f13.net

Not sure if this old news or not?  I heard rumors of it a month or two ago, but this is the first time I have seen an official announcement.  I guess they are eventually morphing the entire network into Zam.com or something.  Never heard of that domain before, is it new?

http://www.allakhazam.com/
http://www.ogaming.com/data/1880~AllNews.php?storyid=10976

Good find, it's always nice to keep tabs on those shiteating bastards at IGE.

Allakhazam posted this on his forum (http://www.allakhazam.com/forum.html?forum=3;mid=114668646932202500;num=0;page=1):

So he says that there won't be any gold-selling going on in Allakhazam's, but who knows what will happen if goldseller advertisers start flinging money at the corporate overlords.

Wait.  They own both Alla and Thott?   Why dont they just merge them into one (or better yet, kill off the entire database of both and start from scratch.  Or maybe just ditch Thott alltogether.  Thing is so badly corrupted as far as drop rates and stuff go for WoW stuff it is rediculous.)

The goldsellers are the corporate overlords :)  The people that started IGE just formed an umbrella corporation with IGE as a sub company, then started branching out.  Who really knows what they own now, Yantis, PlayerAuctions on the goldseller side, OGaming, Thottbot, Allakhazam on the fan site side.  They've got so many various companies and identities setup everywhere, its hard telling and they are private so no need to divulge any information.

Hell, they may have even bought SOE at some point along the way - that would certainly explain a few things ;)

Wow.  They threw millions at Alla I'm sure, because he was always so staunch in his anti-IGE position.  Hell that was the only reason I maintained a sub there.  That's over now.

Looks like in a few years I'll stop the MMO gaming entirely.  The RMT stuff is getting stupid, and I refuse to partake just to play a game I'm already paying for.

Just so you know, there isn't a web dev on earth that wouldn't sell their site for a cool few million (indie bloggy databasey web dev that is - not stuff like IGN) and just start doing something else. NOT A SINGLE ONE. Even if it is IGE. That includes myself. I am not above retiring before I'm 50. And neither is Alla. That said, I would never EVER EVER EVER work for IGE in any capacity. I don't care how "far removed" from IGE Alla thinks he is, he's a dirty piece of shit now and deserves AIDS.

Well that was kinda my whole point.  He didn't say "Hey I sold it, see ya!" while rollling on his pile of money.  He's still in there posting and working, so he's a putz.

In the interests of educating the masses, who are still saying "no, it's not really IGE that bought Allakhazam, it's a company that owns IGE", I posted the following on page 2 of Allakhazam's thread. See if it lasts:

Thottbot was IGE's attempt to shut Alla out of the WoW market. You can see how well that went with this latest news.

Also: http://www.goblinworkshop.com/ for all your non-paedophile-owned (I think) WoW info needs.

There is SO MUCH information available on the web to very sneaky eyes about Brock Pierce and the structure of IGE.

Let me just say this, it involves Hong Kong, France, Canada and America. They have multiple offices with multiple dirty hands doing a ton of gray area shady work. There's a fair chance a lot of their practices are illegal.

To protect myself against libel, I'd like to say that this post was made by a lawn gnome. A lawn gnome that hates children fucking, tax evading, fleeing to the orient cocksuckers.

So Schild if the time ever comes that IGE makes a offer to you am I to understand that you are ok with the rest of us calling you a "a dirty piece of shit now and deserves AIDS"?

Just wanted to check.

If someone comes along and writes me a check with 6 or 7 zeros on it you can feel free to call me whatever the hell you want. I will be crying myself to sleep on my money stuffed pillows.

What WAP said. But either way, your reading comprehension is off. Let me bold something for you:


It's not that Alla took the money. I'd take it in a fucking heartbeat. It's that he's STILL working for them.

Companies like IGE don't just buy stuff. They buy infrastructure and the staff that created it.

Someone else sells out. News at 11. They can spin it however they want, but the independence they once had, and the fanbase that may have developed because of it, is over. They are The Man now.

