Mythic GM Talks Warhammer Launch, Banning Gold Sellers

Gamasutra has an interview with Mark Jacobs, GM and co-founder of Mythic, about the recent launch of Warhammer Online. He talks about handling the heavy demands on the servers, and how the launch is going better than the opening of Dark Age of Camelot (during which "somebody parked a truck on our internet"). Jacobs also blogged about the glee with which he and his team have been banning gold spammers: "We don't wait and let them stay in the game and ban them en-masse, my guys ban their useless, time-consuming butts right away. We have a strike team whose sole job it is to get these guys off our servers as quickly as possible. This weekend, we unveiled a new wrinkle in the fight against them, the public ban message. Players on our Phoenix Throne server have been treated to special messages when a gold seller/spammer is banned. I've given them a wide leash to come up with creative messages to tell the entire community who has been banned and we keep it within the Warhammer universe."

Comments

Re:thinking about it

[Macthorpe]

I throw out the phrase "Better than WoW" after a long period of due consideration. It's not just hype - it's really that good.

The only problem I have with it is that there are a few glitches they haven't quite ironed out yet (animations getting stuck, occasionally a HUD window will vanish for no reason), so I would give it a month.

Re:How is it hard to prevent.

[stonecypher]

I never understood how it was difficult to rid these guys.

You never understood how it could be difficult to ban people from making money by breaking the rules?

Man, you've never bought weed, have you?

Re:How is it hard to prevent.

[vux984]

Doh. bloody filter choked on 'less than symbol' $30 and clipped off most my post...

I never understood how it was difficult to rid these guys.

Then you haven't thought about it.

Just send in some employee to buy some gold that is advertised...Then when you are given the gold, trace it back and ban that account along with the credit card info that was used to purchase the subscription. (As well as the product key)

Well duh!

1) The account that was used to transfer you the gold isn't the one that was used to farm it. Ideally, the accounts that actually do the transactions are "free" throwaway buddy or trial accounts. (Which is why some of the more modern games have limits on those free trial accounts to limit how much gold they can actually have, to prevent them from transfering items at all, or from sending mail, or talking in certain chat channels, etc...) Not much use in banning the free throw-away account now is there?

2) Even if they can't use free throwaway accounts, then they use paid throwaway accounts. The accounts generally cost less than $30 bucks and gets them a free month. If they make at least 100% markup (and they do) than all they need is to sell $60 worth of gold before getting banned to break even. That's exceedingly easy to do. Hell, even if they get 'stung' by an employee, as long as they set it up so that they log in and fulfill all their orders at once, by the time the employee identifies the account, a couple hundred bucks worth of gold will have been moved and the farmer is ahead of the game.

3) Even banning a credit card isn't effective. These guys all pay by prepaid game card at best, or have prepaid visa debit cards etc, which can be obtained en masse trivially, never mind the potential for using stolen card numbers.

4) What mythic is doing by banning the spammer accounts is just stopping in-game advertising, not gold farming, or gold-sales. To do THAT is much harder, and there is little they can do to stop THAT, without very careful game design with that as a goal.

5) The gold farmers also are known to use hacked accounts. (where they've guessed or stolen user names and passwords of a legitimate customer, and use those accounts to move gold between farmer accounts and seller accounts, part of an in-game 'laundering' scheme). The 'victim' never even knows he's been hacked, because they just login for a few seconds to move THEIR gold around and don't otherwise interfere with the account at all.

This makes it difficult for the game-devs to act, because when they ban people suspected of being part of the gold-trade, they have to deal with the 'collateral damage'.

6) Of course, gold sellers also use hacked accounts for spamming sales.

Seriously it doesn't seem that hard.

Its FAR harder than it sounds.

Re:How is it hard to prevent.

[the-amazing-blob]

The only true way to kill a parasite is to kill its host

I truly hope you are not a doctor.