The point is, there would be very little market for these stolen goods if the assholes at IGE didn't exist and there wasn't such a readily available blackmarket for in-game gold for out-of-game cash trading.
Using their "service" is against the game rules and cheating. Every time you buy from them, you are funding this legal (but totally unethical) blackmarket, as well as indirectly funding the illegal criminal element that writes trojans to steal your stuff instead. If it weren't for the IGE link, this wouldn't exist.
While I'm no fan of gold farmers and in-game currency traders, is there any evidence to justify naming IGE in that addendum? What justifies that?
Why, you could click on their web page and note the tagline "IGE, Buy WOW Gold, World of Warcraft Gold, FFXI Gil, Final Fantasy XI Gil, Lineage 2 Adena". These guys are assholes and proud of it. They don't deserve apologists.
Maybe I should also dig up the evidence that in the past they were involved in authoring trojans...
Indeed, that surprised me too. Voodoo 1 was THE watershed graphics card - it blew away everything the competition had by an order of magnitude in high performance, features AND low price. It was even fairly unique in sitting on a separate card slot with the entire VGA signal looped through it and switched on demand. Instant upgrade for your PC. Genius marketing they had back then.
Sadly, they started drinking their own cool-aid too much. Voodoo 3 was THE bankrupting card. It was too expensive, too poor on features (16 bit rendering when everyone else was 32 bit), too poor on RAMDAC speed (poor output quality) and way too late to market. To make matters worse, their marketing department was making laughable attempts at convincing customers that they didn't really need all those extra features (what people want is render SPEED not QUALITY! Oh you already have 60fps? Hmm). You could buy an nVidia TNT2 for the same price, and it had the same performance, better quality output and better quality rendering. Even the drivers were better. I think Voodoo3 vs TNT2 marks the point where 3dfx LOST the fight. Strange that the list says it marks the pinnacle.
Sadder still, rather than recovering, they brought out the Voodoo 4/5 which added very little apart from a huge power supply burden, massive cards, and even higher costs, right when upstarts like nVidia and ATI were bringing out damn cheap, fast and single chip cards that did better.
As an aside - the CEO who bankrupted them by running the company on pure hopes and wishes alone (Greg Ballard) did the same to the company I worked for (SonicBlue/S3/Diamond). I suspect they brought him in due to his history of running a market leading company into the ground in less than a year. Job done.
He's right, I've noticed this as well. I myself have a statically assigned IP address, but if I'm using a file sharing app (Gnutella in my case), and then shut it down, it's sometimes many hours before connection attempts stop. It may be up to 15 minutes before existing connections are dropped, which is because most TCP/IP stacks these days are paranoid and tend to ignore the other end's error responses. (When your PC receives unsolicited traffic it sends back a "reject" packet, but due to that easily being used for denial-of-service most stacks ignore them). I think the parent was exaggerating the actual amount of bandwidth this uses up - it's tiny - but you certainly notice your lights blinking, and any monitoring tool will spot it easily.
In fact, even days after you last used it, you will see attempted connections on those ports, as IP addresses of recently known "good" computers are cached. I'm sure if you have an ISP which likes to reassign IP addresses all the time then you'll see lots of traffic intended for the previous owner. The two previous ISPs I used had this nasty habit, the other side effects being that you drop all your existing connections. I didn't like the idea of my traffic (non-filesharing) ending up being routed to some other guy's PC, so I switched to a static IP provider. (That and it's annoying having your connections dropped)
If the "expert" managed not to mention this, then he's either not fit for the job (because it's incredibly damn obvious if you've ever used a file sharing app and know about networking), or deliberately not mentioning it because it drives an ocean liner through his case. I agree that this is the most likely cause of the mismatch of hard disk and IP logs.
It is exactly people like you who are the bane of WoW. You are coming out with exactly the same template nonsense that every gold buyer comes out with:
"I don't have time to grind XYZ"
"I earn too much money in my job to get dirty with grinding" (there's a word for someone like you)
"I want to skip the un-fun parts"
"I can make faulty analogies to support my immoral and cheating behavior all day"
You haven't made a single point that doesn't have faulty logic. You can't compare this to "not wanting to role play". You are cheating. The rules of the game say so.