Oh, and Alla probably could've sued IGE years ago had he been tracking IGE's actions. They've been squatting on Allakhazam related names for a Long Long time now, under the registered nick Andre Marcelo-Tanner. Between that and two other names, IGE probably owned about 300 (if not more) websites which were part of an elaborate network of weirdness. They tried to hide all of it, especially when news of them owning Thottbot came out.

You heard it hear first.

They stated (in not so many words) a long time ago when Alla first sold out that they'd crush him and force him to sell.  Well, that's been proven true.  It's funny in that sad, pathetic way to read the news thread over at Alla's and watch him try to justify it while most of his 'regulars' tell him to cram it.

   I'm sure he honestly believes what he's saying.. that he'll continue to keep gold ads off the site and not release the subscriber's data to IGE for spam purposes.   He'll do it right up until he's fired and replaced. The man has obviously forgotten what it's like working for someone else instead of yourself. 

Here's an article summarizing the history of Yantis and IGE: The truth about IGE and the gold industry (http://wow.azzor.com/445/truth_about_IGE.php)

Good for them.  I hope they enjoy the payoff for a job well done.

sow pls?

That article is a decent scratch at the surface, but whoever did the research should have kept digging. One day, ONE DAY, I'll write the article i've been meaning to write for over a year now.

(http://www.f13.net/schild/ige_blurred.jpg)

That's a (not current) tree of every site IGE owns. It's a LOT of them. Under a lot of fake names. Hosted on a lot of the same servers, run by a guy who used to be associated with OGaming who owns a fake hosting company (far as I can tell). Basically, they've got to be up to no good.

Worth reading.

The problem is it's only half of the truth, we'll never be sure about the other half, which I've made assumptions on, but will never know for sure. It's probably as secret as the recipe for coke. I think the secret ingredient is nutmeg btw.

Well.  So is the story of any entrepreneur.  Andrew Carnegie was a rotten bastard until he got his.

Hey I'm not excusing it.  Just pointing out that our generation has a chance to watch an old story unfold.

In The Escapist article (http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/42/3) about Richard and Robert Garriott, Richard and Robert had this to say about IGE and gold selling:

Stop making punitive time sinks. Or deal with the leeches. Not much of a choice really. No one's got the resources to watch the actions of every single player.

Even non-punative games such as Guildwars have IGE's fingers in them. Yantis got his start in UO.  Your only choice is to play games without economies (Planetside, BF2, etc. ) or play no games at all.

But.  Why?

Most of us are too fucking old to play the seventeen year old purist goth.  We know now how the world works.  Particularly the current times.  I challenge anyone to document the child slaves chained to the bedposts that crank out game money.  "Oh no I played a game and it was no excuse for career training!"

Doesn't exist.  If you want purity go play monopoly with your sister - just make sure you count her titles before you leave for the bathroom.

Nanny-staters.  /disgust

http://www.f13.net/schild/ige_blurred.jpg -> http://www.f13.net/schild/ige.jpg

Good one  :-).

PRE-EMPTIVE PAGE NOT FOUND!@112 I HAVE DROPPED MY GLASS OF WATER!!!

Indyhosting? Ran into them when researching my blog post tonight.

Allakhazam's latest post about who controls his site (but I can't help wondering whether it's IGE-Andraste posting as Allakhazam!):
http://www.allakhazam.com/forum.html?forum=3;mid=114668646932202500;page=6

Deleted. Apologies for those wondering what this post said.

No Lum, not Indy Hosting.

The problem with this thread is that you're not blatant enough.  Thankfully, fuckedcompany.com still host that flash movie:

http://www.fuckedcompany.com/den/ (http://www.fuckedcompany.com/den/)

Schild,

Whats this about evading pedophile charges? Any links to info on this?

How's next Thursday for "one day"? :)

I found the other article very interesting, I'd love to read whatever you have to add.

And yet, he's still getting the money from gold-selling farmers. That is some seriously skewed sense of ethics.

I would never sell my site to an outfit like IGE. EVER.

My ass.  Do you have kids?  Do you plan to?  Do you want to someday tell them that they could have lived in the best neighborhood and had the best education money could buy, but you turned it all down because having to post movies of Stalin acting like a hillbilly on a different domain twenty years prior would have been selling out to The Man?

Turn down a few million dollars for a website, and you're setting yourself up to feel like a Grade A schmuck when somebody gets cancer a decade later, and the insurance company wants to be assholes, and the bills are piling up.

You can say all you want, but unless I am destitute, I'd rather do what I'm doing than know that I sold my ideas and my creations to some cocksucker who makes a mint raping the games I am passionate about. I'd sell to EA first.

I'm not saying I wouldn't sell my site to someone, but I damn sure won't sell it to someone I KNOW I have a significant objection to their business practices.

If i was them I'd have done the deal so i hand over the site and disappear. No question about whether or not I'd take the money, but there's no way I'd stick around justifying it, especially if I'd taken an anti farming stance beforehand.

I make a comfortable living, but I would seriously consider blowing Yantis on live TV for $10m.  Go Alla.

$10 M won't cure herpes.

So? Herpes doesn't kill you and there are topical creams.

ethics aside, it would put a skid on your reputation.

Question is, how many people who are influential for future $ for you would care. 

Personally, I haven't used Alla in ages and now won't.  Who cares.  But maybe there are people they need to work with who are not players that will care. 

Humm, you don't have to sell your site, why don't youse guys (schild, Haemish...) with site know-how, and lotsa internet 'followers' do this:

Create some new sites following upcoming games.

Dump in lots of bland contents and forums.

Have all your friends post in 'shill' mode.

PROFIT!

Right-click and Save As on this link (http://www.fuckedcompany.com/den/DENMovie.swf) to take your own copy of the DEN movie, just in case ... Or left-click to watch it in glorious fullscreen :)

Edit: Also, someone on the Allakhazam site dug up a classic: Allakhazam says never ever, one year ago (http://www.vanguardsoh.com/forums/showpost.php?p=190819&postcount=260)

Thats a great idea! Can we be like "shareholders" if we all post on the site in order to drive up potential profit?
Hell what do you think the potential profit is on something like that? How much are these guys actually getting for selling their sites? Because I have 10k sitting in the bank I could invest if Schild wanted to run the site!

Or save as, open a new browser window, and drag into the window. Use ShiftWindow to nuke the window. Best of both worlds!

Err, because that matters...

I know that IGE sells gold and shit, and that Thott is the walkthrough-page for WoW.  I've never visited either, and all of the rest are completely unknown to me.

/shrug

Anyway Haem, when someone comes along and plunks down ten million dollars for GameAngst, and the real tangible allure of being filthy rich overwhelms you, I promise not to call you a hypocrite or whatever.  The ability to, say, fly one's hypothetical child across the world for a bone-marrow transplant fifteen years from now (or whatever) outweighs taking an ethical stance against people who run sweatshops to sell play-money in videogames.  At least in my book.

So, wait.. all of the gold-selling websites are pretty much owned by IGE with the exception of a few that Yantis now runs? I'm not sure I understand the point behind the fake competition between them then?

Ever play Deus Ex 2? zomg!

In all seriousness though, I was surprised this didn't happen earlier. I wonder how long it'll take for IGE to infiltrate this (http://www.nogold.org/) network, though. :P


-- Z.

Who cares, nogold.org is webmasters, not devs.

Many of us older Internet users could have run porn sites back when there were maybe 2 on the entire ARPAnet.  Believe it or not, money isn't everything to your children.

I think Yantis actually works for IGE now.  I think I remember a hubub about him getting bought out a few years ago.

That link that was posted earlier at azzaz or whatever says Yantis was bought-out of that deal for 32 mil., and then freed from his non-compete when IGE couldn't continue to pay that buy-out.  He now runs some other gold & auction site.

Some of you folks act as if RMTing is evil or something. Come on. Does anyone really think anything in the entertainment business is some altruistic pursuit inspired by raw divinity?

Now, I can certainly see people turning down real money for truly bad things (drug trafficking, assassination, you know, the bad stuff). But "selling out" a website to a bunch of money folks who care not for the quality of any individual element when they're basking in the richness of the cumulative total? Come on. Some people just need to get their backs up about stupid shit don't they.

Amen, some people act like selling their website to IGE means its going to be filled with child porn all of the sudden.  They sell gold for online games, big freaking deal.  I don't sell gold, i don't buy gold, i also don't give much of a shit if other people do and i wish to god i would have had the same idea this guy had back in the UO days.

And theres nothing wrong with porn sites either :P.

Mate, nothing is stopping you now.  Go mine, or get a coalition to mine to your heart's content.  Sell it to millions. 

However, just because you don't have a problem with dealing with pedophiles doesn't mean I have to accept it or IGE's business, which might in any way support that activity.  Although I've never bought gold, I've sure as hell advocated people not buy it from IGE because I believe this.

Libel city, next stop.

Seriously.  Yes, there's the DEN stuff and the one guy who was brought up on the pedo charges.  Calling IGE "pedophiles," while grammatically incorrect (corporations are singular, not plural), is treading on defamatory ground, especially when there's guys there who were never ever involved in DEN.  Now, that said, feel free to hate them.  I just think some of the "community" sites need to watch what they say to make a point.  It's all fun and games until someone gets a C&D letter.

EDIT -- As far as the whole thread goes, I agree with Darniaq.  Feel free to hate them if you like, but they're more than likely here to stay.  All the railing against them you can do is pretty pointless.  Until games don't require soul-crushing grinds, power disparities based on time played and other level and loot-based bullshit, we'll see a perceived need for RMT.  Someone will fill that market.  Taking the moral high-ground only works if everyone agrees on the rules of morality.  Clearly, not everyone does.

 

See, this is a fallicy.  It's not soul-crushing grinds or any kind of grind that will stimulate RMT.  It's /any/ kind of in-game economy.  Of all the people I'd expect to be against RMT the most it's the virtual-world trippers.  However they seem to be the segment of the community most OK with it, while the folks on the 'just a game' side of things are the ones who get most pissed.  It's a dichotomy I've never really fully understood.

I think it has to do with the fact that the virtual world folks want to view these spaces as having some kind of "thereness."  Dan Hunter has a great law review article on the Tragedy of the Digital Anti-commons where he examines the effect that using physical location language to describe the Internet has on the Internet itself.  It's a ton of postmodern criticism and legal theory wanking, but enjoyable if you're that kind of dork (I am).  His theory is that using those kind of metaphors is bad.  VW mavens want to believe that we can qualify this stuff as being real -- after all, we TALK about it as if it was real and are all emotional about our toons and stuff....it MUST be real! 

The "it's just a game" crowd likely just doesn't want to fuck with all the mess and thinks that it adds extra drama to their recreation.  I guess the sentiment would be something similar to, "I don't come to your job and slap the dick out of your mouth..."  When I go to Cubs games, I don't want Sox fans there rooting against the Cubs (unless we're playing the Sox).  I don't go to Sox games to root against them.  (Unless they're playing the Cubs.) 


As far as the fallacy goes -- even if you didn't have an in-game economy, you'd still have RMT -- people would sell fully levelled characters or fully geared out characters.

I think you're right.

I don't have much of a problem with this, particularly.  I would prefer to play a game that RMT doesn't exist in; I am happy to see it in the TOS; but as far as spending money toward tracking down the RMT people in the game versus making new content or fixing bugs, my priorities are on the latter rather than the former.  Unless RMT fucks up my gaming enjoyment.

It seems impossible to stop. 

I don't know which I would prefer, a game like WoW with RMT going on through outside outfits or SOE who is doing it themselves.  I guess I'd have to see how it works.  I've never engaged in RMT, never sold a toon, never bought gold or other items, nor sold them.  Part of my enjoyment in playing is certainly in playing the in-game economy.  If the in-game economy doesn't get fucked up, then I don't really care.

I would use an alternative to Thott or Alla if there was one, because while the idea of RMT doesn't bother me, IGE does.  They are predators through and through.

I actually don't have a problem with gold sellers. I have a problem with the way large gold farming houses and IGE in particularly do business. Which is badly. There's a reason I didn't have a problem with advertisiing gold farming. Specifically, it's taking money from someone you completely don't like. Just because there's something on a website doesn't mean it's something you support. If Alla had let gold farmers advertise instead of completely selling his soul, he could have slapped some banners up, made a pile of cash and still had the opportunity to rail them. Win/win in my book.

