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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.
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.
Man wird am besten für seine Tugenden bestraft.
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.
What's wrong with "suing"?
Ok, that's an ambiguous one. "Suing" is probably ok. "Sueing" is UK English.
My guess is that they violate the licensing agreement you have to click through when you install the software. So like the AC posted, it's probably a civil case.
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.
I'm no legal expert, so I don't actually know if they have a legal reason for suing here. I'm sure there's something in the liscence agreement that prohibits advertisements, though. Regardless, they've banned the two practices (power-levelling and gold-selling) prior to this. Why not just ban the player? Unless this guy was far-and-away the mastermind of all spamming in WoW, I don't see much of a reason to take it beyond an account termination.
So that's where the missing Zs went. Give them back, scoundrel!
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
Neither the Cambridge Dictionary nor the Oxford Dictionary contain "sueing". Both do, however, list "suing". I think you got ahead of yourself.
They're always surprised and disappointed when reality enters...
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
Peons upset by the harsh treatment of "Peons For Hire" decided to stage a work stoppage and form a labor union. Officials at Blizzard had threaten to send the boys from South Park in to crush the union.
Deleted
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
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
Surely though, Blizzard winning damages from this company means that Blizzard has directly gained money from the selling of in-game "Gold" which is against their own EULA. Ironic eh?
GREAT!!! They finally get so that I can report with ease, oh wait, but now the drop down disappears just as fast as it appears. Can't they ever get it right?
This is Slashdot! Give me the latest gadget, bug, or OS project! This ain't english class so don't confuse the two!
IANAL, but if a person or company makes profit by selling virtual gold, depending on location, they'd probably need to declare it for taxes. Since selling said virtual gold goes against the EULA, and constitutes misuse of the product, it seems like they're kinda trapped there. If I mugged somebody, I wouldn't declare it on my taxes.
Of course I'm thinking somebody operating in the USA. I imagine most of these people or companies are farming in China or somewhere similar. Things are probably different.
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.
Of course I'm thinking somebody operating in the USA.
There's no legal reason Blizzard can't declare that, for tax purposes, the game is in the USA. They probably do already, to ease their jurisdiction.
If you telecommute to NYC, you can expect to pay taxes to NYC, NYS, and USA -- and your home country. There might be a credit in there somewhere, maybe a bunch of them, but not reporting it is still a crime.
On the linked page there were 4 or 5 "First Page" comments.....
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
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.
Blizzard also charges 8.25% sales tax to NYS residents, even those of us who live in a county where the tax less than that. When I noticed the oddity on my statement, I wrote Blizzard's billing department and was told that "Blizzard and its employees cannot be expected to understand tax laws, if you would like additional information, please contact your state Department of Commerce." I canceled my subscription instead--if they aren't prepared to explain their actions, I'm not prepared to pay for their services.
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.
Slashdot: Proof that a million monkeys at a million typewriters can create a masterpiece
"As part of the lawsuit, the operators of Peons4hire have been asked to immediately cease all in-game spamming efforts by all entities and websites under their control. If this organization refuses to act accordingly, further legal action will be taken. We'll be sure to keep you posted on the progress of this topic." Besides the fact that there are 17 pages of posts and, as mentioned earlier, this isn't criminal, it also seems like Blizzard is letting them off easy if they leave Blizzard alone. Also, they obviously aren't ready to reveal the details of this yet.
Maurice Wilkes, debugging, 1949
I'm sick to death of those assholes at peons4hire! Sometimes I'd be getting spam from them every five minutes! I hope Blizzard sues these assholes out of existence.
Imagine putting peons4hire on your resume as an employer.
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.
oops.... wrong story
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
It's a mix between a Bee, a Lizard and a Shark.
The spammers are chinese, and the chinese have a reputation of "not giving a fuck", so I have no idea how you expect the BSA to fix things.
I'm the guy with the unpopular opinion
I'd be willing to bet if Blizzard sued them, it would be more pertinent.
Since they've been told not to come back, why not break out the big guns? ILLEGAL ACCESS TO ELECTRONIC DEVICE. Federal felony.
