Blizzard sues Peons4hire for spamming

[Trouble]

Surprised this hasn't been posted already

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

As many of you know, the latest content patch, along with many great new content additions, contains technical counter-measures designed to combat in-game gold spamming. Our efforts to reduce in-game abuse and create a fun, safe environment for everyone are never-ending.

With that said, we felt that it was important to share with the community just how serious we are in our efforts to combat this type of abuse. Blizzard has filed a federal lawsuit against the operators of Peons4hire, a popular gold-selling organization which many of you have no doubt seen advertised. As part of the lawsuit, the operators of Peons4hire have been asked to immediately cease all in-game spamming efforts by all entities and websites under their control.

If this organization refuses to act accordingly, further legal action will be taken. We'll be sure to keep you posted on the progress of this topic.

Our efforts to combat this type abuse will be ongoing, I assure you. Also, keep in mind that Peons4hire was one of the larger organizations focused on in-game spam abuse. Do not underestimate the value of the message this action will send to to others who participate in similar abuse.

In short, we're making waves. :P

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

[damijin]

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

[CmdrSlack]

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

[Chenghiz]

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

[Triforcer]

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. 

[CmdrSlack]

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?

[Mandrel]

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

[CmdrSlack]

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.

[Trippy]

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. 

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.

[Reg]

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

[CharlieMopps]

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.

[Trippy]

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.

[Akkori]

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.

[damijin]

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.

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.

[Trippy]

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?

[Miasma]

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.

[damijin]

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?

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!

[Trippy]

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.

[DataGod]

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

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.

[CharlieMopps]

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.

[Numtini]

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.

[Chimpy]

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.

[Lightstalker]

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

You are going to what?!

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

[Chenghiz]

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

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.

[Trippy]

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.

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

[Numtini]

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

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.

[Calantus]

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.

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

I just got you banned. :P

[Jayce]

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.

[schild]

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.

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.

[Hutch]

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.

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.

[schild]

Ok. That was funny.

[CharlieMopps]

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.

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

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.

[Trippy]

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

[CmdrSlack]

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. 

[CharlieMopps]

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