Blizzard shuts down one spammy goldseller

[Simond]

http://virtuallyblind.com/2008/02/01/peons4hire-blizzard-injunction/

Blizzard’s lawsuit against virtual item and power-leveling company In Game Dollar (doing business as Peons4Hire) has settled, resulting in a permanent injunction (.pdf) that essentially shuts down In Game Dollar’s entire World of Warcraft operation. Though no monetary damages are specified, the injunction represents a complete victory for Blizzard. The news is likely to be well received by the World of Warcraft player community, which voiced widespread support for Blizzard’s move when the lawsuit was filed.

Blizzard brought the lawsuit against In Game Dollar in the Federal District Court for the Central District of California last May. The Complaint (.pdf) alleged that In Game Dollar violated World of Warcraft’s Terms of Use and End User License Agreement by spamming chat in World of Warcraft with advertising. This, Blizzard alleged, diminished players’ game experience and cost Blizzard subscribers, bandwidth, employee time, and ultimately, revenue.

Blizzard claimed six causes of action, including violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, interference with contract, and trespass to chattels.

Peons4Hire was not the largest virtual property dealer in World of Warcraft, but it was well known for aggressive in-game marketing via chat spam. The lawsuit could be seen as a shot across the bow of larger sellers.

Once again, Blizzard wins a legal case on their EULA & TOS. Doubt it'll stop people arguing about it, though. 

[Venkman]

Not sure how many prior such cases there are. But this is another nice step on the road of precedent.

[Azaroth]

Yet one marvels at the sheer amount of ingame spamming that goes on.

I've always been curious as to why they didn't take a few relatively simple measures to throw a stick in their spokes instead of launching lawsuits and letting them go about their merry annoying business in the meantime. I mean, add the fucking URL to a universal profanity list when you ban one. Make GMs chill between calls at the 2-3 spots on the entire server that they all spam (all day.. every day). Monitor /s in certain areas to set off triggers. Implement a few more simple restrictions on trial accounts.

My girlfriend once said to me "They do so little about all of this spamming, you'd think they were in on it".

Although, when you actually page a GM for something and end up receiving a reply in your mailbox 14 hours later, long after logging out, you do come to realize how fucking understaffed they are. I imagine there are plenty of beancounters over there making sure all profits are maximized, but you'd think there'd be at least a few very simple ways to curb the spamming that wouldn't, you know, require hiring a nearly adequate amount of customer support staff.

[Ratman_tf]

I've always been curious as to why they didn't take a few relatively simple measures to throw a stick in their spokes instead of launching lawsuits and letting them go about their merry annoying business in the meantime. I mean, add the fucking URL to a universal profanity list when you ban one. Make GMs chill between calls at the 2-3 spots on the entire server that they all spam (all day.. every day). Monitor /s in certain areas to set off triggers. Implement a few more simple restrictions on trial accounts.

I believe it was our good comrade Huntsman who indicated that goldfarmer websites spring in and out of existence at a furious pace.

[Azaroth]

Undoubtedly. But at least 50% of the URLs I've seen spammed over the last six months are the same ones over and over again.

[Venkman]

I would be truly interested in knowing the percentage of their subscribers are gold farmers. But more importantly, you can't just go ahead banning people at whim either when you're collecting money from them (their TOS says they can, but it's just not good CS nor business). I'm sure they've got a rather rigid process of identifying and substantiating every account they plan to ban.

WoW is an old school design in a new world environment, where way many more people can and therefore do play than they ever did in EQ1 days. Growing things grow faster, and the growth of RMTing probably has grown with WoW. It's just too easy an environment to exploit and too fertile and playstyle to not.

[Koyasha]

I mean, add the fucking URL to a universal profanity list when you ban one.

They did this with at least one site (ukow.com).  It created problems for regular communication because anytime that combination of letters came up, even with spaces or punctuation between them, the entire line would be removed and you wouldn't really have any idea why.  What problems for regular communication?  Well, I can say I experienced some personally because I knew someone named Ritsuko at the time.  Anytime you said her name, followed by a word starting with the letter W, the sentence would go away and you wouldn't know why.  Took me days to figure out what was going on.  If they did that with every website that springs up like a weed, we'd find more and more of our sentences blocked with no idea why.  I think they stopped this procedure.  I know I sent a GM ticket and an email explaining the problem and complaining about it, and I'm guessing other people did too.

Perhaps curiously, the advertisements don't bother me much at all, since there's almost never any interference with normal communication.  I can't recall a time when I have had my chat scrolled by line after line of advertising spam.

[Azaroth]

I mean, add the fucking URL to a universal profanity list when you ban one.

They did this with at least one site (ukow.com).  It created problems for regular communication because anytime that combination of letters came up, even with spaces or punctuation between them, the entire line would be removed and you wouldn't really have any idea why.  What problems for regular communication?  Well, I can say I experienced some personally because I knew someone named Ritsuko at the time.  Anytime you said her name, followed by a word starting with the letter W, the sentence would go away and you wouldn't know why.  Took me days to figure out what was going on.  If they did that with every website that springs up like a weed, we'd find more and more of our sentences blocked with no idea why.  I think they stopped this procedure.  I know I sent a GM ticket and an email explaining the problem and complaining about it, and I'm guessing other people did too.

Perhaps curiously, the advertisements don't bother me much at all, since there's almost never any interference with normal communication.  I can't recall a time when I have had my chat scrolled by line after line of advertising spam.

I think the problem is, then, a poorly implemented system of censorship. Something like that isn't hard to think your way around.

And by the way, I've very often had my chat scrolled by line after line of advertising spam. Especially in Ironforge and Stormwind.

[Moosehands]

(V) ictory?
(I) know you want it.
(C) ome to us.
(S) peedy delivery.
(A) lways open.
(L) ess you pay.
(E) njoy your game.
(.) ...............
(C) ome right now.
(O) pen 24/7
(M) ore money, more fun.

Got two of those sitting in an in-game mailbox right now.

The problem with any chat or mail filter is that you're putting some sort of essentially static regex filter against a group of human beings who make money by finding ways around that filter.  And spam prevention is one (non-profitable, quality-of-life) factor of a game for a dev company but spamming is bread and butter for the spammers.  Also, as the above discussion demonstrates, game companies have to walk a fine line between blocking spam to make your customers happy while not blocking spam in so draconian of a way as to make your customers UNhappy.

Funny anecdote time:  I was talking to a senior producer for an MMO recently, and they related an event from a few weeks before.  A shard had crashed and the first reboot didn't spin up all resources correctly.  So they locked the shard to external logins and rebooted again.  Then the producer logged in with their regular player account from within the office to poke around a bit and give a sniff test that the shard was in proper working order, then gave the order to flip the shard external.

Within 10 seconds the producer had received 4 gold selling tells.  Spambots had been cycling on the login waiting for the server to come up, and when it did they logged in and pulled a /who list to find targets.  But there was only one real player on the server at the time.  Hello instant IP ban!