You cannot make the excuse that you like to PvP and therefore you want to skip all the "un-fun" parts. You know where people get most of their gear for PvP from? Yes, that's right, they get it from those hours they spent grinding. You are cheating to do better in PvP.
There are many players just like you who are lacking any kind of moral compass and make all kinds of crap arguments to make themselves feel better about it. It all reads like some school essay on "Virtual gold vs Real world money", and it's also all as vacuous as most school essays.
Buying Virtual Gold Is Cheating. The Rule Say So.
Which part of that do you not understand? All of it. There's no way you can justify anything you are doing.
Do you understand why how much you earn in real life should have NOTHING to do with your in-game character? Do you not understand how it's supposed to be a virtual world where everyone is basically created equal? You are screwing with that.
Unfortunately the people who buy virtual gold have either all had self-labotomies or nailed their moral compasses to a wall somewhere. This concept is beyond them, and it's extremely frustrating coming up with what would be crystal clear analogies to normal people. They simple do not understand how using factors outside of the game rules/world for your own advancement is cheating.
Likewise, if camping the sword of uberness would take 59 hours or you can buy it for $177 dollars (1/2 hour of your time), the decision is easy.
No, you camp the sword of uberness. Buying it with dollars is cheating.
Why spend 200 hours of your life killing rats and weak monsters (oh the incredible fun) when you can just start at 20th level for 100 bucks?
Because it's cheating, and because I'm fed up of seeing high level players who haven't got a clue how to play the game because they basically skipped the introductory levels. You're probably one of them I'm guessing.
If those 200 hours were entertaining- maybe. But typically they are insanely mindless grinding with no fun factor at all.
Your logical leap relies on using your shitty and deliberately misleading examples. It does not take 200 hours to get through 1/3rd of levelling. It does not involve killing rats except for maybe level 1 and 2, and that's with damn good reason - beginners need something they can actually achieve. If you're not a beginner you get through that crap in about 15 minutes. If you find grinding not fun (and it can be fun) then you shouldn't be playing the game. Hello, this is an MMORPG for fuck's sake.
In fact, most folks power level in some fashion once they get one character up to a decent level even tho it reduces the "fun".
Again, your choice of words leads to your illogical leaps. The trem "power levelling" here is used to denigrate the act of grinding your way to high levels or items. What you are describing is PLAYING THE GAME.
What you need to realise is that you stopped playing the game, and the virtual gold blackmarket is laughing at you all the way to the bank. You bought the game, you paid your fees, and now you pay them money so you don't have to play it? Do you not see what's wrong with you?
Game companies are FURIOUS at the farmers, not because they do what they do, but because they can't figure out how to cut them out and just charge for each level or item in the game without losing players. Most companies are probably setting up fake front companies to do it, because there is now far more money in the farming then in hosting the game.
I see this horse crap churned out every time there's a discussion about the virtual gold blackmarket. It's not true. It's boring seeing everyone cut and paste this response as if cynics of the world have all somehow come to agreement that it's reality.
Show us some damn evidence rather than just stupid slander.
Either that or it's only going to apply to games where virtual gold selling is OK, of which there are very few, strangely enough because people got sick of them.
So this is a company that exists just to let people break the game rules? Ignoring EULAs (which are dubious), this is basically just cheating central for people that don't want to play the game. A central place for all the griefers to ruin the game some more for the rest of us. Sickening.
Perhaps it's a good thing because the MMORPG companies can just spider that website and ban all the people they find!
In theory, yes. In practice, a lot of games are poorly tuned for casual players, who want to see the high-level content without having to take a pay cut to grind hours a day.
Is buying yen with USD cheating? If not, then why is buying gil with USD cheating?
Ah, the typical extremely poor logical argument of the virtual industry user. No, they are NOT the same thing at all and you cannot draw those analogies.
MMORPGs are *based* around a big grind, and if you don't like it you shouldn't be playing the game. If you don't enjoy it, you shouldn't be playing the game. People that do the big grind get rewarded - their advancement is a mark of how much they have played.