Oh, and no question whatsoever - RMT in some form is the future of gaming.

More than they ever should have.

But I am not YOU.

I'd welcome anyone to try to test my resolve on this one, of course. Just having millions waved in my face would probably be enough to give me a chubby for a week.

But I do truly believe I could turn down IGE, or someone quite like it.

IGE is hinky. Shady. As in probably some kind of money laundering operation. They hide it well enough that nothing can be proven, but there's something rotten in Denmark.

But even beyond all that, I have no problem with the RMT concept IF IT'S DONE BY THE PEOPLE WHO MADE THE GAME. I have no problem with them making money from idiots who want to shortcut the entire mechanics of the game to get to the "fun" part, because when they realize they just spent $1000 real dollars on the fun and it's NOT fun, I can LAUGH. But I have serious problems with butt pirates who have nothing to do with the game, have no concern for the game's well-being, sitting like a goddamn barnacle on the bottom of these whales and feeding on the low hanging fruit. They are leeches. And they are turning a game I might enjoy into a job, either for them or someone else. They turn people who might be interested in the game aspect into people who see the whole exercise as a way to cash in on easy money. And when easy money gets waved in people's faces, their inhibitions drop like a sorority girl at a kegger.

Hat trick!

At least it wasn't SirBruced.

I'd get back to you on this, but as soon as my check to Schild clears, this will be WindupNutsack's House of Fursex and Jedi Trammel Leetness, and I have to get ready.  Bruce will be a mod.

(http://smiley.onegreatguy.net/sheepshag.gif)

Where do you find those wonderful emoticons?

It's a deep dark secret that I'll carry to my grave.  (or you could just follow my linky-fu: http://smiley.onegreatguy.net/)

Okay so why not go with the suggested idea? Create some fan forum/info sites for upcoming games, generate lots of initial posters and maybe some cash with banner ads, and then finally sell the thing to IGE or the like for a pile of cash?

ie intentionally create sites in order to sell them.

Gold in WoW is relatively hard for the average player to accumulate. STFU now if you are some wanker who wants to tell me how fast you can accumulate gold. Gold in WoW really is hard for normal people to accumulate in the hundreds, and you are not normal, so please, step back from the keyboard.

But there is never a shortage of RMT gold. A near-infinite supply of it is generated 24/7 for RMT. So on the auction house, Axe of Pwn can sell for 700 gold because you can get 700g for a few bucks if you are willing to break the rules of the game. Meanwhile, the average player staying within the rules will take weeks or months of effort to accumulate 700g. But you see, Axe of Pwn isn't worth the value of 700g in fair play effort. If the supply of gold from RMT was not entering the game, Axe of Pwn would perhaps cost 300g as a reflection of effort versus rarity. At least in WoW, I am certain RMT hurts legitimate players. If the solution is to find something to sell to the RMT buyers and live off their spending, then that's also negative: they should not exist, so normal players should not have to compensate for their presence in the economy. All up, it makes life harder for a legitimate player.

Then there is the RMT marketing irritation. Typing /ignore every time it happens is not a solution. In WoW, you get whispers/tells, mail and group invitations from gold-sellers. They shout it in the cities, they spam it in the trade and general chat channels. Their farmers take the spawns you need for legitimate play. It's a major inconvenience to have this going on when you are trying to play fair.

Don't give me that tired excuse: "poor design led to this". Whether all this is the fault of RMTers or game design flaws is irrelevant to the point: RMT is a bad thing in games where it is against the rules. People who practise RMT (buyers and sellers) in games where it is not permitted are hated by normal players because they damage the game. They have a negative impact on the game for those who are playing by the rules. They made the decision to engage in this activity - they're not absolved by poor design, even if good design would fix it.

