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Probably The Most Popular Move Blizzard Ever Took
From their community CM comes this:
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.
While I don’t think anyone at all who’s played a WoW character for more than 10 minutes actually objects to this I’m not sure how they’re doing this legally, or whether this is happening in the US or in peons4hire.com’s home of China. EULA violation? CAN-SPAM act? To quote a Something Awful emoticon, 
| Print article |
- CmdrSlack.com » Blizzard Suing Peons4Hire for In-Game Spam
- Click here to buy a mount. at What Would Matt Do
- Zen of Design»Blog Archive » Everybody Sues Everybody
- MMODump.com » Everybody Sues Everybody
- Blizzard v. In Game Dollar Update: Injunction Entered, Peons Not 4Hire in World of Warcraft Anymore | Virtually Blind | Virtual Law
- Blizzard v. In Game Dollar Update: – Ultimate Online Forums – Always Quality over Quantity
about 3 years ago
Hm. I guess I won’t need to go find that 3rd party add-on that stopped the spamming.
And my ignore list now gets 500 names shorter.
about 3 years ago
My guess is CAN-SPAM. They could also be simply filing based on the old method — trespass to chattels. That argument basically goes, “They are using our servers to send the spam to our users, which makes our service harder to use and puts a load on our servers that would not normally be there.” It worked back in the days before CAN-SPAM, I don’t see how it wouldn’t work here.
Also, if the company is based in China, Federal court is a smart place to file — it’s still going to be tough to enforce a judgment against them, but you never know, the Chinese government may help out and even enforce that judgment.
about 3 years ago
Maybe i’ve been lucky but since the patch released I’ve only gotten one gold spam whisper. Prior to the patch I was getting at least 3-4 a play session (that being a couple hours or so). Mostly from peons4hire.
about 3 years ago
Their spam was very annoying, but I’d bought gold from the several times before they’d started getting bad about it. They always delivered the correct ammount and were quick about it. If you’re going to buy WoW gold, they’re the one company I’d recommend.
But their spamming was till over the top.
about 3 years ago
Later in the same thread, the CM Eyonix posted:
“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.
”
Maybe these new waves will add nicely to the (way to few) waves of banning accounts blizzard starts every few months.
And even if this lawsuit has no effect at all, the players have a bit of information to be happy about: Blizzard is actually doing something about the annoying spams. And at the moment, to many players it will not even matter whether this will have any effect or none at all.
Hm, i cant find anything in their EULA or rules, that defines a place of jurisdiction. Maybe it is out there somewhere and peons4hire accepted something in the many wow rules, that will be their downfall.
about 3 years ago
They could be going a very business route… “our game, our channels, our items… where is our cut? cease and desist until you start paying eleventy billion dollars a month for utilization of our services for your profit, k thx bye.”
about 3 years ago
Damnit, Bob! You can’t do that. By using their services (we will leave the pro-RMT v. anti-RMT argument aside) you only validate their intrusive advertising model.
about 3 years ago
I’ve been impressed with the anti-spam measures in the latest patch – I’ve gotten about a tenth as many spam tells as usual, and none in the last two days. Reporting the ones I still get takes about half a second, ideal for encouraging people to report.
I’ll be interested to see how the lawsuit comes out, but either way I’m a lot happier.
about 3 years ago
What concerns me about this is that Blizzard could stop most of this spam cold if they wanted to. Simply limiting the number of different people a low-level character could send tells to per hour would put a crimp in it right there. That would be a trivial matter for real players, but the need to spend some amount of time levelling up the spamming toons, which would then be detected by angry players almost the minute they start, would make it far less time-effective. The more troublesome they make it for the spammers, the less spam we get.
As for Blizzard going after Peons directly, there’s another possible approach. You do realize, I hope, that these gold selling companies do not get most of their stock in trade from willing sellers, and gold farmers seem to be scarce these days compared to, say, a year ago. Exploits are getting patched more quickly these days, too. Much of the gold they sell comes from hacked accounts. IGE, the largest of the RMT companies, owns several popular websites, including Allakhazam. There have been very credible reports of people (including a guildmate of mine) getting the win32.wow password-stealing trojan from those sites via an Internet Explorer exploit. Angry Bob, the gold you bought may be the “blood diamonds” of WoW. If Blizzard has been assembling evidence connecting one of the RMT companies to hacking, they have the potential for a very strong case against the company, and possibly not just a civil case. The government of China is not fond of anyone who could be described as a hacker; the Peons management could be facing RL permadeath.
about 3 years ago
I didn’t think their measures would do anything but they seemed to have nailed it, untill they spammers work around it some how. Personally I think p4h only shot themselves in the foot by spamming and annoying almost every lvl 70 in the game by spamming us every 15 minutes, on our european servers I spamsentry caught 42 spam whispers in 3 days (3 hours ish a day).
But contrary to what Wanderer says, bots are far from stamped out on our server. There is a spot where I used to farm gold myself for raiding stockpiles where there would be minimum 1 alliance and 1 horde bot trying to monopolise the spawns. Obviously I get about 90-100 honour a day off the single same bot that is there
I’ve also reported them over and over, to no avail and they have been there for the last 3 weeks.
about 3 years ago
“Damnit, Bob! You can’t do that. By using their services … you only validate their intrusive advertising model”
Indeed. I used to just go to Ebay and buy what I wanted/needed. Remember though, banning Ebay gold sales completely crippled the RMT business. Except it didn’t… at all. After that came the periodic, then constant spam mailbox mails. I used Peons because their spam at least had a little inventiveness to it in the form of fluff. Then they cracked down on the mail spam and we got /whisper spam. Now they’re cracking down on /whisper spam and I’m interested in seeing what comes next, because something will come next no matter what they do. Cause and effect, the RMT market is too big to just die. The only thing, and it is literally the only thing that will ever stop this sort of thing is for the MMO companies to do the RMT themselves directly in the game – and to do it at a price point the 3rd parties can’t match. Period. End of story. Those are the two options people have, and that’s the end of the debate. You can either have the game companies do RMT in-game for dirt cheap, or you can have an escalating cycle of stuff like this. There is no in-between whatsoever, and there never will.
about 3 years ago
“The only thing, and it is literally the only thing that will ever stop this sort of thing is for the MMO companies to do the RMT themselves directly in the game – and to do it at a price point the 3rd parties can’t match. Period.”
When dealing with a sweatshop mentality, the only price point the 3rd parties can’t match is Free.
about 3 years ago
“Much of the gold they sell comes from hacked accounts. ”
You assert this as if it were fact as opposed to mere conjecture based off limited personal experience. You are vastly over-generalizing.
Does that really sound like a valid business plan?
We’re going to take orders for gold, wait for someone (with no virus protection) on the same faction and server to conveniently download our trojan, hijack the account which hopefully has enough money to cover the order (in which case we’ll need another victim), cover our tracks so we can’y get caught, and do this all while maintaining a valid cover as a WoW-info site? Then multiply this by the thousands of gold-buying transactions that presumably occur each day on the US Servers and it would be at pandemic levels.
No, what is in fact more likely (and which you know but don’t want to admit) is that your friend is an idiot and either stupidly downloaded a virus linked from the wow-glider forums or gave his PW to a friend who looted his account dry. He might have tried to pull a fast one and given his UN/PW to one of the gold seller sites that offered free powerleveling from 50-60 in exchange for account info. How many people, when burned by their own stupidity come right out and announce that they’re idiots?
You want to know how the gold farmers really earn money? Glider.
about 3 years ago
My guess is that this is most likely a breach of contract case. Although most states now have a “computer trespass” statute on the books, which makes unauthorized access to systems a low level crime in and of itself, that would be the state suing Peons4hire, not Blizzard.
Presumably what Peons4hire is doing is a breach of the TOS and EULA for WoW, so this would be a breach of contract case.
Since Peons4hire and Blizzard aren’t residents of the same state, all Blizzard has to do is allege damages above the federal minimum to take the case to federal court.
about 3 years ago
Didn’t a couple of gaming magazines get shut down (fiscal reasons) recently because their parent company was guilty of spamming through myspace accounts?
I’d wager that Can-Spam probably has the most “teeth” at the moment, its really a question of enforcement. If p4h has US assets (which I’d imagine there are probably some US based “villians” in all of this), then that will be what is attacked. Beyond that possibility though, its not much more than PR really.
about 3 years ago
“Didn’t a couple of gaming magazines get shut down (fiscal reasons) recently because their parent company was guilty of spamming through myspace accounts?”