Why is buying gold cheating? Because it's against the game rules. Why is it against the game rules? BECAUSE THE DAMN RULES TELL YOU THAT. That's not the case for every MMORPG (e.g Sony et al), but for the vast majority there are great big notices and clamp-downs all over the place to remind you that this is the case. You must have missed them.
A better analogy is this: say you were on a treasure hunt (the fun kids party kind, not the pirate kind), and you got a token for each thing you found. What you are saying is that it's completely OK for you to just buy the tokens off the other people and not actually take part in the game yourself. That's the kind of person that uses the virtual industry. Cheaters.
The sad fact is the people who use them have nailed their moral compass down in order make the appropriate illogical leaps that make it "ok" in their mind. "I don't have time to play the game" is the typical and extremely laughable attempt that most make to give themselves a feel-good about their actions. Here's a clue: you STILL aren't playing the game.
People claim that you are rewriting history because you are. You haven't actually touched on ANYTHING that was said on the page in your comment there - you just spin around with some ad-hominem about Wikipedia itself. Telling.
Why? Because Gracenote's history is one of unethical and spiteful behaviour. I've had the extreme misfortune of being on a project in the past which involved using the "technology" your Company licenses, and as such I witnesses first hand what was going on. You know what? It ties up exactly with the rest of the comments here.
What you tried to pull off was this:
Take the free GPL licensed database submitted by volunteers and relicense it under another copyright without permission. Successful.
Claim patent protection on the pitifully bad hashing algorithm used by CDDB lookups. Nobody in their right mind would ever use this scheme if written again, because it collided way more than any good hash would, so no problem there. Failed.
Claim patent protection on the act of looking up a CD by its table of contents. Thus reeling in a license fee from everyone that had a player capable of it. Successful.
Sell software to "make this all easy". FAILED. FAILED. FAILED. I and others spent about 6 months getting that pile of crap of work properly. Try again.
Prevent anyone bitter enough about your software from using freedb instead even if they paid you a license fee. Instead, you're forced to use your crappy software. So, tell us the ethical logic behind that one? Successful.
Specify ludicrous rules about branding such as having a logo of fixed real-world dimensions that happened to be larger than the LCD screen we used. FAILED. It actually got in the way of the damn UI and I'm guessing it didn't make any friends amoungst end-users.
Ring-fence the entire CD-lookup thing by threatening any company that used alternative sources and request license fees off everyone. So no escaping the blackhole of lost development time and legal bullying that was Gracenote at the time. Successful. And you wonder how you got so many enemies?
What don't you understand? Are you that distanced from reality? You screwed a LOT of people, a LOT of companies and now you come back claiming that all this stuff never happened? Legally, what you did was dubious but never got you on the wrong side of the law. So what. Legal != Ethical. Don't fall back on faulty logic - we can all see straight through it.
What your company did has earned you a future where nobody wants anything to do with you. You can't go up to random companies and threaten them legally and expect them to be friends when that legal ruling turns against you... as happened with Musicmatch. Looking forward to hearing about your bankruptcy.
Nonsense. If you bought a copy of Doom, is the first thing you do when you take it home to type "IDDQD" and quickly complete the whole thing? No. Of Fucking Course Not. You are cheating yourself out of the game.
People who bot are cheating themselves out of the game. Unfortunately, they also cheat OTHER people out of the game too. It cheapens the whole experience of making it to lvl60, which, if you don't listen to trolls and flamers, is actually quite an investment in time and effort. At the end of levelling, you will be skilled in the art of your class and will quite possibly have met a lot of friends and gained reputation. Bots don't. There is a huge influx of blatant eBay/Bot/morons in the game at the moment, and they're ruining it all.
Botting only cheats yourself out of actually playing the game. It's like getting a VCR to record a film for you, never watching it, but talking to friends afterwards as if you had. You are found out fairly soon. The WoWglider guy would never mention stuff like that, of course.
I'm flattered that you can infer my position from a statement which says nothing about it. Like I've been saying a lot recently, "You can say a lot of crap if you ignore what's actually being said."