C//
I use SpamSentry, and while Blizzard did hamstring the reporting function, the spam blocking parts still work fine. I get at least 4 spam messages each hour still, more if I'm in a city with a trade channel for any length of time. At least Blizzard has finally woken up and tried to do something, but it hasn't been effective by even the most generous stretch of the imagination.
I think they should implement a vote for banishment. Something like if some number of characters report you as a spammer in a certain amount of time you are ported to the boss of the opposing factions highest level instance and are killed instantly by the big bad elite monster. By being in the opposing faction's area it would render all of the tells unintelligible and as a bonus the level one spammer would be immediately killed thus silencing him again.
As an added punishment, if a spammer is killed by an NPC I think the spammer shouldn't be able to be resurrected or talk on any chat channel for > 10 minutes.
MapleStory is a free MMORPG that uses in game currency to buy certian items that do not directly inpact the gameplay. There's pets that autoloot, teleportation rocks that let you get to maps faster and store permits to open stores.
One of the things you can buy is a Gachapon tickets. The Gach is simular to those prize eggs in the Supermarket, one ticket gives you an item randomly. Some are worth billions, but you can get something that's worth almost nothing. This is basically trading real money for in game money, but it also helps control inflation by limiting the number of good items that go into the world.
~~~
Click here, you know you wanna!
if we could get rid of "real world" email spam as easily. Bravo to Blizzard for getting this fixed with the recent patch.
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
Not necessarily, but with the current registration system, it takes muscle to find out who is really behind it.
whois gold4power.com
Registrant: Domains by Proxy, Inc.
Registered through: GoDaddy.com, Inc. (http://www.godaddy.com)
Administrative Contact:
Private, Registration GOLD4POWER.COM@domainsbyproxy.com
Technical Contact:
Private, Registration GOLD4POWER.COM@domainsbyproxy.com
Enlightenment? It's just a flush in the pan.
(Anonymous Coward Tells You): This week only, 5 mod points per story for $60 (USD), powerkarmaing to excellent in only one week $300 (USD)!!!!1!!!1!1 Visit slashd0tt3r4h1r3.com!!1!!11!!!1
Now if Blizzard would only fix their client so it didn't crash at random times then I could actually play it.
Orignator of the Miserable Failure Googlebomb
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.
Of course, Blizzards lawyers had a meeting with the staff and gave the usual, "Do not discuss this lawsuit with the public," speech.
-- Should there be smoke coming out of my CPU?
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Seriously? I had never heard of auctioning nor selling game items online until World of Warcraft. Not to mention the girl who offered sex in exchange for 5.000 gold pieces, or something to that extent. All because of some PC game? All I can say is "wow" (no pun intended, really). Now the community is getting spammed by some "virtual gold sellers". People, it's just a game. Don't forget to live your life. It should be far more important than a computer game.
-- Chaos, panic, pandemonium... My job here is done!
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.
/cityban the gold farmers a few times. I still regularly report them to the CSRs. They come back like cockroaches.
/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.
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
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
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
If the former, doesn't profiteering from wrongful collection of taxes contravene some federal law and potentially place Blizzard in some very, very deep shit with the IRS (or whoever)? When I noticed the oddity on my statement, I wrote Blizzard's billing department and was told that "Blizzard and its employees cannot be expected to understand tax laws, if you would like additional information, please contact your state Department of Commerce." (Disclaimer: IANAL, and the following is speculation). Whilst it's understandable that most employees won't understand tax law, there should be someone there that *does* (or should) and should have been informed/questioned about the issue as soon as (anyone in) the company was informed that there may be such a problem.... right? Or at least I'd guess that's how a court would see it.
I don't know that much about the U.S. tax authorities, but I do know that you don't want to get on the wrong side of them. I really doubt Blizzard washing their hands or shrugging their shoulders like that would look good for them at all.
Might be worth investigating if you dislike Blizzard's attitude and possible wrongful profiteering.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Now if Blizzard would only fix their client so it didn't crash at random times then I could actually play it.
As a first step, get rid of any addons you've installed. If that doesn't fix the problem, reinstall Windows, or run a virus scanner to get rid of the crap that your machine is almost certainly infested with. If you're using Linux, you may need a more recent version of Wine.
However, I routinely play WoW for probably a minimum of four hours a day with absolutely no problems. It doesn't crash for me at all.
Also it seems if you try and type 'peons4hire' in any communication, the server just drops your message. Fiance was trying to tell guildmates about the lawsuit and was confused why none of her messages were getting through...
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
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.
Yes, Blizzard claim ownership of all items. Which is fine, considering that you can't ever take them out of the environs of the Blizzard servers.
Selling things on from one player to another thus can never be theft, as Blizzard are never deprived of the item.
What the spammers are guilty of is unauthorized access of a computer system. I know the UK has hefty penalties for this, and I believe the US does as well. By breaking the terms and conditions of the game, they are not allowed access (by person, not account) to the game. Continuing to come back and break the terms of access to the system once more then becomes a criminal offense. This is the same area of law that applies to crackers..
Of course, the spammers have already found something new.
Yesterday, I logged in and in the middle of a major WoW city, there were 3 or 4 "jumble-name" accounts similar to the ones who had previously sent whispers. Only this time, they were standing there preaching spam messages over and over, where a lot of people would surely be gathered and overhear them.
While we're all grateful the whispers have gone away, these people are far from done.
"Microsoft killed my company, I hold a personal grudge. I don't use Microsoft products and neither should you."-JWZ
WOW does not require skill to advance. Sure there are skilled players but the main asset a player needs is time (or to put it another way, stamina).
So what gold buyers are actually doing is paying cash instead of time to obtain their epic sword of leetness. Perfectly reasonable imo and the only people whom 've heard whinge about it are the adolescents supported by their parents who can afford to spend their lives in WoW.
So don't mistake stamina for skill. The latter is more than just playing 24x7 and being able to endure WoW farming. (Personally I think WoW grinders are pretty much the same creature as WoW Gold farmers: except the farmers get paid for their time where as the grinders are just waisting theirs).
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
One could argue that it's no different than someone messaging someone saying "Hey, I found a cool new webpage" or "I got a cool new *random object or service*. A spammer is just doing that repeatedly... to anyone they're capable of reaching... over and over again.
Now, one would think it would be easy to differentiate the two... but there's no solid line drawn between them. It's going to have a large grey area where Blizzard won't know whether it's actually spam or just a really annoying jerk... which isn't illegal anywhere (unfortunately)
Planet Zebeth - Metroid with a twist
The charges should be selling something that does not belong to you. If you read eula, everything on the server belongs to blizzard. Also with a little luck they set up presadence(sp) and use that to quickly take down all the other gold sellers.
Try running it on linux instead of the hobby OS you have to pay for :)
I am not knowledgeable about WoW. Please explain what virtual gold is and why it is a problem. Are people making their own, or cloning it, or stealing it, or what? I don't understand the basic issue... Thanks
Registrant: Domains by Proxy, Inc. DomainsByProxy.com 15111 N. Hayden Rd., Ste 160, PMB 353 Scottsdale, Arizona 85260 United States Registered through: GoDaddy.com, Inc. (http://www.godaddy.com) Domain Name: GOLD4POWER.COM Created on: 09-Jan-05 Expires on: 09-Jan-08 Last Updated on: 01-Dec-05 Administrative Contact: Private, Registration GOLD4POWER.COM@domainsbyproxy.com Domains by Proxy, Inc. DomainsByProxy.com 15111 N. Hayden Rd., Ste 160, PMB 353 Scottsdale, Arizona 85260 United States (480) 624-2599 Technical Contact: Private, Registration GOLD4POWER.COM@domainsbyproxy.com Domains by Proxy, Inc. DomainsByProxy.com 15111 N. Hayden Rd., Ste 160, PMB 353 Scottsdale, Arizona 85260 United States (480) 624-2599 Domain servers in listed order: WSC1.JOMAX.NET WSC2.JOMAX.NET Registry Status: clientRenewProhibited Registry Status: clientTransferProhibited Registry Status: clientUpdateProhibited Registry Status: clientDeleteProhibited
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're goin' and hook up with 'em later.
The price of World of Warcraft gold soars by 14.83%.
>As far as I am aware the legal situation is that Blizzard claim ownership of all the items/gold etc in WoW.
So? If they want to do that, fine, no one is changing that or claiming otherwise. The gold, after all, will not leave Blizzard and their servers, they are thus still owning and posessing them afterwards. Sure, the possession of it in the game has changed, but that is what the game is about in part, change of possession inside the game. The game has plenty of functionality to facilitate that even, trade windows, auction houses, built in mail system were you can send gold and items along and so on.
will the spammers pay in in-game currency?
Fair enough.
But suing them will be equally difficult.
C//
You know that line on the IT-150/200/201 where you declare Sales Tax you haven't paid? I wager that, if you document the over-tax you paid, you can get a credit for it from DTF and have it included in your refund.
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
You are most kind to take the time to explain this so well. I understand now why it is so bad. It makes it harder to make a living. Now that I understand. Anything that distorts the game like this make irk the players and the provider. Pseudo-virtual spam is the stray that breaks the camel's back as well. The final insult. And as in the real world, it tends to work which makes me sad/crazy. Can I assume that there is a way to export virtual gold from the game to the real world and in doing so drain financial energy from the game?
When you /ignore someone, make it ignore the entire account (for all of your and their alts).
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
Just like the borg, or roaches, or whatever, but under the new adverse conditions they are finding new ways to spam-spam-spam.
I was recently invited into a party (this happens a lot, until 2.1, then it changed), it is almost always a clueless idiot/newbie/child/dumbarse so I tend to join anyway and completely ignore the person who invited me without chatting first... it's an in-game etiquette consideration to first talk to someone before inviting them into a party or opening a trade window. Some people who don't quite understand civility will just invite you with no warning or open a trade window and expect you to buy something or unlock something... it's annoying. So yes, I tend to join these parties then ignore the inviter, which is surely about as aggravating to them as it was to me to be invited without warning in the first place.
Anyway, I joined the group and lo and behold, it was a fully populated raid group and the raid leader was spamming everyone. Looks like Blizzard isn't filtering raids/party chat.
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
Seconded. I've been running almost exclusively under Wine since about 0.9.30, and Cedega for a month or two before that, and NO PROBLEMS AT ALL.
If the client is crashing, my first guess is a dodgy computer. Windows machines can have utter crap for hardware without the user noticing.
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reasons described in the parent are the ones which push people to buying gold and powerleveling instead of playing the game.
Read radical news here
started wow 1 year ago. for a month or so, it was fun.
but when i hit level 20, the "go there and here for that quest and come back" concept started to wear off.
after i hit 40, this time "go to this and that dungeon with 5-20 people and such" concept started to wear off.
it was a long and boring, tedious journey from 40 to 60.
just as i hit 60, and started to grind for items that would make me able to compete fairly in pvp, the only fun left in the game, expansion came out and 10 new levels to go were added into the game.
60-70 boredom is much much longer and tedious than 30 to 60 boredom. and, when you hit level 70, you have to go through the "grind for items" boredom to get adequate itemization for being able to compete in pvp, and get into raids easily.
i admit, its boring. boring in the boredom kingdom of the bored.
im in this game for 2 things, 1 my guild that has migrated here from swg, 2, for pvp, which is the only thing fun in the game.
if blizz wants to break the cycle, they have to let go of the concept "play time" when valuing game s, but bring in "fun factor".
making me play something for months and than claiming that a game has "xxxx hours play time" does not mean shit, because i am bored through those xxxx hours.
Read radical news here
Slashdot admins stop paying attention to titles!
I don't know about the author, but I've seen nothing but increased spam since the patch. It's impossible to /ignore since the spammers send from brand new characters that never send more than one message to you. Heck, I even saw one spammer brazenly standing in the middle of Ironforge peddling his site's services out loud. The existing filters obviously aren't enough.
/tell. That way spammers would have to spend hours rather than seconds to set up a spamming character. Sure, it'd be a tad inconvenient for honest players, but you don't really need help from your level 70 buddy when you're still in a starting territory.
A simple way for Blizzard to help fight spam would be to disallow some communication commands for low-level characters. For instance, you could prevent all characters below level 10 from using
You don't understand. It's not that Windows makes your hardware be shit.
It's that, under Windows, you have no way of knowing, because "crashes all the damn time" is normal.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
To keep the '/reportspam' command from harming innocent players: