DDoS Attacks Cripple Real Money Trading Sites

WhaddayaMeanIHaveToLevelUpTheOldWay writes "A massive denial of service attack has disabled some of the world's largest virtual goods trading sites. The Korea-based sites hit by the attack are responsible for most of the country's estimated $1bn annual trade in virtual gold, weapons and other items for games like World of Warcraft. Local press reports are blaming Chinese botnet controllers for the attacks and claim that this is an extortion attempt. The sites affected have been offline for four days and reportedly handle more than 90 percent of Korea's online item trading — a business now worth more than $3m a day, according to Korean government statistics."

Re:Oblig.

[djones101]

I agree entirely. Serves the gold farmers right, they're getting a taste of the very same medicine they dish out to everyone else.

I can't decide...

[Seakip18]

Is this a good thing or bad thing? I mean, I'm all against wasting bandwidth and the such, but it's shutting down the folks that make me harder for me to enjoy a game like WoW.

I doubt its extortion

[Anonymous Coward]

If these companies make 3 million dollars a day according to the Korean government is seems rather silly to just ask for money.

What seems more likely is Chinese gold farming companies are hoping to take the place of the currently unreachable Korean gold farms.

Re:Oblig.

[ILuvRamen]

I SECOND THAT! Those jerks are jamming the servers on my game. Half the day nobody from the US can get on because there's so many gold bots. They're practically DDOSing the game itself so it's perfectly reasonable payback. And plus all their chinese gold that they sell is coated in lead.
btw it only takes a couple people to actually shut down one of them. If you know of a gold selling website, just scan it for e-mail addresses. If you find one for the same domain as the site, get everyone you know to sign them up for like a hundred spam lists. There are A LOT of voluntary, mass spam sign up sites like what coupons.com used to be. By the next day they'll have GBs of spam and their server will either have hit some sort of bandwidth or mail limit or the sudden constant surge in traffic will just make their host shut them down. Plus they won't be able to do business through their e-mail account anymore. No matter what happens it will be bad for them. Try it sometime :D

Re:Any way to participate?

[Anonymous Coward]

How about instead you stop playing games that reward gold-farming behavior.

Gold farming shouldn't hurt anyone. If it does, that's not the fault of the gold farmers, but of the developers who designed a game that allows it.

Re:Any way to participate?

[Opportunist]

Well, care to explain a way to stop it? I know many MMORPGs trying their best to eliminate gold farmers from their games, but so far no attemt was really successful.

And yes, gold farmers can hurt a game when they can monopolize shared resources. Areas that are not instanced can be monopolized by gold farmers. Even without this, they can have a tremendous impact on inflation, ensuring that new players cannot get into the market without buying gold from them, because even if they grind 24/7 they cannot keep up with inflation in some games. What you want costs 100 $money today, when you got 100 it costs 200, when you got 200 it costs 400 and so on.

That's where money farmers hurt a game and the experience for the player.

Not just the farmers to blame

[LozHuf]

Seriously, I dont get why so much of the aggression is against the gold farmers/sellers. The real issue should be with the people actually doing the buying. If there was noone buying gold/characters etc then there would be no farmers. In my opinion the farmers themselves are the least to blame. Sure, the actual process of farming is screwing up some rich american's(or korean's, or whoever's) precious hobby, but from their point of view - what do they care? If it means they can put food on the table then im sure that that is their imperative.

If there weren't any lazy fuckos out there spending such a vast amounts of money on gold then there really wouldnt be any problems with the game economies being fucked over. If there have to be witch-hunts against RMT then I think a much more useful approach would be to vilify the selfish buyers than the farmers who are just trying to earn a wage.

NAME AND SHAME THE BUYERS! Nothing like a good old fashioned McCarthy-era witch-hunt ;)