Blizard Sues Virtual Gold Seller 242
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."
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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The person who originally sent the whisper would generally have a trial account, create a character with a random name (often including accents and ascii symbols), log in, send the mass number of tells,
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Re:Anti-spam (Score:5, Informative)
Double Secret Probation (Score:2)
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Click the "Disable spam filter" and they will get through
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Or maybe I'm just too easily amused by stupidity.
Result (Score:4, Interesting)
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Wherever you go, there you are (Score:5, Insightful)
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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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But then we are faced with the question, What if
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/Mikael
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What constitutes force which deprives free will? For example, the need for oxygen forces people to breathe, depriving them of the free will to choose not to breathe. So free will in this sense is impossible. But free will could mean free from imposition by
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Re:Wherever you go, there you are (Score:4, Insightful)
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Whatever happened to cyberspace as a virtual utopia?
It works exactly the same as real utopiae, as you pointed out. So far, it's working perfectly.
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Virtual utopia went the same way as the real one (Score:3, Insightful)
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You know - way back when cyberspace was $6 or $12 an hour (or more!) in the days of GEnie and CompuServe, this sort of thing really wasn't a problem. You could play a multiplayer game with your friends and enjoy yourself. The beggars and spammers were kept to a minimum and most of them were encouraged to actually play the game.
Then the internet happened. Prices came down - WAY down. Playing a game that would cost
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It ended when we let the masses in.
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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.
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Every society can be put somewhere on the line between absolute lack of individual freedom = totalitarianism and absolute lack of societal control = anarchy. None of those are without troubles, and it would be foolish to think any point inbetween is. Even the best examples of democracy and rule of law are flawed and imperfect. Utopia can only exist where all the inhabitants act in an utopian way, with the
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Meh. You're really making too much of it in this case.
I don't understand cheating in games such as, say, Counterstrike or America's Army. The whole point of the game there is: how good are you? Can you beat the other guy? I simply can't understand what the fun is in using aimbots or firing cheats or whatever.
For the most part, WOW isn't that. If people enjoy playing more if they don't have to worry so much about gold, I really don't care that much. It may have a minor effect on prices in the aucti
Stamina not skill (Score:2)
So what gold buyers are actually doing is paying cash instead of time to obtain their epic sword of leetness. Perfectly reasonable imo and the only people whom 've heard whinge about it are the adolescents supported by their parents who can afford to spend their lives in WoW.
So don't mistake stamina for skill. The latter is more than just playing 24x7 and being
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If your 'virtual utopia' depends on skills only,
and those skills cannot be automated or assisted by computer,then you're safe.(e.g. virtual servers of Second Life and skill based games like Go)
Blizzard is fighting what is essentially
exploitation of game design.Its profitable and going to be a problem as long as the game exists.
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.
Re:Hang on for a second... (Score:5, Informative)
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Of course, nothing stop them from using fake/stolen credit card info, AFAIK credit card info is mostly used to prevent the same people from signing over and over to trial... but in any case if they did that, it might give Blizzard some more legal ammo, since IIRC using fake or stolen credit card information is actually illegal and could be used as a criminal case
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Stolen accounts are a easier way to make money for companies, even faster then farming all it takes is a couple of key loggers.
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Peons of the WoW unite! (Score:2)
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
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Still, having trouble making the connection. You're talking about his... ahh.. website visiting choices?
Enlighten me.
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I think the GP is questioning whether you were "doing research" or "shopping".
On the MMO that I play occasionally, a new player admitted to buying game currency on the cash market. One of my friends told him that he was "buying from terrorists", and that the 9/11 attacks were funded by "gold farming". The poor guy was really upset until the rest of us couldn't stand it anymore and let him in on the joke.
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TLF
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This is why all of the servers on the game should be full PvP where anybody can kill anyone else at any time and for any reason whatsoever without warning. This does not necessarily result in the chaos that one might otherwise suspsect since factions and groups quickly emerge to keep the asshats and the spammers in line. That l
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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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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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Congratulations. You are now part of the problem.
Where exactly do you think they're getting the gold? Do you think they are legitimately running characters to high levels and then shipping the gold around to characters whose players pay for it? That w
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An undercover detective who buys drugs from dealers is supplying said dealers with money to get more drugs. The detectives are part of the problem. But, in a larger sense, they are part of the solution. I'm not an undercover detective for anyone other than myself, and my only drive was curiousity.
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Where exactly do you think they're getting the gold? Do you think they are legitimately running characters to high levels and then shipping the gold around to characters whose players pay for it? That would take time and effort and would not be an efficient way to make money.
hacking accounts would net you very little at great risk and it not sustainable since the number of idiots is a finite number and they only have so much time to remake alt hat gold. A average 70 might have a few thousand gold at most on
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As long as the game lets random people join and chat, there will be UCE, XCP, and fraud. If you let absolutely new accounts get full access to communication when you release, everyone expects it from then on. So, unless Spam becomes game-breaking, you can't escape that design choice for your chat features. I'd prefer a three tiered system of (1) default no chat, (2) listen only and (3) full duplex with
Blizzard entering secondary market! (Score:5, Funny)
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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.
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Compared to subsistance level agriculture, coal mining, or a million other jobs, it's pretty damned cushy. That's why people do it.
I don't go and kill farmers. I understand why they are there.
That said, I will never buy gold for WoW. I earn enough money to buy the 5000g I would need
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Funny (Score:2)
YES! (Score:2)
Imagine... (Score:2)
Fixing the Economy (Score:2, Interesting)
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 m
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And it has the same effect as legalizing drugs. Sure the street corner dealers are gone, and people stop smuggling it accross the border, and some of the violent crime goes away (and those are all 'good things'), but the heroine junkies are still going to inject their rent money and end up on the streets where they'll smash your window for spare change and pawn-abl
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The Blizard Animal. (Score:3, Funny)
The spam problem has NOT STOPPED (Score:2)
Banishment (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Wouldn't it be great... (Score:2)
Remove the incentive as well (Score:3, Insightful)
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The only way to let players avoid long, boring grinds is to offer many kinds of grinds so that a player doesn't have to kill 5,000 Xs; instead, they can kill 100 Xs, mine
Lets Hope They Sue Them Into the Ground... (Score:3, Interesting)
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
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.
If blizzard wins (Score:3, Funny)
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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.
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C//
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Re:Interesting. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Interesting. (Score:4, Interesting)
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Selling things on from one player to another thus can never be theft, as Blizzard are never deprived of the item.
What the spammers are guilty of is unauthorized access of a computer system. I know the UK has hefty penalties for this, and I believe the US does as well. By breaking the terms and conditions of the game, they are not allowed access (by person, not ac
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There's no legal reason Blizzard can't declare that, for tax purposes, the game is in the USA. They probably do already, to ease their jurisdiction.
If you telecommute to NYC, you can expect to pay taxes to NYC, NYS, and USA -- and your home country. There might be a credit in there somewhere, maybe a bunch of them, but not reporting it is still a crime.
Blizzard in deep shit with the IRS? (Score:2)
Blizzard also charges 8.25% sales tax to NYS residents, even those of us who live in a county where the tax less than that.
Who keeps the extra money wrongly collected as "tax"- Blizzard or your county/state/whatever?
If the former, doesn't profiteering from wrongful collection of taxes contravene some federal law and potentially place Blizzard in some very, very deep shit with the IRS (or whoever)?
When I noticed the oddity on my statement, I wrote Blizzard's billing department and was told that "Blizzard and its employees cannot be expected to understand tax laws, if you would like additional information, please contact your state Department of Commerce."
(Disclaimer: IANAL, and the following is speculation). Whilst it's understandable that most employees won't understand tax law, there should be someone there that *does* (or should) and should have been informed/questioned about th
Re:zzz (Score:4, Funny)
So that's where the missing Zs went. Give them back, scoundrel!
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As for the second part.. She is living her life. Gaming is a part of it. What should she
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The net - where men are men, womem are men, and 13 year old girls are FBI agents.
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WoW is becoming too much like real life. I get begged in my front yard and street walkers hang out as close as a block from my place (telling them I am broke since I look the part is the instant way to avoid being hassled by the street walkers anyway) - need a different game with more fantasy.
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As a first step, get rid of any addons you've installed. If that doesn't fix the problem, reinstall Windows, or run a virus scanner to get rid of the crap that your machine is almost certainly infested with. If you're using Linux, you may need a more recent version of Wine.
However, I routinely play WoW for probably a minimum of four hours a day with absolutely no problems. It doesn't crash for me
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