f13.net

Surprised this hasn't been posted already

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=106771592



Blizzard implemented many spam prevention and control features with the latest patch. Prior to that it was expected that you would get spam whispers at least four times per hour, sometimes many more, and at least two spam mails per day, in game. Also, during the recent Stratic House of Commons with some Blizzard devs "Peons4hire" was spam leaving and joining, though it hasn't been determined if that was actually them or an angry customer voicing their displeasure at the spam.

Edit: forgot link

Somehow I have doubts that this will end the way that Blizzard wants it to.

I think it has merit.  It'll just be interesting to see how they enforce a judgment against a company based in China.

I hope peons4hire burns to the ground. I fucking hate advertisement in real life and I hate it even more in games.

Its interesting that this is finally happening.  But as with most high-level legal battles, Blizzard doesn't REALLY want this to go to trial because of the offchance the other side prevails and anti-internal policing precedent is on the MMO law books. 

IMO, if they don't use CAN-SPAM, trespass to chattels is a likely slam dunk.

If I was Blizzard, I might want to take that chance to roll the dice and get a nifty precedent on the books in their favor.  We've seen with Davidson v. Internet Gateway (the bnetd case) that they're willing to go the distance, so why not now?

LOLZ
You can go to their site to sign up to be spammed...

"Peons4hire operates ethically in game and in life just as any corporation would responsibly act. If you would like to subscribe to the promotional materials / information update sent from Peons4hire, please feel free to let us know by entering the information below :"
http://www.peons4hire.com/Subscription.aspx

If they provided an opt-out and marked their spam as advertising, they'd actually have a reasonably decent defense under the CAN-SPAM Act.  The fact that they offer an opt-in is comedy gold.

Blizzard (or Vivendi, actually) was happy to take the bnetd case to trial so I have no doubt they are willing to take this one to that point if necessary as well.

I hate those peons4hire assholes and I hope Blizzard destroys them utterly. Their constant spam actually makes my gaming less fun.

lol, SOE has been talking smack for years about how they were "Trying" to prevent spam... They were always full of shit. This is the first real attempt by an MMO company to stop it. It makes me almost want to go back and play Wow again.

And... they don't have to win. A huge company like Sony or Blizzard could destroy a little company like that with ease... just flood them with lawsuits. Sue them for using the name "Wow." Sue them for breaking the TOS. Sue them for hurassment. Sue them for being assholes. Sure, most of them would get thrown out. But the company would go out of buisness just based on legal fees.

As CmdrSlack said the company is based in China -- it's not going to be that easy to shut them down.

I detest the gold sellers as well. It shouldn't be too hard to set up filters in game that catch keywords and after a certain character get's tagged a few times, a GM shows up. Result? Account banning and credit card blacklist or game card revocation and loss. IF these 3rd party sites start losing money on subscription fee's, it forces them to charge more for their gold, and makes it less attractive for buyers, spiraling it into death.
I hope Blizzard destroys them, and other game companies (EVE!) follows suit.

Tell 'the party' that Peons4hire is creating a negative nationalist sentiment against their country which will hamper their economic boom as Americans grow more fearful and angry at the People's Republic due to their position as a rising superpower and their only Chinese exposure being spam?

Suddenly the company is gone and most of their top people are erased from record of ever existing. Problem solved.

Wow (no pun intended), that's like the most naive thing I've read here in a long long time. Was that supposed to be green?

It's a shady foreign company so they will probably just close up shop and you will start getting spam from grunts4hire.  I doubt they even respond to the lawsuit at all.

I've never gotten into the whole f13... green... thing. But the comment was not intended to be taken seriously, if it helps you overcome the shock!

Yes that does help.

The same way other companies have forced judgements against companies operating in Asia, threaten to pull out investment until regional authorities "enforce" the judgement for them.

I've always been an advocate of:

Add the following line to the TOS "any violation of this agreement will result in a processing charge of up to $100 to your subscribed credit card"
Then setup your own "Gold4U" website
When people show up to buy gold, They buy like $20 worth
Then you send them their reciept email that says "Thank you, your account has been banned and your credit card has been charged a $20 processing fee for the trouble."

Once word got out about that, I think the problem would clear itself up pretty quickly.

The key is penalizing players, not sellers. Kill the market.

Buy gold. You now have a seller's account and IP. Watch the transfers for a month from both account and other accounts on that IP and collect a bunch of accounts.

Or better strip every character on those accounts bare. Let everyone laugh at the level 70s without a shred of equipment.

Blizzard did that "on accident" to a bunch of level 60s in the pre-expansion patch. I cancelled the week before but 3 people I knew  logged in after the patch and everything that was in their bank/bags was missing. One guy was left with just his "pink festive dress" from one of the festivals and a 10-lb trout because he happened to be wearing those when he last logged out.

Took Blizzard a month to get stuff back to most people.

You are going to what?!

They've already penalized the players by making some portions of the game less fun than going to work. 

You say that as though playing the game instead of earning a wage was an option.

That doesn't work if you pay by game time cards.

I've said consistently that MMPORPGs are the only genre of games where people will play even though they don't actually enjoy playing the game. If it's less fun than going to work then, DON'T PLAY.

I think FPSes are the biggest yawn in human history. But I don't play them and pay someone in an attempt to make them fun. GEEZ.

"So thats $20 for 100g? Ok cool, send it over to Numtini on the double!"

