say "being an obnoxious twit" than I can.
It's not 'a player'. Peons4hire and similar businesses have many players working to farm up and advertise the gold, if you've ever played WoW you'd know it's not just one account :p
NPR covered some of the human aspects of the gold farming story a while ago. Audio Link for your listening pleasure.
12 hours a day playing Warcraft, getting beaten up by higher level players. It's sounds like a pretty ugly life.
-- "It's not stalking if you're married!" My Wife.
That is "client side" It appears
Click the "Disable spam filter" and they will get through
-nick
The problem is that certain people are using either bots (AI players) or cheap labour (called gold farmers) to gather large amounts of gold, not for their own use, but to sell on to others.
This is against WoW policies, and will get your account banned.
It also impacts the game negatively; it distorts the game economy horribly, for one. The various sources of income (gathering various items, killing beasties and taking their stuff) become harder for genuine players, because the bots/farmers get there first. And you get less for them too, because the glut of farmed items drives the price down.
Meanwhile, the people who buy the gold spend it, generally on the more expensive and difficult-to-acquire items, which drives the prices for them up. So it's harder to make money in the first place, and harder to buy stuff with the gold you do get.
But of course the most irritating aspect by far is that in order to get customers, they spam the living heck out of players. This is astonishingly irksome.
To summarise the summary of the summary, gold sellers and buyers make the game less fun for everyone else.
Korvar the Fox!! www.korvar.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk