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."

Comments

Result

[milo_a_wagner]

From the comments under TF'A', it seems as though this has had a massive impact. With the filing of a Federal lawsuit, perhaps we'll be sending another, louder message that these nuisances are no more acceptable in virtual universes than they are in ours.

Re:Wherever you go, there you are

[AlephNot]

There's no such thing as a utopia--real or virtual. Suffering is the kick in the pants that forces us to become better people. A utopia is a world where no one has any incentive to become a better person (since there's no suffering), in which case, I'm glad no utopia can exist.

Cold-hearted? Sure. But so is reality.

My Own Research

[The Living Fractal]

I've been playing WoW since beta.

Up until now, since the release of WoW, gold spam has followed a nearly expontential curve. At first it was almost zero. Slowly over time it built up. Recently it exploded and you couldn't go five minutes without getting a whisper from some character named something like "Fahzhizdaj" asking you to go to their website and buy gold or powerleveling etc. After patch 2.1.0 spam has not disappeared. It has morphed into different forms. Instead of receiving private messages from spammers they have resorted to different means. Now you cannot run through the major cities without getting bombarded with local messages from the "say" or "yell" channels.

This means that the gold spammer literally had to run a character from the starting town, at low level, to the major city. While not difficult, it certainly added an extra step to the spammers' setup. And once that person spams in a major city they will be reported much faster than if a million players all got individual private messages. People in the game in a common area will communicate with each other about stuff like this. The spammers can't possibly last long.

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. So camping a trial account spammer at the auction house in a major city will net a pretty big payoff in terms of impact vs. time spent, especially since the trial account is free.

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. The actual numbers on all of these are impossible to determine for me. But nevertheless, these are some ways the spammers do it.

The real crux of the issue though is that spammers, and more generally, gold selling, wouldn't even exist if people didn't buy the services! Because demand is so high it is not reasonable to expect in-game ads to disappear completely. But what Blizzard has done is definitely a giant step in the right direction -- IF you aren't one of the large minority of people who have actually purchased gold. If you are, you probably liked the spam sometimes, because usually it provides up-to-the-minute price info and increases competition between the sellers.

You might be wondering: does one run the risk of getting scammed purchasing gold from these people?

I didn't know the answer to that, so, I looked into it deeper. I went to their sites. There were numerous ones advertised but, after getting deeper into each site, eventually I was taken to a specific site almost every time: gold4power.com Of the eight or so websites I visited, every one of them led me to this one site. And it wouldn't amaze me if Peons4Hire was actually behind this one.

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.

Anyway, spam is bad, yada yada. Get used to it, or download a mod like SpamSentry and put a stop to it.

TLF

Re:My Own Research

[arivanov]

All that it will do will be the spammers to "hire" bodyguards to the more valuable yellers and raise prices. If the have enough gold to offer for sale and enough peons to farm it sparing some resources to develop some "security staff" is not going to even show up on their balance sheets. And there is little your level 50 orc lord can do if he is simultaneously backstabbed by multiple characters of similar level.

Re:Wherever you go, there you are

[gilroy]

Just to be clear: You're saying something like: People are rotten. Because people are rotten, real life is harsh. Because real life is harsh, we need to become better people (to reduce the harshness, I suppose). Utopias would imply an existence without that motivation, so we'd all stay rotten people. Hence, it's good that no utopias do or can exist.

But... the point of a utopia is exactly that people aren't rotten (in the utopia). It's not about easy living -- natural disasters can still occur, people still die, etc. It's about everyone working together for the net greater good. It's about people not competing in a life that's nasty, brutish, and short. So if a utopia did exist, its inhabitants wouldn't need to better themselves.

I agree that utopias don't exist in the Universe we inhabit. But I'm not sure I buy the idea that the impossibility of a utopia is a good thing. It sounds a lot like rationalization to me.

Side snark: Of course "There's no such thing as a utopia--real or virtual". The name was chosen by Sir Thomas More specifically from the Greek that means "no place" or "place that cannot exist". :)

Greeat

[Anonymous Coward]

Great! So now the large guilds that make the market unusable for anyone in a small org. Yea fuck the little guy and let the big guys get richer.

Untill blizard fixed the problems with the markets on some severs being runined by large groups flooding the market, they should of left things how they were.

Re:Interesting.

[Decado]

As far as I am aware the legal situation is that Blizzard claim ownership of all the items/gold etc in WoW. By selling these items the gold sellers are basically selling Blizzards property which amounts to theft.

Fixing the Economy

[paleo2002]

I play WoW for over a year until I no longer had the time and money to committ to the game. (I'm still not quite over the withdrawal symptoms.) I've recently been playing around with Puzzle Pirates as an interesting time-waster and they've come up with a really interesting solution to the problem of buying game currency.

The problem with WoW is that you have people with time and skill, but not a lot of money. They hate people who buy gold because, to them, they're cheating. Then, you have people with money but not a lot of time and/or skill. They're willing to spend $50 on gold that might have taken days or weeks to collect in-game. Blizzard wants to keep the former happy AND they want to get as much money from the latter as possible.

Puzzle Pirates has what they call "doubloon servers" that utilize two types of currency. In-game "pieces of eight"(PoE) that you get from just playing the game, like gold in WoW. Doubloons are a special currency that you use to buy access to more advanced parts of the game, better clothing, equipment, etc. You can buy doubloons from Three Rings (game dev) directly for about $.20 to $.25 a piece depending on volume. Or, you can trade PoE's for doubloons and vice-versa in the game with players.

If Blizzard implemented something like this in WoW, it would essentially legalize buying gold, but it would eliminate spamming and other account abuses. Say, for example, you have an epic mount. Blizzard implements "Epic Feed" that can be purchased for $.20 a day by anyone. The people who have money to burn can buy extra feed and sell it at the AH. People who balk at the idea of spending extra money on the game can buy feed at the AH. The people who can afford neither probably don't have an epic mount.

Re:Fixing the Economy

[vux984]

Legalizing selling gold doesn't prevent the real world economy from interfering with the virtual world. It just remvoes the black market element.

And it has the same effect as legalizing drugs. Sure the street corner dealers are gone, and people stop smuggling it accross the border, and some of the violent crime goes away (and those are all 'good things'), but the heroine junkies are still going to inject their rent money and end up on the streets where they'll smash your window for spare change and pawn-able items to get their next fix (now at the 7-11). So legalization isn't really a 'real solution'.

And the organized crime elelement simply morphs, it doesn't disappear. There's always a black market for something. Legalize currency sales, and peons4hire just shifts focus to acquiring rare items, and power-levelling. What are you going to do in response to that? Put all rares into vending machines so anyone can get them? Provide a prompt at login "What level do you want to be today?" with a price list? They could I suppose... and it might even work as a game idea... but it wouldn't be WoW anymore.

There is NOTHING wrong with a GAME having arbitrary rules that dictate how you progress. When you choose to play the game you implicitly agree to play by the rules or face being kicked out of the game.

WoW should -aggressively- target both buyers and sellers of services, ban accounts, ban credit cards. Maybe even issue temporary bans to ip addresses (say 4-12 hours) [yes some ISPs NAT and banning an ip could affect hundreds of people -- so don't filter those ISPs - its not rocket science, and it will work for enough cases to be worth doing] Toss free trial accounts onto a trial server (let them server transfer when they buy the game).

Make currency trackable. (like real currency, and record transactions). Write algorithms to watch for 'suspicious behaviour' like accounts sending large sums of gold to brand new characters, which immediately transfer it to other new characters.

Modify the game rules so that low level characters simply cannot possess large sums of gold. And limit how much gold they can transfer to other characters per hour in discrete transactions. Limit the number of transactions all players can accept per hour. (To prevent a series of low level characters from each sending a small sum of money to one recipient... etc).

Basically, force the gold traders out of throwaway characters, and into characters that have to have some 'history', which can be tracked and profiled. Sure there's nothing stopping them from power levelling up characters for a single transaction but it will be comparatively easy for blizzard to track them.

The point is, there are a lot of things they can do to put a real dent in people breaking the rules if they really wanted to, but a certain (and profitable) amount of players -like- breaking those rules... and blizzard is a business first and foremost... they only crackdown to the extent that the 'problem' starts costing them "too many" subscribers.

And in that light I'd like to see MMORPG publishers create zero-tolerance servers, and more relaxed servers.

It genuinely bothers me to play on servers where farming is going one and some of my fellow players have bought their way up. It cheapens my own sense of accomplishment, and frankly I don't like associating with people who lack the integrity to play by the rules. I would like servers dedicated to people like me. I'd even welcome additonal mechanics rules like capped progress per hour to mitigate power-levelling (without affecting more relaxed 'realistic' play), etc. I'd be prepared to sacrifice some of my anomymity to gain access to that server. And to have limits on the number of IP addresses I can log in from within a time period, etc. And other measures to make the players more accountable.

Now, I'm not so arrogant as to expect everyone to play like this, and if one likes to buy gold or whatever, I don't mind them having a place to play, which is why I support running more relaxed servers too. I just don't have any interest in playing on the same server as people like this.

Re:Anti-spam

[ajanp]

I would think blocking the ability of trial accounts to initiate tells is what had the largest impact (so far). Most of the spam came in the form of mass whispers from companies like peons4hire that would contain a couple of lines about the gold/price/website and it was sent to everybody in the entire zone.

The person who originally sent the whisper would generally have a trial account, create a character with a random name (often including accents and ascii symbols), log in, send the mass number of tells, and the log out and delete the character, so they might only be logged on for no more than 30 seconds.

The trial accounts are free so they could be used to sent mass whispers w/o any fear of getting banned. By blocking the ability to trial account users to send tells, that alone cuts of the primary method of spamming people, because now they would be forced to open subscriptions which would include a significant investment considering the account is destined to be banned quickly.

Don't forget, there is a market for selling gold in a virtual economy. Gold spammers might be breaking Blizzard's TOS, but they are making money from it with absolutely no consequences. Blizzard certainly took steps to protect their users given you could expect an average of 2-3 gold spam tells in an hour, but I'm sure they will find another way to get their message across (after all, it's a business that rely's only on marketing and price).

This lawsuit really has nothing to do with seeking monetary gains from peons4hire. It's about deterrence and making peons4hire and all other gold selling companies aware that there are consequences for their actions. If they win their case, then it basically makes selling gold within WoW more expensive than continuing to break Blizzard's ToS and it will have a huge impact on that entire market.

Bottom line, as long as gold sellers can continue to profit, these companies will exist.

Re:Anti-spam

[Sandman1971]

That's incorrect. I'll try to find the link to the WoW forum post regarding this, but a Blue (Community Manager) confirmed that most of the reported spam came from paid accounts and not trial accounts. They were a combination of gold sellers purchased accounts and hacked accounts. Trial accounts have had whisper limitations for months.

Lets Hope They Sue Them Into the Ground...

[Phrogman]

I am not litigious by nature. But as I am playing SWG heavily again right now - and it is massively plagued by Credit Spammers - I am hoping intensely that if Blizzard takes the lead the rest of the industry will follow suit (as they have in pretty much every other regard sadly, with some exceptions), and sue the living **** out of the gold sellers. I know I am casually condemning thousands of third world country workers to sudden unemployment, but I don't care. The ratbags that run these businesses are in direct violation of the TOS/ROC for MMORPGs, and I would dearly like to see them nailed to the wall - possibly literally.

They systematically end up ruining games. Ok, so SWG has suffered an awful lot from the ravages of inept developers and designers over the past few years - its actually getting better now and approaching playable once more - but the area that has alwasy interested me was the player-driven economy. Most of my characters have been crafters. Over the past few years its been subject to gross inflation, and I suspect that the gold farmers that infest the planets like cockroaches are largely to blame. Its gotten to the point where players who are currently subscribed have lost all feel for how the economy ran in the past, and just post random prices for things (always high mind you) because the economy is so whacked out (a common item can vary from 100k credits to 12m credits easily. Mediocre quality resources are priced at 10-50 times what they used to sell for etc).

I was mayor of 2 cities in SWG (on Tarquinnas server) and had to /cityban the gold farmers a few times. I still regularly report them to the CSRs. They come back like cockroaches.

Now I have to report the AFK spammers that stand in front Mos Eisley Starport and spam an advertisement for their website literally every 5 seconds. Yes, you can turn off seeing AFK chat (a nice improvement), and you can /ignore the individual but since they will be back with a different name in an hour the later accomplishes nothing. Reporting them is useful enough, but I have a feeling the CSRs can't keep up with the reporting and I bet they are spending a lot of their time just banning trial accounts containing spammers. I hope they are forced to follow the lead of Blizzard again here and restrict the ability to broadcast, send, whisper etc.