I just got you banned. :P

My theory about how the gold sellers are now doing the spam thing:

It looks like you just need an email and solve a captcha to get a trial account.  I think that they figured out a way to automate it, autolog into the game, spam, delete character.  There is probably enough lag time before the account is banned that they can do a handful of servers on each account.

The hardest part might be automating solving the captcha, but that problem has been mostly solved.

If I'm right, this would mean that "account banning and credit card blacklist or game card revocation and loss" won't work, among other things.

This is not true. The entire gaming populace seems to have a problem with maximizing their fun. Generally, about 15-20% of games released in any given year across all platforms is worth playing. In other words, there's a 1 in 6 chance that, while you may be having some fun, you're not maximizing your fun.

I feel like I should write some sort of elitist expansion book for Raph's Theory of Fun.

No one will read that either.

Ok. That was funny.

It does when they used their Credit card to buy the gold... They've already paid. And to avoid possible legal questions about the transaction, you could actually put the Gold in their account right before you banned it. Now that would be funny.

OIC, sorry I misunderstood what you said originally. However that would likely qualify for whatever the non-law enforcement term for entrapment would be.

Well, if Blizzard set up its own RMT site on the sly just to catch people buying gold, there's no civil version of entrapment, but arguably the buyer isn't in breach of the TOS if the buyer is buying from the fake Blizzard site.  I mean, he's buying FROM Blizzard essentially. 

Besides, that sounds like a lot of work (and stupid) to catch people BUYING gold.  It seems to me that the whole point here is stopping spammers.  Not gold sellers.  Spammers.  It just so happens that the spammers are gold sellers.  Blizzard's main problem is that people are over-using its bandwith and server capacity to farm gold and then spam players (who get pissy and threaten to leave) with their offers to sell gold.  It's easier to get traction in court based on the argument that the spam is bad.  Arguably, the farming behavior also over-uses the service, but it's not necessarily out of the bounds of the TOS.  After all, regular players farm gold to buy shit like their flying mounts.  (Assuming that they can't just sell themselves for the gold needed.) 

So yeah, the real issue here is spamming, not gold farming.  Even if Blizzard wins, it'll only stop the spam from this one party, not from others (but will probably scare 'em off) and it won't stop the farming overall. 

I'm actually more concerned about what the Gold sales do to the gaming economy than the in-game spam.

Edumacate me here...

Wouldn't the US government be interested in these companies due to the fact they are doing business (so to speak) in the US, collecting US dollars, but not paying US taxes?

Or is this one of those grey areas in the virtual world that hasn't been hammered out yet?

Grey areas.  I give Amazon a lot of international business because I don't have to pay local sales tax/GST/VAT which can be ~20% in some countries - meaning I don't pay any local taxes.  This is even more grey because there is no physical items being moved so local customs can't whack me with a 'pay us duty' notice. 

The IRS has taken note of the VW arena and RMT.  As far as I know it is still up to the individual to do the "right" thing and pay their taxes on their USD gains from RMT.  There was a bunch of sturm and drang about it a few months back, IIRC.

The ones they should be suing are the GaMeworker fucks who imply they are GMs on their spam.  "you know our gold is safe because it comes directly from GaMeworkers!", right fuckers.

Very specifically, I think whats going to really get the government involved are people that buy coin with real money, then enter the game and gamble (Eq2 slots machines and the Sims actually have gambling halls, etc...) and then resell their winnings. That kind of shits going to blow up in a developers face one day. "I gambled my retirement away in EQ2! I didn't know it was gambling! I'm sueing!!!!" Sounds silly now... but just wait.

Move company to southern Afghanistan and hire current staff as contractors?

Conversely, Remedial (former Goonswarm CEO in EVE) got hammered with an unexpected tax demand based on the (legitimate in EVE) timecards-for-ISK referral scheme Goonswarm has set up with one of the timecard sellers.

If he was making a profit (even a small one), then yeah, I can see how the IRS may ask for its share.  Even bartered goods are taxable income.

This is all of a good thing. The spam was absolutely ridiculous, and I'm sure Blizzard's GM's got tired of being spammed with complaints about yet another faceless goldbot spam. Fuck Peons4hire or any other gold farming bitch outfit. They deserve to get shankfucked by large Zulu warriors.

I thought I read somewhere that they had nerfed trial accounts- they were only able to send /tells to characters who had spoken to them first. Between that and the new spam filter, I have only gotten 2 gold spams in the past week. Yay.

However, now I'm seeing randomly named characters in the Org bank/AH area using say spam.  However, they can't do that from the starting area, so at least they have to have a human or bot run there.  And the right-click report spam button seems to be working wonders.

The problem is, if you can buy the client for $10... You can setup your macro program to create a character, Spam a server, delete the character and then start it on another server. By the time the they figure out who you are and bann you, you've already hit 10 or more servers. All they have to do is get 1 buyer from all that and the accounts paid for itself. It's even easier in EQ2 because you can get the client NEW for $3 if its the origional EQ2 box without expansions.

Blizzard are doing something because people are opening tickets. When you get spammed, open a service ticket reporting the character. If you have an open ticket, edit it to add to the existing ticket.

Stop reporting people, let them spam yelling in Ironforge. Everytime you people think you've succeeded in "driving them out" they immediately come back with something more intrusive. They're now starting to spam group invites so you'll be getting invite pop-ups every 20 minutes or so.

RMT gold sales are a part of MMO*, and part of them forever, period. You lose, they win. Live with it. No matter what you do to try stopping them, it's just making them come up with something even more annoying than what they did before. Just think people, you were all sooooooo happy when they banned sales on Ebay. That's what started this mess in the first place. Stop while you're ahead.

There is absolutely nothing that any company, anywhere can do to stop that won't net them more account losses than retentions. They are here, and here forever.

Blizzard should hire Blackwater to track them down.

They're certainly doing a great job of cleaning up Iraq.

Seriously though, getting rid of, or even just reigning in gold dealers will be every bit as successful as the "War on Drugs" or ending prostitution.

Are they? I wouldn't know. My addons automatically close unsolicited duels and group invites. Don't you buy gold?

Can you point me to a company that has tested that theory? The thing that drives gold farming is the amount of gold a casual player with more cash than time typically makes, and the amount a gold a farm bot playing 24/7 in an optimized way can earn. The amount a bot can earn could easily be capped. Set the cap low enough, and farming is uneconomical even in China.

My theory is the account gains from casuals you would get by capping gold acquisition would way outweigh the account losses from bot like players who would reach the cap. Its a theory entirely without any evidence either way for it though. I've never heard of a MMORPG that tried it. Have you?

OK, so the farmers would just need more accounts, and the process would continue.  Heck, that would be playing into the hands of the farmers, as they would be more than willing to pay for more accounts to max the gold they could earn, and then sell it off to those who don't have multiple accounts.  Buying gold would give an even greater advantage to the players who did.

Yes, I love buying gold as I have tons more cash than time to farm. Since they'd banned Ebay sales Peons is the company I use and have never had a problem with them. IGE fucked me pretty good once so I won't use them again. I also don't use any add-ons as I think they're cheating, so whatever it is they end up doing I get annoyed by.

Also, pardon my hostile, trenchant tone earlier. I've got some sort of flu that's really beating the hell out of me. 5 minutes after I posted that, I simultaneously projectile vomited and shit diarrhea into my pants while I collapsed to the floor. Doing something like that at work really, really sucks. Plus I spewed into the cap door on an STK/SUN tape silo and had to make a subordinate clean it out since I couldn't even stand up without spewing more. Ugh. Just Ugh.

Spoken like a true (admitted) gold buyer.


Oh. Okay. 

Wouldn't want to cheat, after all....

 :roll:

yeah fuck those cheatin raid guilds. real men don't use raid assist

But they do buy gold, don't forget that.

BTW bob, do you only come here when you have some massive problem?  Last time I saw a post by you, you hadn't slept in 48 hrs before posting because of something about your kid.  I'm getting tired of making sympathetic noises before refuting your points.

So anyway, thanks for all the spam.  The leap of logic it takes to say we are the problem by supporting countermeasures, where you aren't by buying gold, is breathtaking.

Real men don't. Add-ons are for bitches, especially when the people using them go on and on about how whatever it is they're doing takes skill and then turn around and use so many mods they barely need to be involved in the game. Especially healers. Any healer that has to use a mod fucking sucks. If your game system requires your healers to use some giant whackamole healthbar display mod, your game is broken, needs redesigned, and you fucking suck as a game designer. If you can't raid without raid assist, it means the game is fucking broken and that they need to incorporate the features of Raid Assist into the game or FUCKING REDESIGN RAIDS. Seriously, what about that is not obvious?


Yes, they do. Oh, they'll never admit it, but they do. It's like porn - or do you really think it's 1,000 people spending $150,000 a year on WoW gold that are supporting this industry? In fact, I'd be willing to bet that half the people rubbing their ouchy pussies about it in this thread have bought/buy gold. I at least man up and admit it.

I come here all the time and I've made plenty of posts since then. The apology was for Righ, most of the the rest of you can go fuck off back to whatever bridges you live under and go back to eating goats. Don't feel the need to make any sort of noises before "refuting" my points, I don't consider most you real people anyway. You're things that make text appear that I use to occupy my bored at work time. But so far you haven't refuted anything, except called my posting habits into question. And don't bother doing that in the future. The tone of my posts don't differ enough that you should feel the need to be sympathetic.


Thank yourselves for the spam mother-fuckers! For years we were perfectly happy buying gold on Ebay where you never had to be involved or even aware of it. It had nothing at all to do with you, and there was nothing involved in game. If you wanted to buy gold you actually had to look for it. Then you guys rubbed your pussies about it and got them to ban Ebay sales. Did you really think the industry was just going to go away? How fucking naive are you people? So then they moved on to sending you a spam mail a couple times a week. Sure, more annoying then nothing, but nothing that took more than a few seconds to deal with and be done. And save the "A couple? I got 50 spam mails a day!" In know you didn't, I play on both a release server and a new one... the most I ever got in one day was 5. So you all bitched about that. And once again, what the fuck did you think was going to happen? I'd keep going about you all rubbing your pussies and making worse each time, but it's pretty tiring pointing the cause and effect of your own actions. I'm sure you'll continue to refuse to see what I'm saying and keep laying the blame at the feet of the eight people who buy a million and a half dollars worth of gold apiece each year. Remember though, until you all decided to "crush" the gold industry, we'd been buying it on Ebay for years with no annoying shit going on in-game.

Gold selling is never, ever going away, ever - no matter what anyone does about it. There is nothing you can do about it, and each time you try it's only going to make the process a bigger pain in everyone's ass. The only thing that can possibly stop it is for the MMO companies to offer gold themselves at a cheaper price. Period. That's it. So all that shit and pipe-dreaming about your foolproof plans for stopping it are just wishful thinking.

 :wink:

If you (and the millions like you) weren't buying gold, there'd be no RMT industry, and thus no in-game spamming. Which is wishful thinking, of course, but the "cause" in cause-and-effect is spelled with you.


Unfortunately this is true. But blaming spam on the people who aren't buying gold ... there's a word for that. Deflection? Spin? If only I had the flu; I could really go to town and expand my vocabulary, but you get the drift.

I think that would be lovely, and a much better solution than being spammed to death by fuckwads with little grasp of the English language.

Psycho.

Gee Bob, how far can you projectile vomit from that soapbox you just climbed on?

Watch that first step.......

This one seems to have worked for the pet food issue.... (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6699441.stm)

I thought it was a lovely post. And I'll throw myself out there as one of the evil gold buyers. I have to work all day. I can spend what I make in an hour and receive what I'd have to farm 12 hours for. It keeps me up (somewhat) with the lifeless kiddies. I could really give two shits if you feel its messing up the economy.

I also buy/sell accounts. I've made money in every MMO I have played, maybe broke even on a couple after you count up the monthly. In all, its a lot of free entertainment if you got skills :)

Two points here, skippy.  First, people buy gold because THERE IS A PROBLEM WHEN A GAME REQUIRES TONS OF TIME PUT IN TO ADVANCE.  Plain and simple.  This is NOT the same as spending hours training for a marathon or ironman, or practicing pitching in the hopes of making it to The Show.  The ability to play a game and farm gold is a function of time, not skill.  People with more money than time will find ways to short-circuit the "time to advance" equasion if they cannot make reasonable progress in the time they have to play.  This is a design issue. 

Second, Bob has a point about the cause-effect of taking steps against RMT type folks.  In Second Life, RMT is just fine and dandy.  The company runs its own currency exchange.  One NEVER sees spam from money-sellers.  Why?  Because it's not necessary.  People know where and how to get their cash.  There's a fucking button that opens the interface.  Seems to me that making things forbidden kinda contributes to the spam.  Now, you may discount Second Life for a lot of reasons, but a spam-free monetized virtual currency trading environment is not one of them.

And there is a 3rd party market for buying Linden dollars and land in Second Life with real money from someone other than Linden Labs. Everybody wins.

It's a little disingenious to rail about the evils of addons and how a real man won't use them but to be okay with buying gold.  A real man would earn every copper.

If you're okay with it, fine, but gimmie a break on that line of thinking.

And nobody gets spammed.  Heck, when I was working on a big land development project, I bought Linden dollars with USD.  I needed the cash to buy land, etc. and since there's not too many ways to earn cash in the world that aren't slow and/or lame, hey, no biggie.  I even bought them from IGE.  The service was fast and efficient.  I guess that makes me part of EVIL INCARNATE, but hey, my shit got built on time and was widely liked.  So hurrah.

Were you trying to refute my points, chief? Because you didn't. Let's go through it again. Try to just read what I'm writing this time.

We have RMT because there's a market for it. No market, no RMT. No RMT, no spam. Blaming spam on those of us who don't buy gold is ignorant at best.

Blaming spam on the game design makes sense. Game -> timesink -> market -> rmt -> spam. But you haven't refuted what I said.

This is ironical.

Welcome to two pages ago.

edited to be less offtopic:  To be clear, I don't care much either way about RMT or gold selling.  I don't like spam much, but I can live with it.  I'm just here for the logical fallacies :)

What you said was "People who buy gold are why the RMT industry exists."  I'm paraphrasing, but that's what you said.  I'm not trying to refute you, but moreso trying to point out that you're missing that key first step -- what creates the demand for the gold.  The flawed game design creates the demand for the market.  So, basically, playing the games at all endorses the design choices that initially created the demand for a RMT industry.  At the end of the day, it's futile to rail against RMT because it's going to stick around in one form or another.  There is no more magic circle.  None.  All of the analogies as to how it's cheating are fundamentally flawed, and people should just get off their high horses and suck it up.  Either buy gold or don't buy gold, but as long as there's linear advancement with more cash sinks than faucets, you'll have RMT.

Comparing buying L$ in SL to buying gold in EQ/WOW/etc. is apples and oranges. Buying Lindens is basically the standard way they enter the economy. That's the funding mechanism. It's not a game in which one completes for Lindens. It's a game in which you buy stuff.

While there's no spam, it doesn't take much to find advertising for SLExchange, there's over 800 terminals in the game to buy lindens from.

You people keep throwing around "flawed game design" like having something that people desire in a game is a flaw.

The only really possible problem here is that you don't like the "normal" way to get gold.  Because you don't like it doesn't mean it's a flaw.

Does the 1919 World Series prove that baseball is fundamentally flawed? After all, if you can steal a base, why can't you sell it? Doesn't it belong to you?

Does cheating at cards mean that card games are inherently flawed?

Can you name a game at which people will not cheat if they can get away with it?

The issue is that people are able (currently) to get away with it. There's no sanction whatsoever to RMT. They don't ban buyers, only sellers. The buyers are the ones cheating. Ban a few /played 500 hour ubers for buying gold and you'll see a bigger turn around than you think.

It's all a matter of accountability.  If the risk outweighs the benefit of cheating, very few will risk being caught.  Of course sociopaths are ubiquitous and will cheat regardless of the consequence.  There will be cheaters in any game.  The best that you can hope to do is minimize their impact on the rest of the paying customers.

Its a fallacy to equate people who complain about tell spam with people who complain about people eBaying gold. I may not be fond of mobs of gold farmers choking up spawns, but I couldn't care less how people play the game if it doesn't grossly interfere with my play. As a result, I may have whined about gold farmers in the past (they really haven't been so much of a problem in WoW as in other games), but I've never asked a games company to go after people eBaying gold, loot or characters. Flashing windows from constant gold selling tell spam directly interferes with my enjoyment of a game, and so I'll complain about them, and be part of the reason that Blizzard takes action. I don't see random group invites, so that's your problem, not mine. Deal with it.

And I may scoff at folks for paying good money after bad to shortcut "the grind" out of a game when I'm of the opinion that unless getting there is part of the fun, it ain't worth playing (or paying), but then they scoff at me for augmenting said game with loser addons. Different strokes is all. However it was amusing to see Bob rail against other folks for a problem he's at least equally guilty of creating. But unknown people talking to me when I'm killing foozles can go to hell. And that goes for newbies begging me to take them through Wailing Caverns, people telling me my epic axe is cool, and somebody wanting to know where a quest mob is too. Do you idiots think I play these games to socialize?

I'm not actually missing the game design's role in all of this. I know that these games are designed to contain massive timesinks.

I guess what I'm doing is holding players responsible for their own behavior. And calling shenanigans when they try to deflect the blame onto someone else.

Here's a rough time flow of what happens:
1) Player realizes they're in a time sink. Either consciously or otherwise.
2) The player either decides to buy gold, or the player is compelled to buy gold.
3) Player buys gold from an RMT organization.

What happens in step 2 is important. Is the player in control of their own decision-making process?

If so, the players who buy gold are responsible for the existence of the RMT market.

If not, well, they aren't responsible. Maybe they shouldn't have access to credit cards or the internet either.

Whether RMT is a horrible evil doesn't enter into it. I personally don't care about RMT in and of itself. If there weren't any spam, the closest I'd come to noticing the effects of RMT would be at the auction house.

This isn't technically accurate.  They do ban buyers if they implicitly catch it ocurring.   However, the processes required to track and execute that type of policing would be very cost-intensive, and its easier to eliminate the supply than it is to kill the demand.  Besides, banning a buyer is terminating a customer and a revenue stream, while eliminating thes etrial account spammers and banning a few select farmers makes major progress while limiting the PR and client side nightmare.

In general, Blizzard has done a good job limiting the spamming.  I have not gotten any tells since 2.1 went live and I haven't noticed the city say spam.  Then again, I am quick to put people on ignore when I can't read my chat log from all the enchanter/ JC/ gold seller spam.

I've never bought gold.  I have purchased cash for use in Second Life.  Never anything for an actual game. 

I think massive timesink systems are rather flawed.  It's pretty obvious to me that a system that encourages catassing is at best the easy way out for creating fun.  Lazy design is lazy design.  Games like CoX don't seem to have a huge market for buying Influence/Infamy -- why is that?  Is it lack of players or because the design focus that moved away from an item-based advancement scheme killed the need for it?  I'm sure some people do it anyway, but I'm willing to bet that as a percentage of player population, it's lower than for a game like WoW.

Seems like design decisions certainly do influence player behavior to some extent, eh?


Well, for whatever reason, the spam is there.  I don't know if it's truly possible to prevent (mail spam becomes chat spam), but at very least games should give some kind of privacy options for those who want them.  Doesn't WoW have some kind of system that allows users to say, "Don't accept incoming whispers unless from my whitelist" or "Mail from my friends only, please?"

Maybe that would make grouping tougher (at least as far as whispers are concerned), but maybe not.  I don't claim to have a good solution, I really enjoy RMT from an academic perspective -- there's some nifty legal issues that entertain me when I'm bored.

Real men have jobs and families and don't have the time to grind.

Support Real men everywhere!!! VOTE YES on Proposal RMT!

I don't think it is illogical to suspect that closing off one advertising method for a highly desired and highly profitable product will likely result in the sellers resorting to as-yet unthought of advertising methods which may be even more annoying.  Now, I'm not sure if I agree that in an alternate universe where SoE never decided to ask EBay to remove EQ sales that IGE still wouldn't have bought up a bunch of EQ fan sites and that Peons wouldn't be spamming gold ads in WoW tells, but it's not a crazy idea. 

To make a wildly exaggerated, quasi-apt-at-best analogy (i.e. an analogy on the internet), banning cocaine didn't do much to curb sales of the product, it just forced people to sell it in a way that causes all sorts of collateral problems. 

You know what i don't get? what the hell are people doing with so much wow gold?.  I've never considered buying gold because ive never needed to even think about it.  You don't NEED an epic flying mount, you don't NEED boe epics.  Theres very little reason to farm for gold, by the time i reached 70 i had easily enough gold for a regular flying mount and that was after buying an epic mount at 65.  I log in and pvp most days, i raid 3 times a week, i DO NOT farm, ever.  I just dont get it, wheres the flaw? what are people doing that they need all this gold?

Potions.

Repairs on Epics. Especially plate.

My last stint with WoW I didn't buy gold and I didn't use mods.  Beat them hairy balls, babies!  (http://www.aquariacentral.com/forums/images/smilies/raspberry.gif)

Every one is comming out of the closet here. So, I will as well. I have bought gold/plat/isk in EQ1, EQ2, EVE and WOW. Not often and not without muttering to my self. But do you honestly play these games to be a second class citizen? I think on this message board we all should chime in. Theres a broken mechanic here and an income stream that should by rights go to the developers/producers.

I use the pvp potions and have mostly epics to repair, i guess if you are in one of the very top guilds your potion budget would be extreme but thats still a very small % of the population that couldnt possibly be buying all the gold.  I'd would ask the people who have bought gold if they didnt mind posting what they needed it for.  Once again, i dont farm and don't feel like a second class citizen at all, my guild is at mags lair atm and i do regular pvp/arenas as well as raid regularly.  My gold supply slightly goes up week by week, ill never afford an epic flying mount but it doesnt bother me.

What were you, level 30? You don't strike me as someone who'd ever hit max level. "Level 30 finally! Ok now where to- ooooh, new korean MMO. MUST TRY!"



As far as grinding gold I've never had a problem with it. I listen to a lot of music and if I didn't have a boring, low attention required activity to do while listening to music I'd just be sitting here with my eyes closed doing nothing anyway. Therefore I lose nothing by farming gold. :P

My experience is all pre-BC. From what I hear, it is a ton easier to get gold than it was before.

The worst times were learning AQ.

There, the bosses dropped a total of about 75g each (less than 2g a person) so even if you had a clear run all the way through, you would usually lose gold on repairs if you died even once, regardless of class. Also, protection spec warriors and heal spec'd priests and druids really had no effective way to farm repair money. A warrior on a good night would have 25-30g in repairs. That was about 3 hours of farming for a protection warrior at the time.

Naxx was also bad because of the time commitment you had to put towards the instance along with the consumable costs.

I raided extensively ... for a while... on a warrior with blacksmithing and mining.  I rarely broke 50g and most of the time was dead broke.  But I still managed it somehow and didn't buy gold.

My current go is on a mage with two gathering profs, and I'm being as cheap as I can be.  I now have about 1500g at 68 with epic mount + skill already bought.  I'll be able to afford my normal flyer immediately, and probably my epic shortly thereafter.

So yeah.  I don't know why anyone needs to buy gold once they get past the learning curve of their first character.

I bought adena for Lineage 2.  I think that should be understandable, in a still-very-fucked-up kinda way.

Ok, so I only got to level 18 the last time in WoW.  But they were virgin levels!  And I got to level 50 in Lineage without buying adena or using 3rd party apps!  That alone is probably enough hair on my balls to weave ten Indian blankets!

Dammit.

When I went back to Gemstone III/IV like 4 years ago, I payed like $20 for 1m Silvers (in-game currency) to outfit my character and such (for reference, 1m isn't going to get you anything terribly uber, and I had to totally outfit a character).

When I went back with a buddy again last summer, I made the same transaction again (I had given all the money away when I left previously).

That is the extent of my RMT.

I think this is the only time any one has come out of the closet and become a first class citizen. :-D

 :rimshot:

I guess buying gold is a brilliant idea as a fix to a broken mechanic, therefore future patches should come in 1000 g increment at 10 bucks for every week.

Oh yeah.  The closet.  It's getting stuffy in here.

I've never bought anything in WoW as stated above, but I did buy a tamer account on Siege Perilous once, then resold it for about the same amount.  I also bought prepatch GSC leggings in AC1 back when such things mattered, then again I resold them.  Those were approximately a wash in terms of cash.

I later bought an AC1 account, which had some sweet characters on it, but that was the dawn of macroing, which I didn't get into, and the account was rapidly outclassed.  I lost money on that deal, but back then I wasn't married and had no kids so it was easy come, easy go.  I suppose I could still login to it if I remembered the info.

I haven't RMTd since, but I wouldn't be above it if I could be arsed to care about a game that was truly beyond my reach as a 2-3 hr a night casual.  WoW doesn't qualify (as being beyond my reach, that is).

I've sold gold and characters in multiple games, since we're all coming out of the RMT closet as it were. The only game I ever bought gold in was Lineage 2 because I bought it bulk from a farming boss via Western Union direct to China to resell for a profit (the markup is HUGE, especially when the boss can't speak English and has no way to directly present his product to a western customer base.)

I'm also friends with a bajillion farmers. They're quite nice, and they give you lots of free stuff.

Never bought anything IRL for a game*.  Because, well, it's a game.

I did, however, once go to the store and buy another Monopoly set and then I filled my wallet with the money and during the game with my family, I just kept buying hotels and streets and whatnot, right outta that wodge.  It was awesome.  The look on their fucking faces when I totally fucking owned them.  Ha.  That'll teach them.  Fucking Noobs.



*Unless a character transfer from Blizzard counts because the Server was shite and my character wisnae.

Gold.  no pun intended

I usually sell my chars when im done with a game for good, does that make me an evil terrorist supporter?

Its not so much the timesinks, but that the reward for time spent is linear. So a farmer bot playing 500 hours a month earns ten times (or more) that earned by a casual player playing 50 hours a month. That is what makes the RMT transaction economically attractive. Ditch that linearity and you have a very different game, one with little RMT. My theory is that the new 50 hours a week players attracted to such a game would vastly outweigh the 500 hour a week players leaving. I doubt I will see that theory tested though, because the developers themselves are by nature the 500 hour player type. 