Sigh, it seems that the moderators are also all polarised WoW junkies or anti-WoW junkies and pretty much anything with any insight is being modded as troll and anything flamebait is modded as insightful.
Time to use those metamoderation points to bring them to (supposed) justice.
Excuse me, but isn't this irrelevant? If you don't like WoW personally, then there's no need to state your opinion as fact, especially when it has nothing to do with the subject at hand.
This story has comments annoyingly similar in style and lack of substance to those you find on the WoW forums.
I think you will find this is www.slashdot.org and not news.bbc.co.uk. This isn't mainstream news for people with (sadly) mainstream-only interests. You're the one that took a wrong turning - don't tell everyone else they're in the wrong place and care about the wrong things.
You obviously have no idea what you're talking about and should not have commented.
They may be running WoW on an unsupported platform, but they are NOT cheating, they are NOT doing anything against the terms and conditions and they now have their accounts (and their huge playing hours) terminated.
But you can ignore all that and snipe at the people affected if you want. You can make up all sorts of crap if you ignore what's actually happening.
Because Dvorak keyboard aren't faster. All studies into their advantage were fabricated. They're actually slower due to the way they deliberately try to make you swap hands each key press. Some people find this more natural than QWERTY, but it means that you hit a limit at a WPM much lower than you can manage with QWERTY.
It's just a popular myth that's repeated by most people verbatim, and most of it comes right from those fabricated studies issued by the people that were going to make money out of it...
All these people declaring the capslock key useless are simply slow typists who have missed a trick all this time. Using capslock when you're typing a long string of uppercase letters is just plain efficient.
I suppose at some point in the future I'll be one of those guys who has to pay extra for a damn capslock-layout keyboard so I can keep that advantage vs you slow typists.
Even if there really are merger talks I would still release the lawyers because it would then be a blatant attempt to scupper the deal.
Seriously, this is almost criminal behaviour. Perhaps it even is.
Slashdot Mirror
Using their "service" is against the game rules and cheating. Every time you buy from them, you are funding this legal (but totally unethical) blackmarket, as well as indirectly funding the illegal criminal element that writes trojans to steal your stuff instead. If it weren't for the IGE link, this wouldn't exist.
Why, you could click on their web page and note the tagline "IGE, Buy WOW Gold, World of Warcraft Gold, FFXI Gil, Final Fantasy XI Gil, Lineage 2 Adena". These guys are assholes and proud of it. They don't deserve apologists.
Maybe I should also dig up the evidence that in the past they were involved in authoring trojans...
Sadly, they started drinking their own cool-aid too much. Voodoo 3 was THE bankrupting card. It was too expensive, too poor on features (16 bit rendering when everyone else was 32 bit), too poor on RAMDAC speed (poor output quality) and way too late to market. To make matters worse, their marketing department was making laughable attempts at convincing customers that they didn't really need all those extra features (what people want is render SPEED not QUALITY! Oh you already have 60fps? Hmm). You could buy an nVidia TNT2 for the same price, and it had the same performance, better quality output and better quality rendering. Even the drivers were better. I think Voodoo3 vs TNT2 marks the point where 3dfx LOST the fight. Strange that the list says it marks the pinnacle.
Sadder still, rather than recovering, they brought out the Voodoo 4/5 which added very little apart from a huge power supply burden, massive cards, and even higher costs, right when upstarts like nVidia and ATI were bringing out damn cheap, fast and single chip cards that did better.
As an aside - the CEO who bankrupted them by running the company on pure hopes and wishes alone (Greg Ballard) did the same to the company I worked for (SonicBlue/S3/Diamond). I suspect they brought him in due to his history of running a market leading company into the ground in less than a year. Job done.
In fact, even days after you last used it, you will see attempted connections on those ports, as IP addresses of recently known "good" computers are cached. I'm sure if you have an ISP which likes to reassign IP addresses all the time then you'll see lots of traffic intended for the previous owner. The two previous ISPs I used had this nasty habit, the other side effects being that you drop all your existing connections. I didn't like the idea of my traffic (non-filesharing) ending up being routed to some other guy's PC, so I switched to a static IP provider. (That and it's annoying having your connections dropped)
If the "expert" managed not to mention this, then he's either not fit for the job (because it's incredibly damn obvious if you've ever used a file sharing app and know about networking), or deliberately not mentioning it because it drives an ocean liner through his case. I agree that this is the most likely cause of the mismatch of hard disk and IP logs.