Yep, that was TheGlobe.com, owners of Computer Games Magazine and MMO Games Magazine. They are teh p00f.
about 3 years ago
“Now they’re cracking down on /whisper spam and I’m interested in seeing what comes next”
Since the patch, every major city on every server I’ve played on has had someone planted in the middle of the highest traffic area say-spamming their sales pitch at one-second intervals. That can’t last long, of course. I find it interesting mainly because of how very aggressive a move it is. The gold-sales-spamming equivalent of giving Blizzard the finger.
about 3 years ago
Side note: While Allakhazam itself is still owned (indirectly) by Brock Pierce, who founded IGE, it is not currently owned by IGE at this time.
How much involvement in the business of breaking game TOA/EULAs Affinity Media (the founder of IGE’s new company which owns Alla) and its affiliates may engage in is of course anyone’s guess.
about 3 years ago
Ah, blachawk, still as antisocial and clueless as ever. Have you ever considered that someone who doesn’t believe the same (improbable) things you do might actually not be a liar, and your position might in fact be incorrect?
As to your post:
First of all, why would hacking gold be any different from buying gold from willing sellers in terms of keeping a sufficient stockpile to fill orders? Except, of course, that it would produce greater supplies of gold. Blizzard has demonstrated an unwillingness or inability to follow the data trail more than a few hops.
Second, the person I used as an example of hacking is someone I know offline, and who has been a friend for the better part of a decade. When he calls me in a panic to say that his account has been hacked, it has been. When he tells me that nobody else knew his password, he’s telling the truth. When he asks me for help getting win32.wow out of his computer, he’s not making it up. And since the only sites he had visited on his gaming machine were allakhazam, thottbot, and wowwiki, the number of possible suspects for dropping the trojan on him is very, very small.
And since I am anonymous here (except to Scott), I have no reason to lie to you or anyone else. My e-peen is of sufficient size and tumescence that it requires no enhancement from arguing on the Internet (you know the old saw about that). Sorry the truth isn’t compatible with your peculiar worldview (well, okay, not very sorry) but them’s the facts, bub.
about 3 years ago
Wanderer, the whole arguing on the internet/epeen thing makes sense when it comes from a third party, not from someone who just spent 3 paragraphs arguing on the internet and trying to save their epeen. You obviously care or you wouldn’t have replied.
You made an assertion that is flat out wrong and I called you on it. You said “Much of the gold they sell comes from hacked accounts. ” The only way that could be considered correct is if you were using the word ‘much’ to mean a a large number that is otherwise statistically insignificant. As in ‘the American Nazi Party presidential candidate got much of the vote.’
Sure, hacked accounts get sold all the time. There’s probably four or five listed on ebay right now. You can spot them easily. They’re the ones with three day list times, no reserve, no pictures, and a short description that appears to have been written by a second grader. Those however, are a drop in the bucket compared to the thousands of transactions that occur each day.
I’m glad you’re standing by your friend, but a rational person would at least consider the possibility that your friend was mistaken. How likely is it that one computer has only been to a total of three websites? He never misclicked on a google ad or a popup? It’s possible that your buddy merely doesn’t remember doing something stupid, perhaps because he didn’t know it was stupid. He did after all, need your help to get rid of a virus. Sounds to me like he doesn’t know what he’s doing.
“First of all, why would hacking gold be any different from buying gold from willing sellers in terms of keeping a sufficient stockpile to fill orders? Except, of course, that it would produce greater supplies of gold.”
Sounds to me like you don’t appreciate the sheer scope of RMT transactions in WoW. Hacking could never produce enough supply to meet the demand. You also vastly underestimate the intelligence of the WoW community. Sure they’re pretty dumb, but how long would it really take for the community to figure out that every time someone goes to allakhazam their account gets hacked and looted? Also, you vastly overestimate the average WoW player. Blizzard doesn’t follow the data trail more than a few hops because they don’t need to. There aren’t enough hacked accounts to make doing so necessary.
At one time gold farmers really did use rooms full of people grinding away in WoW while tolerating sweatshop conditions. That’s a thing of the past. The way farmers make money their money is with a room full of computers that barely meet the minimum system requirements for WoW. The computers are attended by a few people who periodically make sure glider is working properly on each one. Occasionally the attendants give glider a break and take manual control to auction off all their crap at 25% usual market rates.
Ever seen someone in IF selling 140 stacks of netherweave for 4g a stack? Farmers didn’t go away, they just farm smarter. Gone are the obviously farmer names like fffggghhr, now they use ones like Nicgirl or Airplaneman. Still dumb, but harder to spot.
about 3 years ago
Oops, had a sentence eaten.
Also, you vastly overestimate the average WoW player’s account. The average WoW player doesn’t have a lot of gold, which would be why we have all these people buying it.
about 3 years ago
“Also, you vastly overestimate the average WoW player’s account. The average WoW player doesn’t have a lot of gold, which would be why we have all these people buying it.”
Eh I don’t know about that it’s rather easy to just get gold from questing and the like in BC.You will get to 70 long before you run out of quests, with quest turn ins netting something like 18g average once you hit 70 it ain’t hard.
I have over 3k gold and I don’t farm and i play probably on average 2 hours per day.I went in to TBC with right at 600g at level 60. Not had any uber drops to sell (most of that 600g did come from a drop pre level 60 and pre TBC though) so almost all of my gold has come through questing and selling the greens which seem to drop like candy in Outlands (hell even grey items can sell for over 2g). Don’t have my epic flying mount yet but i’ll get there eventually.
about 3 years ago
“Now they’re cracking down on /whisper spam and I’m interested in seeing what comes next”
In addition to the person standing in the city shouting spam, they’ve also begun creating newbies to spam group invites on everyone they can. Anyone who joins the group (for example to say in group “stop fucking inviting me”) is immediately spammed via group chat.
The group invites are massively annoying, and got me killed in a battleground by popping up at the wrong moment.
about 3 years ago
Blachawk, I qualify as a rational person under your criteria because I considered the possibility that my friend was mistaken. However, upon further investigation, I was able to dismiss that possibility.
How likely is it that one computer has only been to three websites? Very likely in the case of that particular computer, because it was used only as a game machine, not a general-purpose machine, and had been recently reformatted besides. He did not need my help to get rid of a virus — for one thing, no virus was involved; it was a trojan. Try to keep up, please. Second, it was a trojan that his security software did not identify, probably because it’s in fairly limited distribution. It only grabs WoW passwords, and despite the fact that it seems to us that everyone plays the bloody game, the reality is that even WoW’s huge subscriber base is a miniscule fraction of the computer market, and a trojan that targets only a small percentage of that miniscule fraction is about as noticeable to the security software vendors as one that targets left-handed, red-haired midgets, but only on Thursdays. He finally found the damn thing when he switched from the Windows firewall to ZoneAlarm, which caught it when it tried to phone home.
I said nothing about ebaying stolen accounts. I said they hack accounts, vendor everything, and send the resulting gold through a chain of cutouts to the characters that deliver it.
The bit about stripping every single item, right down to the ragged newbie clothes on bank toons, shows this is not being done by J. Random Guildie who someone foolishly told their password to. Nobody who has to do it one click at a time is going to bother to get those few coppers for vendoring some level 1′s clothes. The pros have scripts to do it for them, so everything goes.
And IGE is smart. “…how long would it really take for the community to figure out that every time someone goes to allakhazam their account gets hacked and looted?” Not long. But if only 1% of the millions of hits a day on their websites deliver a copy of win32.wow along with the stats for the Sword of Mighty Pwnage, most people will blame someone or something else. They’ll blame their buddy that they let play their character last week, or their kid brother who uses the same computer and seems to actually attract malware, or something, anything other than popular, familiar, professional websites. It only became obvious for my friend because he made such limited use of that specific computer — that handful of WoW websites being the only point of exposure.
Here’s Allakhazam’s original excuse, for the first time they got caught at it:
http://www.allakhazam.com/news/sdetail6363.html?story=6363
Yeah, a banner ad did it. Funny how they wouldn’t say which one, nor what the FBI supposedly found out. That was right around the time they were getting bought out by IGE. Testing the mechanism, maybe?
And here’s a more recent reference to it:
http://www.oswguild.com/WoW/viewtopic.php?t=7069
I seem to recall (forgive me if I mistake you for a different troll) that you’ve showed up here in the past defending RMT in the face of any and all logical opposition, your primary argument being “I’m right.” Things that make you go “Hmmmmm….”
about 3 years ago
Hate to stick my nose into this hacking/trojan thing but:
“Yeah, a banner ad did it. Funny how they wouldn’t say which one, nor what the FBI supposedly found out.”
This very well could be real rather than a lame excuse. I frequent a site related to online flight-sims (no ‘gold’ to sell there) and there was a period of time, contiguous with the date on the Alla notice linked above, where its banner ad rotation was giving visitors the same problem.
about 3 years ago
I suppose I should be happy that I subscribe to Alla then, since I dont get banner ads when I go to the site with a subscription. I’ve always liked Alla since my EQ days, was not happy when IGE bought them out to go along with Thotbot but such is the nature of the internet.
I know there have been a number of keyloggers out there that have been packaged with many of the addons. One of my friends was almost burned by a trojan-laden addon, he is lucky that his AV did notice it.
As for spam – yeah there are bots with names like ffeerrww standing in Orgrimmar in front of the auction hause spamming away in /say, my anti-spam plugin seems to be pretty good at catching it.
about 3 years ago
Rand-
“Eh I don’t know about that it’s rather easy to just get gold from questing and the like in BC.”
Unfortunately a gold piece just ain’t what it used to be. Pre-BC 1000 gold was a kingly figure. You could by the fastest mount in the game or afford a few world drop epics. Now 1000g is 1/5 of the price of the fastest mount and might get you half the materials necessary to craft a 3-piece set of epic armor. I would argue that the demand for gold has never been higher. Which would make sense because even half a year after the last round of farmer/glider bannings, gold prices have yet to come back down to pre-BC levels.
Wanderer-
“I seem to recall (forgive me if I mistake you for a different troll) that you’ve showed up here in the past defending RMT”
Nope, not me. I was wondering why you adopted such a nasty tone. I don’t have a problem with RMT seeing as I’ve engaged in it myself to a small extent in WoW as a buyer and to a very large extent in UO as a seller (Tram castle = $1500US yeah baby!). I find it amusing that your definition of troll is anyone who tells you you’re wrong.
Even if I grant everything you say about your friend, it doesn’t matter. Your underlying assumption/argument is flawed. Your friend’s account got hacked and looted because of a malicious allakhazam banner so everyone else’s account must be getting hacked too? And even if that were true, what logic do you use to get from that point to all the proceeds of the hacking getting distributed to and sold by the major gold sellers? Because there is some tangential connection between allakhazam and IGE? It doesn’t follow. The use of anecdotal evidence and flawed methods of extrapolation aren’t helping your case out.
I’m not sure why you’re so ready to believe that there must be some evil corporation out there conspiring to plunder your account. I’m also not sure why some people believe G.W. Bush was behind the 9/11 attacks.
You might want to try this on for size.
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/items/tinfoilhat.xml
about 3 years ago
johnz:
“Hm, i cant find anything in their EULA or rules, that defines a place of jurisdiction. Maybe it is out there somewhere and peons4hire accepted something in the many wow rules, that will be their downfall.”
It’s in the EULA, clause 14(e).
“e. Location. If you are a resident of the United States, any arbitration will take place at any reasonable location convenient for you. For residents outside the United States, any arbitration shall be initiated in the County of Los Angeles, State of California, United States of America. Any Dispute not subject to arbitration (other than claims proceeding in any small claims court), or where no election to arbitrate has been made, shall be decided by a court of competent jurisdiction within the County of Los Angeles, State of California, United States of America, and you and Blizzard agree to submit to the personal jurisdiction of that court.”
about 3 years ago
And today in the category of least popular decisions Blizzard ever made is changing the arena points formula (nerfing it), and telling players about it after they log in and find themselves a few hundred points short of what they expected.
about 3 years ago
Doh.
They should if anything, make it easier to buy gold…
Epic Flying Mounts are expensive, yo!
about 3 years ago
I doubt Blizzard can use can-spam. The wording in that is so tightly wound around e-mail that it’d take a creative lawyer and a slightly loopy judge to adapt it for in-game advertising.
about 3 years ago
Britt quoted a passage from the EULA, where a place of jurisdiction is defined for the US version.
Now i cant find a paragraph 14 or something similar in the european EULAS. There seem to be differences depending on local law.
about 2 years ago
Whatever. Spammers are like commericals oon TV, theyre annoying but they come and go. Dont really care if they spam unless they do it 5x in under 2 seconds.