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Blizard Sues Virtual Gold Seller
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Sat May 26, 2007 09:32 AM
from the long-time-coming dept.
from the long-time-coming dept.
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."
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Anti-spam (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Anti-spam (Score:5, Informative)
A lot of stuff that will make a spammer's life more difficult.
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Re:Anti-spam (Score:5, Informative)
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Result (Score:4, Interesting)
Wherever you go, there you are (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Cold-hearted? Sure. But so is reality.
Re:Wherever you go, there you are (Score:4, Interesting)
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".
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Re:Wherever you go, there you are (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Virtual utopia went the same way as the real one (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I'll agree that constant nagging is annoying, but bitching about someone paying for things that you'd rather do yourself is kind of pathetic.
Hang on for a second... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Hang on for a second... (Score:4, Informative)
Spam is unsolicited communication.
If you can't wrap your head around that.. well.. yeah.
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Re:Hang on for a second... (Score:5, Informative)
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My Own Research (Score:5, Interesting)
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: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:My Own Research (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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.
This, coupled with the inability of trial accounts to send tells (or hell, segregating trial accounts onto trial servers), would provide a cheap, technical fix for an annoyingly organic problem. As far as people getting hit by keyloggers by trying to download cheat macros (such as automated mob farming or other activities barred by the EULA) or people whose accounts are compromised by "power-levelling services", I'm afraid I don't have much sympathy. A ban by credit card, necessitating a nice chat with a Blizzard rep to get the ban removed, would both heavily inconvenience farmers while providing an incentive for actual players to police the activity on their account ("Timmy, you got the entire damned family banned again because you were screaming 'shitcock' in Trade").
Actually, I've always been curious as to how people justify buying gold or using power-levelling services. The argument I usually hear is that they are too busy with a job to level a character and "just want to play". Presumably these people wouldn't join a tennis league and then demand to use an oversize racquet because they're too busy with their job to learn to play skillfully. Would they think it acceptable to buy points in some sort of sports fantasy league from another player because they don't have the time to properly manage their team?
If you're going to play a game with a lot of other people, why not play it on equal terms? And if you don't have as much time to devote to the game as others, then either accept that with good grace or move on to a different game for which you do have the time. I suppose that shortcuts, cheating, and griefing are an inevitable side-effect a large crowd of people playing, but it's really bloody annoying!
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Except that's real hard (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Blizzard entering secondary market! (Score:5, Funny)
Gold Farming is Big Business (Score:5, Informative)
12 hours a day playing Warcraft, getting beaten up by higher level players. It's sounds like a pretty ugly life.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Interesting. (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Interesting. (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:zzz (Score:4, Funny)
So that's where the missing Zs went. Give them back, scoundrel!
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Re:Lets Hope They Sue Them Into the Ground... (Score:4, Insightful)
The Chinese (who are the main nationality in question here I think) need to be given a very strong incentive not to see gold farming as a legitimate form of employment...because it isn't. Civil lawsuits on their own are unlikely to be enough; what Blizzard should really do IMHO is petition the Chinese government to conduct enforcement within their own country.
Gold farming isn't any more beneficial to the Chinese people themselves than it is to gamers. Apart from anything else, it sends a message to whichever businesspeople that are running these companies that Chinese employees are willing to be exploited; that they are willing to work long hours in poor conditions and be paid the absolute bare minimum required in order for them to have an incentive to do the work. The Chinese government isn't doing itself any favours by allowing the companies in question to exist, either. The companies in question are almost always owned by foreign nationals, and every last dollar of whatever revenue they make will leave China, if it ever enters the country at all. This does nothing for the Chinese economy.
I can understand Chinese workers wanting to make a living for themselves and their families as much as any other people on the planet, but I also feel that they should look for ways in which they can have a genuinely beneficial employment opportunity, rather than something which is exploitative and harmful to them simply because the people running said companies are willing to exploit these workers' own beliefs that they do not deserve better jobs. They do deserve better, and we as gamers deserve better than what they are doing to the games we play.
Gamers and the gold farmers are not actually on opposite sides here; the reality is that both groups are being screwed in this scenario by the usual plutocrats.
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