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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."
You create this new online world, and pretty soon it's just as crappy as the real one - full of cheaters using money instead of skill to win, ads everywhere constantly nagging you to buy stuff, and anonymity being stripped away in hopes of curbing irresponsible behavior. Whatever happened to cyberspace as a virtual utopia?
Hang on here... People PAY to play this game online, and they get spam? Spam comes via email because nobody owns the SMTP/POP system, per se. But this is a closed environment. One company owns the infrastructure here. There should be *zero* spam.
What kind of idiots put up with that? Could it be that it's a subset of the millions of people pay to watch commercials on cable TV, too? I can't really wrap my head around this one.
I don't respond to AC's.
They're always surprised and disappointed when reality enters...
Deleted
Except I gave up my account because of all the gold spammers. So Blizzard is really trying to re-coop the money they are losing due to these sites.
-- Should there be smoke coming out of my CPU?
It would be nice if they could also take measures tor educe the incentive for these spammers. Basically, WoW's economy rewards players for doing things they don't enjoy, farming herbs, ore, power levelling, grinding the same mob over and over... etc. That is why people will actually pay in order to not do so. If the economy instead made fun activities much more profitable than the boring ones it would reduce the amount of spammers ( thou probably not remove them completely ) and also make the game itself a lot more fun to play. Basically, running a bot program or paying someone to do the same thing over and over should not be rewarded by the game mechanics. Playing the game with other people, completing quests, winning PvP battles etc... should be the main source of wealth in the game. As long as Blizzard insists to have the economy based on "kill monster X 500 times and hope item Y drops" you will get problems with bots and spammers.
If demand for these services is so high, I'm guessing there might be something wrong with the game :P
So you might be wondering, where does a spammer get an account? Most people think they use trial accounts, or they buy accounts. Of course, both are usable. Trial accounts are locked down for many things, but they aren't locked down to the local 'say' channel.
Spammers also get accounts in other ways too. People who purchase power-leveling services, for example, are at risk of allowing their account to be compromised to a spammer. People who go to websites claiming they have WoW exploits/cheats are at risk of using a keylogger and compromising their account. Then there's stolen credit cards and false account numbers. Four words solve the problem: Ban. By. Credit. Card.
This, coupled with the inability of trial accounts to send tells (or hell, segregating trial accounts onto trial servers), would provide a cheap, technical fix for an annoyingly organic problem. As far as people getting hit by keyloggers by trying to download cheat macros (such as automated mob farming or other activities barred by the EULA) or people whose accounts are compromised by "power-levelling services", I'm afraid I don't have much sympathy. A ban by credit card, necessitating a nice chat with a Blizzard rep to get the ban removed, would both heavily inconvenience farmers while providing an incentive for actual players to police the activity on their account ("Timmy, you got the entire damned family banned again because you were screaming 'shitcock' in Trade").
Actually, I've always been curious as to how people justify buying gold or using power-levelling services. The argument I usually hear is that they are too busy with a job to level a character and "just want to play". Presumably these people wouldn't join a tennis league and then demand to use an oversize racquet because they're too busy with their job to learn to play skillfully. Would they think it acceptable to buy points in some sort of sports fantasy league from another player because they don't have the time to properly manage their team?
If you're going to play a game with a lot of other people, why not play it on equal terms? And if you don't have as much time to devote to the game as others, then either accept that with good grace or move on to a different game for which you do have the time. I suppose that shortcuts, cheating, and griefing are an inevitable side-effect a large crowd of people playing, but it's really bloody annoying!
P.P.S. I'm doing Science and I'm still alive.
I have no idea who runs this site, but I wanted to see how legit they were. So I sent them a small amount of money through paypal and, lo and behold, 30 minutes later, the gold was in my mailbox. I figure at least they aren't just scamming people completely.
Congratulations. You are now part of the problem.
Where exactly do you think they're getting the gold? Do you think they are legitimately running characters to high levels and then shipping the gold around to characters whose players pay for it? That would take time and effort and would not be an efficient way to make money.
Last I knew, most of the gold came from hacking accounts and stealing it. It's a lot faster to shard and sell off the inventories of multiple characters than it is to go out and earn the money. If it were easy enough to earn the money, people wouldn't be buying it in the first place.
The CGFs people joke about (you know, the ones that run their characters up, speak poor English, and then farm all day long) may make some of that, but not much... Several days to get to the point where you can farm, then maybe three drops an hour for 7-10g each? Pitiful compared to hacking just one account. Probably why I haven't seen them around much--that business model died out.
So next time you think about doing "research" to see if a goldseller is legit, don't bother. They might not have ripped you off, but that's probably because they were too busy screwing over someone else at the time.
So next time someone you know gets their account hacked and all their epics sharded, you can feel really good about yourself. In your own way, you contributed to that just a little bit.
The demand is there. The desire to make money is too. The combination works well.
TLF
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
I know I am casually condemning thousands of third world country workers to sudden unemployment, but I don't care.
The Chinese (who are the main nationality in question here I think) need to be given a very strong incentive not to see gold farming as a legitimate form of employment...because it isn't. Civil lawsuits on their own are unlikely to be enough; what Blizzard should really do IMHO is petition the Chinese government to conduct enforcement within their own country.
Gold farming isn't any more beneficial to the Chinese people themselves than it is to gamers. Apart from anything else, it sends a message to whichever businesspeople that are running these companies that Chinese employees are willing to be exploited; that they are willing to work long hours in poor conditions and be paid the absolute bare minimum required in order for them to have an incentive to do the work. The Chinese government isn't doing itself any favours by allowing the companies in question to exist, either. The companies in question are almost always owned by foreign nationals, and every last dollar of whatever revenue they make will leave China, if it ever enters the country at all. This does nothing for the Chinese economy.
I can understand Chinese workers wanting to make a living for themselves and their families as much as any other people on the planet, but I also feel that they should look for ways in which they can have a genuinely beneficial employment opportunity, rather than something which is exploitative and harmful to them simply because the people running said companies are willing to exploit these workers' own beliefs that they do not deserve better jobs. They do deserve better, and we as gamers deserve better than what they are doing to the games we play.
Gamers and the gold farmers are not actually on opposite sides here; the reality is that both groups are being screwed in this scenario by the usual plutocrats.
It takes a good deal of time to get a character to level 70. Even for people who are good at it and spend lots of time on it, we aren't talking a one day thing, we are talking at least a couple weeks of really determined effort. Now to have any effect, you'd need a ton of body guards, like hundreds probably. It isn't hard for a single PvP guild to get 20-40 people on short notice to go after someone, and these people would be targets for everyone. Also, you don't need to kill all the guards, just keep them occupied while one person gets one spell off on the low level person. So this is all fine you say? Ok, except that Blizzard will no doubt ban the guards as readily as the spammer. Then you are again stuck needing to level up more characters. The people who attack you can do it at any time, each time it happens, you get all your characters banned and have to start over.
Global PvP is problematic for other reasons, but gold sellers wouldn't be able to get around the problem by hiring body guards. Remember: Developers aren't the government, they are gods in the virtual world. While they aren't all seeing, all knowing gods like the Christan god, they are still extremely powerful gods like the Roman gods. The gold sellers can't hire defense against them, as they simply remove people from the world and shut down accounts permanently.