You haven't made a single point that doesn't have faulty logic. You can't compare this to "not wanting to role play". You are cheating. The rules of the game say so.
You cannot make the excuse that you like to PvP and therefore you want to skip all the "un-fun" parts. You know where people get most of their gear for PvP from? Yes, that's right, they get it from those hours they spent grinding. You are cheating to do better in PvP.
There are many players just like you who are lacking any kind of moral compass and make all kinds of crap arguments to make themselves feel better about it. It all reads like some school essay on "Virtual gold vs Real world money", and it's also all as vacuous as most school essays.
Buying Virtual Gold Is Cheating. The Rule Say So.
Which part of that do you not understand? All of it. There's no way you can justify anything you are doing.
Do you understand why how much you earn in real life should have NOTHING to do with your in-game character? Do you not understand how it's supposed to be a virtual world where everyone is basically created equal? You are screwing with that.
Unfortunately the people who buy virtual gold have either all had self-labotomies or nailed their moral compasses to a wall somewhere. This concept is beyond them, and it's extremely frustrating coming up with what would be crystal clear analogies to normal people. They simple do not understand how using factors outside of the game rules/world for your own advancement is cheating.
No, you camp the sword of uberness. Buying it with dollars is cheating.
Why spend 200 hours of your life killing rats and weak monsters (oh the incredible fun) when you can just start at 20th level for 100 bucks?
Because it's cheating, and because I'm fed up of seeing high level players who haven't got a clue how to play the game because they basically skipped the introductory levels. You're probably one of them I'm guessing.
If those 200 hours were entertaining- maybe. But typically they are insanely mindless grinding with no fun factor at all.
Your logical leap relies on using your shitty and deliberately misleading examples. It does not take 200 hours to get through 1/3rd of levelling. It does not involve killing rats except for maybe level 1 and 2, and that's with damn good reason - beginners need something they can actually achieve. If you're not a beginner you get through that crap in about 15 minutes. If you find grinding not fun (and it can be fun) then you shouldn't be playing the game. Hello, this is an MMORPG for fuck's sake.
In fact, most folks power level in some fashion once they get one character up to a decent level even tho it reduces the "fun".
Again, your choice of words leads to your illogical leaps. The trem "power levelling" here is used to denigrate the act of grinding your way to high levels or items. What you are describing is PLAYING THE GAME.
What you need to realise is that you stopped playing the game, and the virtual gold blackmarket is laughing at you all the way to the bank. You bought the game, you paid your fees, and now you pay them money so you don't have to play it? Do you not see what's wrong with you?
I see this horse crap churned out every time there's a discussion about the virtual gold blackmarket. It's not true. It's boring seeing everyone cut and paste this response as if cynics of the world have all somehow come to agreement that it's reality.
Show us some damn evidence rather than just stupid slander.
So this is a company that exists just to let people break the game rules? Ignoring EULAs (which are dubious), this is basically just cheating central for people that don't want to play the game. A central place for all the griefers to ruin the game some more for the rest of us. Sickening.
Perhaps it's a good thing because the MMORPG companies can just spider that website and ban all the people they find!
Is buying yen with USD cheating? If not, then why is buying gil with USD cheating?
Ah, the typical extremely poor logical argument of the virtual industry user. No, they are NOT the same thing at all and you cannot draw those analogies.
MMORPGs are *based* around a big grind, and if you don't like it you shouldn't be playing the game. If you don't enjoy it, you shouldn't be playing the game. People that do the big grind get rewarded - their advancement is a mark of how much they have played.
Why is buying gold cheating? Because it's against the game rules. Why is it against the game rules? BECAUSE THE DAMN RULES TELL YOU THAT. That's not the case for every MMORPG (e.g Sony et al), but for the vast majority there are great big notices and clamp-downs all over the place to remind you that this is the case. You must have missed them.
