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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.
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.
So that's where the missing Zs went. Give them back, scoundrel!
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
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
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?
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.
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
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.
It's a mix between a Bee, a Lizard and a Shark.
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.
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.
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
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.
That is "client side" It appears
Click the "Disable spam filter" and they will get through
-nick
will the spammers pay in in-game currency?
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