Real world drug analogies are not even quasi apt. We are talking server based worlds here. Any player behavior the server can reliably and cheaply detect can be banned. Better yet, just don’t implement the ability to do that behavior in the world. Most MMOGs don’t have illegal drugs coded in the database, so drug prohibition works perfectly. EVE does explicitly code illegal drugs in the database, so they do have an “illegal” drug problem.

Prohibition in an online world can work perfectly. It is just restricted to behaviors the server can reliably detect.

I've never bought anything from a third party (or even first party) for an MMOG. Ever. I've been given gold by Shockeye, who used to buy WoW gold, but at the time, I didn't know he'd bought it. My wife has sold a few accounts, in EQ and DAoC, but that's about it. I've just never seen the point, or had enough disposable income that I could justify it. I'd rather spend that money on other games, DVD's or you know, FOOD.

There's just no value to me in in-game currency.  There's always an easy way to make it and it never stops appearing out of the blue.  It's infinite. 

I do see a problem with a game that does not scale gold earned appropriately with what a player will realistically be spending.  Not enough of a problem to spend even more money to get ahead of the curve, though.

This sort of post turns on the economist in me, so I apologize in advance.

In a lot of ways, in-game gold is perfect money: not counterfeitable, infinitely transportable, divisible, fungible, and durable.  It does suffer from a few fatal flaws, to wit: it's entirely controlled by whoever adminstrates and codes the game, so its value is completely based on overall trust of that company.  Not only that, but the company's prime goal is typically to let people have fun, not create a stable system of exchange, so their goals are not exactly aligned with more serious uses for money.

Another flaw is that you can't directly exchange it for goods outside the world, for example the aforementioned FOOD. So there goes any possible argument of actual value (edit: leaving aside RMT)

However, one thing that occurs to me is: why do people use it as the standard?  If gold farming got so out of control that money had no value and everything was ridiculously expensive, would people start trading using things that are like money but not?  It would have to be something everyone agrees is valuable, like health potions.  Health potions are even bad because players can make them.

One reason people don't do that is that you can't trade via the AH with health potions.  You also can't buy things from NPCs (like mounts) with them.

Well that actually happened in AC, the pyreal was so devalued that people traded in barter form.

SoJ

Yheska.

They use it as the standard because there is not a real means to create another standard that is not overly complicated.  Currency was created over a really long (that's me being scientific) time.  Currency in games exists right away and is given to us as the standard to use - complete with easy ways to use that standard.  To barter is to make it MORE complicated.  Hell - bartering in most games is a nervous experience.

"Oh god I hope this guy doesn't know the item screen switcharoo trick - but this deal is so sweet!"

As far as I know, ykeshas where never used as barter material. Everquest gold was never sufficiently devalued that the players moved to a barter system. Or were you just being cute?

Add me to the list of people that never bought anything out of the game. I did sell my EQ accounts whole when I quit, got over $5k.

I've never bought anything from a third party, though I've thrown about $200 at transfering characters around in WoW. The only time I've ever sold anything was my old UO account to someone I knew then. I'll never do it again unless offered quite a lot, a couple hundred is enough to make me part with an old account. Never know when you might want to come back and regret selling it like I did that old UO account.

I think the influx of gold with the new daily-repeatable quests is in part to fuck up the gold sellers and their ilk. Why pay cash for this stuff when you can make 10-12 gold x10 per day for a bunch of simple quests?

Yeah, I'm making a ton of gold right now working on Netherwing faction and came to the same conclusion.  Just doing 6 repeatables a day I'm making about 120g in 2 hours.  I borrowed 2k from my wife to buy my epic flyer last Wednesday and I'm already up at 1400 gold again.  If I were to sell my greens rather than ship them to my Enchanter for DE/ Skillups I'd be even farther ahead.  Very nice.

For some reason, as totally logical as that is, I suspect it just provides some farmers with a much, much, larger quantity of gold to service even more people who are too lazy to do even the simplest of tasks.

On the plus side, things like that tend to fuck up the gold market so bad that a lot of farmers will have their profits turned to shit and go look for other games with a more favorable economy for farming.

We'll find out if I'm right, Turbine is banning gold buyers in LOTRO.

Incidentally, the goldsellers in LotR started with spam tells and in-game mails, rather than spamming the chat channels. Come to think of it, goldsellers in WoW have been doing that for ages too. I'm not sure I buy this theory that a "golden age" ever existed when the goldsellers happily spammed chat in Ironforge and refrained from sending annoying tells and mails.

Nah, the golden days were when this shit was on eBay and there was no in-game spam at all.

Really? I recall using them to trade just before Kunark came out. Forget how many of them I traded for a COF.

I recall receiving in-game mail spams occasionally as far back as I can remember.  That of course has the limiting factor of costing a few copper per letter, but the advantage that an interested buyer can hang on to the mail rather than having to copy down info out of a tell.

There was no in-game mail in EQ...maybe now, but not back then.

Ykeshas were totally used for barter material.  I remember doing deals for ykeshas several times.  Kunark dropped the bottom out of the ykesha market but even for months after Kunark launched they were still pretty standard items for mid-40's types.

You missed a really big fundamental flaw though--the currency source is infinite (spawns), and the influx rate to the money pool (M1? or is that M2--been a LONG time) is controlled by the consumers of said money pool.

Back when I was working with a team to design an MMO focused entirely on RMT (we elected to discontinue since back then their was too much investor risk since none of the laws were even close to being solidified), our core concept was that the total money pool for an entire shard was fixed at the start of the shard. Theoretically, years and years down the road, no more resource consumables would be available, and no more currency would "spawn"--the only way to get currency was a transfer.

We did design a mechanism to inject additional value into a shard's economy by RMT--effectively buying an additional amount of value that was injected to the value pool of the shard. The root idea was that at any time a player could either "cash in" or "cash out" directly from the shard itself, making it effectively a poker casino where the players played with their own money against each other, and the "house" simply took a rake from the transactions.

One, not immediately apparent, result of mudflation in modern MMO's is that the game becomes easier for new players over time.  I'm guessing here but I bet that helps build and maintain a 'long tail' of keeping old subscribers in game through alts.

I don't have the experience of having designed any RMT-based (or other) MMOGs, but with that caveat, I'd disagree to some extent with this statement.

I disagree that the currency source is any less infinite in the real world, where governments increase the money pool as the economy grows.  Both are potentially infinite but in practical terms controlled by the gate mechanism (gov't in RL, number of players in VL).  As players quit (assuming some don't give away their stuff) they remove their accumulated goods and cash from the pool, acting as a sink on the overall cash supply. When population reaches a plateau, the cash supply should also reach a plateau, especially if you put money sinks in the game to balance people's income versus their spend (repair costs, purchase of stuff from NPCs, etc)

I agree that the influx is controlled by the consumers (said players) but there is a practical limit on how fast it comes in (leaving aside duping and other cheats) based on how many players and how much they farm.

Puzzle Pirates got the whole RMT thing right. Almost no affect on gameplay, but they've sold a million dubloons.

On some servers I believe they'd mostly moved to a barter economy pre-kunark, late-release era but for a different reason. The argument went that there was nothing you could buy with gold so who needed it. This was before gold/plat selling really caught on and gave even the average player visions of sugar plums, when only a tiny number of people were selling gold on e-bay.

Peons has a new trick. I got invited to a group tonight by "fkjdkcjmkrjs".
That's not the exact spelling, but you get the point.

I declined the group invite, and did a /who on them instead.
My level 25 hunter, in Tarren Mill, was being invited to a group by a level 1 Tauren in Mulgore.

I speculate that the gold spam would have come in a party tell, instead of a whisper.
Had I decided to join the group, that is.

So, instead of /whisper gold spam, it's going to be party-invite spam. Time for the 3rd-party community to write a new plugin   :roll:

Yeah, I've gotten a random invite to a party before, and when I joined, there was a shitton of folks in a set of raid groups. I think there was gold spam before I figured it out, at which point I and a bunch of others dropped it. I didn't notice what level the invite was from.

That's going to be a shitton more annoying than tell spam.

Just get a mod that auto-denys group invites. Hell it is probably in the standard UI now.

Then turn it off if you need to be invited to a party. Problem solved.

EQ2 has an auto-deny group invites (and duels) option.  I'm sure WoW probably has it too, somewhere.  The hassle will be in having to turn it off when you DO want to join a group.

So next patch level 1 trial characters will lose the ability to create groups I guess.

Probably not letting trial accounts send invites to people more than 5 levels higher would do it.

For EQ2, force all the trial accounts onto exchange servers.

Some years back it would be hard to believe that peple actually will not go to work on Monday morning, instead they will log onto a PC and farm money that don't exist and sell it afterwards .. and that lawyers will get jobs for cases like that.

But hey, spammers and gold sellers we hate, hate, hate! What they do to game economy is one thing, how they bother people other, for both things they should be slapped and we should use all ways to do it. If Bliz sues them, then It's only positive and I hope they are more than successful.

More than successful?  I don't know, that implies that they completely ruin and wipe out the spammers and then go on and somehow affect the industry extra and on top of that.  Maybe it becomes a social stigma to sell gold or whatever.  Or a crime.  Worldwide.

Nah.

I'll give you that point in a way--but it's leaving the money pool completely under semi-random influence instead of direct, authoritative (and semi-informed) control like most modern economies is flirting with disaster, and when you're talking real money value in the virtual economy, that's very dangerous.

I read an article somewhere (have NO idea where) that the only real way to balance a mudconomy is to have wells (outflow) that are dynamic enough to adjust against the influx--basically to keep things relatively neutral. Without things like repair costs, mandatory vendor bought potions, etc, etc, all the money pool can do is go up, inflating the prices of everything in the mudconomy, and/or devaluing items due to farmed sources (if there are 5 swords of uberness in the game, they are worth xxx. Once there are 5000, they aren't worth anything unless demand goes up by the same amount).

Blizzard has added this really nifty new feature.  When you right click on a person's name, you can select "Report Spam" as one of the options.

So, join the groups, then you can right click the person's portrait and report them very easily with only one step.  Then drop group, go on with life.

There's always Automaton (http://www.wowace.com/wiki/Automaton) (download (http://files.wowace.com/Automaton/Automaton.zip)), it will (among other things) do a /who of whoever sends you a group invite that isn't in your Guild or on your friends list. This is probably the mod that Righ was talking about a few pages back.

I haven't had a single spam tell, ingame mail, or any random /invites  whatsoever since the big patch the other week. They've done well.

One interesting thing that Blizzard has done is mask out all website notation in chats. For a while it was rather comical as Peons kept changing their website and Blizzard kept masking it. Now Blizzard just said "fuck it" and now any sort of website notation is masked out. I had to do some creative spelling just to give a link to one of Paul Barnett's Warhammer videos to one of my guildies.