So drop this "RMT is OK with me, it's just IGE that's bad" bullshit, because I've had enough of your trendy fiction. It's false. In games where it's not allowed, RMT users are cheats and RMT suppliers are profiting from corruption, it's that simple. The criminal links of those involved are no co-incidence. And it affects all of us. And they buy out our beloved websites and fuck them up. And they love buggering young boys.

That works assuming you can get enough of the right traffic.

Whats the cost and process associated with getting a site listed with Google?
We would have to look at initial investment versus (servers, bandwidth, software lisencing, etc.) versus potential sale price (what other similar sites have sold for).
But if these sites are getting millions, or heck even a couple hundred thousand then return on investment is a potential windfall. Akin to churning fixer uppers in real estate.

Depends on how good you are at SEO (Search Engine Optimization). It could be anywhere from free if you have enough other sites you can cross link into your new site or hundreds to thousands of dollars to pay for advertising if you can't finagle your site to the top of the search results.

The infrastructure costs are pretty minimal -- like $100 - $200 a month for a dedicated server with unlimited or near unlimited bandwidth. The trick is to attract the right traffic and keep them coming back. If you look at the list of OGaming Affliates on the www.ogaming.com site you can see that they targeted very specific sites for purchase.

I hadn't seen this eight-page article on DEN (http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/business/soa/The_last_pixel_show/0,39023166,20106716-5,00.htm) before (Brock Pierce's dramatically failed pre-IGE company).

It includes details of the child sex abuse suit against the three DEN directors (Pierce, Shackley and Collins-Rector, who had all fled to Spain). Unfortunately it doesn't go into detail on the claims against Brock Pierce, just his two housemates.

I hadnt seen that before either. That is disturbing. :x

You all should look up some articles chasing Brock through Europe and Asia as he eventually got to Hong Kong. Either bad luck follows him or he has hooves for feet.

He was a child star.....just look at what happened to the stars from Different Strokes.
Not that I wouldnt shoot the sick fuck on site along with the other two.

Just found this-
http://www.itweek.co.uk/vnunet/news/2120349/dotcom-founders-spanish-jail

"The men fled to Spain where they were arrested by Spanish police who found "enormous amounts of child porn" at their villa."

There's probably legal problems with the following but what would prevent this:

A dude employed by blizzard buys 100g @ let say $14 from IGE. When the trade is to happen, the delivery guy can easily be seen and banned. Track who farmed the gold ( a lvl 60 account ), and ban that one too. Do this for a few months and I don't see how IGE could still be making profit. This would be good buis for blizzard too, as IGE would have to constantly buy new boxes to make up for the lost ones.

What are the alternatives to Thottbot and Allakhazam for WoW?

If I use thottbot, but never clink on the ads, am I really supporting anyone?

Probably the fact that theres 150+ servers in america alone and hundreds of farmers on every single one of them, going through all that trouble to ban a few of them wouldn't really help much.  What they do now is ban the farmers who use teleport exploits to farm the king in DM north.

I don't know why of all the examples you could use that you'd pick WoW.  It's not hard for a player to accumulate gold, and the game is so easy you can get to level 60 without buying uber shit off the AH anyway.

Not only that but the world drops and tradeskill items you could buy are pretty much crap at this point.  The only major purchase for someone in wow is their epic mount.

Well buying the smallest chunks of gold on all 150 servers from some IGE site should be rather fast. I don't know how this work in detail, but I guess they have som kind of convenient web shop, a matter of hours perhaps. Rumor has it that the transaction is handled fairly fast, so lets say 1 employee from blizzard would be able to make 30 transactions each day. I believe the guy delivering the gold is separate from the one who farms them, so that means 2 deleted accounts / transaction, this is of course if they track gold transactions in game, which I would believe they do. I would guess 1 employee working full time would be able to greatly cripple IGE, perhaps to the point where they're not making profits anymore.

It's been a while, so pardon any wrong concepts here from WoW.  But, I have an alchemist reach pretty high (oh the nights spent getting fishing up to freaking 300) and at that level I was trading lots of gold regularly.  Also, in other games where ventrilo is used money changes hands simply to conclude a deal that may have completely be originated on ventrilo vice the game.  This was particularly true in SWG.  How do you account for these circumstances?  I would classify these as normal transactions but they could reflect the same activity of a seller.

What you know for certain is that the guy who does the transaction is someone who is representing IGE. In other words, regular players won't donate cash to this dude, the guys delivering gold to this guy is the farmers. I guess they could somehow try to launder the gold through the AH and try to decriminalize the farmers, but since at your average AH there's tons of people sitting and looking for bargins this would most likely be impossible. Your alchemy char trading gold won't get caught because the deals you perform doesn't mean IGE gains gold since they don't earn any value. This could perhaps be a problem if IGE earns their gold through playing the AH Game_tm and try to accumulate their gold through legit players, something which they're most likely not doing. The reason for why someone at blizzard would pose as a buyer is because then there wouldn't be any doubt about the nature of the transactions.

Actually getting a site to be googled is easy. Getting it into the rankings enough to make search engine marketing worth enough to get enough people coming to your site to make it worthwile to IGE? Not so easy, and requires constant massaging.

The guy that runs Allakhazam has been providing players for multiple games with information for years.  I remember it being one of the first sites I went to when I played EQ after release. 

Personally, I'm happy to see the guy make money on the endeavor. He provided a valuable service to many gamers and that has value. 

Every site of his other than EQ1 has been piss poor. Just like every Stratics site other than UO's is piss poor. Fan sites need real fans to run them well and no one can multi-fan sufficiently to run more than one.

So what's your point?  Whether the site meets your standards or not is irrelevant.  Someone saw value in it and made him an offer.

Allakhazam was pretty much the only alternative to Thottbot, which has a ridiculously messy database. Loaded a bit slower but was hardly bad.

It's not that difficult to build a db template and write a web front end for the db.  The users provide the content for the db.  Where are all the college kids who need to do senior projects in CS?  Oh wait, they don't have the cash for the db software or the server. But surely some enterprising youngster will realize the profitability here...

MySQL, Postgres, SQLite, Oracle Express et al are all free DBs. And shared hosting with DB access starts at like $10 a month.

Me and my bud made a totaly home brewn MMORPG community site. Meta news. News system with diffrent levels where ordinary members can submit to specific areas. A complete system for publishing and creation of reviews. User grinding based on 3 diffrent criterias ( R G B ) which decides the color of peoples user name, complete white naturaly being the highest. Character database, only a basic one though, not custom made for every game. A fairly advanced administrator system. It's own integrated forum software supporting the most common features, naturaly not as complete as the one used here for example. Information database for L2, a lot better than the one on l2orphus imo, since you can comment entries as on thottbot and alla. Static content generation, meaning the pages are always served fast. Messaging system for sending messages to other members on the site. There was also a lot of experimental stuff which got trashed a long the way. Created a basic ebayish system where people could trade in game wares for in game currency, pretty wasted now though that auction house is becoming more common in game.

When it was all pretty much finnished there was only one problem, we were to lazy to launch and run it  :-P

Just that I disagreed with your praise.

does IGE etc. own Cosmos.org as well?  They have Thottbot embedded in their package and Thottbot has Cosmos listed off its side nav.  Are they co-owned?

Cosmos has long been part of the IGE-Thott thing. Every time you ran their little application on your computer, you were playing with fire. IGE have been paying Allakhazam (via shell) since November 2005, so every time you ran their little application since then you were playing with fire.

In 2002, Netcraft, an Internet trends monitoring company, started noticing phishing attacks growing against online games. It strikes me as odd that over the years more of those phishing attacks against online games have originated from Spain, then China. It also strikes me as odd that there are computer worms out there that target various gold selling sites, but none that I know of that target another one...

As the money behind these "secondary market" sites grows, there will likely be growing interest in some of the computer crime associated with them from certain US Federal and international law enforcement agencies. You can come to your own conclusions about who is behind this stuff, and why - I have no way of knowing if its just plain stupidity by criminals in the obvious place or if somebody else is trying to make said place look bad. Perhaps they are just rich businesses being targetted by unrelated criminals, but it is certainly interesting why some gain more attention than others. But the long arm of the law is going to feel a collar at some point. No doubt about it - there's too much money involved.