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Blizard Sues Virtual Gold Seller

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the long-time-coming dept.

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."

7 of 242 comments (clear)

  1. Anti-spam by nekozid · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Anti-spam by Broken+Bottle · · Score: 5, Informative

      they also blocked trial accounts from being able to send whispers to people who haven't sent them a whisper first or have the trail account name on their friends list. Also, they throttled the rate at which people can send whispers and te amount of text that can be sent per whisper.

      A lot of stuff that will make a spammer's life more difficult.

    2. Re:Anti-spam by LocoMan · · Score: 4, Informative

      And when you report a spammer, it ignores all messages coming from the entire account until you log off. That prevents a spammer from creating an alt, spamwhisper everyone, delete it, create another alt, repeat.

  2. Re:Hang on for a second... by mikkelm · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  3. Re:Hang on for a second... by xpccx · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  4. Re:Interesting. by Mr+EdgEy · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  5. Gold Farming is Big Business by kabz · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.