A better analogy is this: say you were on a treasure hunt (the fun kids party kind, not the pirate kind), and you got a token for each thing you found. What you are saying is that it's completely OK for you to just buy the tokens off the other people and not actually take part in the game yourself. That's the kind of person that uses the virtual industry. Cheaters.
The sad fact is the people who use them have nailed their moral compass down in order make the appropriate illogical leaps that make it "ok" in their mind. "I don't have time to play the game" is the typical and extremely laughable attempt that most make to give themselves a feel-good about their actions. Here's a clue: you STILL aren't playing the game.
Why? Because Gracenote's history is one of unethical and spiteful behaviour. I've had the extreme misfortune of being on a project in the past which involved using the "technology" your Company licenses, and as such I witnesses first hand what was going on. You know what? It ties up exactly with the rest of the comments here.
What you tried to pull off was this:
What don't you understand? Are you that distanced from reality? You screwed a LOT of people, a LOT of companies and now you come back claiming that all this stuff never happened? Legally, what you did was dubious but never got you on the wrong side of the law. So what. Legal != Ethical. Don't fall back on faulty logic - we can all see straight through it.
What your company did has earned you a future where nobody wants anything to do with you. You can't go up to random companies and threaten them legally and expect them to be friends when that legal ruling turns against you... as happened with Musicmatch. Looking forward to hearing about your bankruptcy.
You fail for not starting at 000.
Nonsense. If you bought a copy of Doom, is the first thing you do when you take it home to type "IDDQD" and quickly complete the whole thing? No. Of Fucking Course Not. You are cheating yourself out of the game.
People who bot are cheating themselves out of the game. Unfortunately, they also cheat OTHER people out of the game too. It cheapens the whole experience of making it to lvl60, which, if you don't listen to trolls and flamers, is actually quite an investment in time and effort. At the end of levelling, you will be skilled in the art of your class and will quite possibly have met a lot of friends and gained reputation. Bots don't. There is a huge influx of blatant eBay/Bot/morons in the game at the moment, and they're ruining it all.
Botting only cheats yourself out of actually playing the game. It's like getting a VCR to record a film for you, never watching it, but talking to friends afterwards as if you had. You are found out fairly soon. The WoWglider guy would never mention stuff like that, of course.
I'm flattered that you can infer my position from a statement which says nothing about it. Like I've been saying a lot recently, "You can say a lot of crap if you ignore what's actually being said."
This kind of rabid polarised talk is exactly why bugger all is actually being achieved. Yes, 100% rabid.
Time to use those metamoderation points to bring them to (supposed) justice.
This story has comments annoyingly similar in style and lack of substance to those you find on the WoW forums.
I think you will find this is www.slashdot.org and not news.bbc.co.uk. This isn't mainstream news for people with (sadly) mainstream-only interests. You're the one that took a wrong turning - don't tell everyone else they're in the wrong place and care about the wrong things.
You obviously have no idea what you're talking about and should not have commented.
They may be running WoW on an unsupported platform, but they are NOT cheating, they are NOT doing anything against the terms and conditions and they now have their accounts (and their huge playing hours) terminated.
But you can ignore all that and snipe at the people affected if you want. You can make up all sorts of crap if you ignore what's actually happening.
Science isn't biased, but that doesn't mean scientists aren't.
Ironically, you are the perfect example of what he's talking about. Listen to yourself.
It's just a popular myth that's repeated by most people verbatim, and most of it comes right from those fabricated studies issued by the people that were going to make money out of it...
All these people declaring the capslock key useless are simply slow typists who have missed a trick all this time. Using capslock when you're typing a long string of uppercase letters is just plain efficient.
I suppose at some point in the future I'll be one of those guys who has to pay extra for a damn capslock-layout keyboard so I can keep that advantage vs you slow typists.
Even if there really are merger talks I would still release the lawyers because it would then be a blatant attempt to scupper the deal.
Seriously, this is almost criminal behaviour. Perhaps it even is.
Would certainly piss me off enough to release the lawyers if I were AMD.