Death by Leech

Zubon has a disturbing insight about a recent lawsuit in China, RMT and US gambling legislature.

In the lawsuit, a judge ordered Blizzard/The9 to restore everything they took from a gold farmer, citing property laws. If anything virtual in game can be classified as property because RMT allows it to have a real value, then any game that relies on randomness is gambling, because you may lose or gain something of real value according to luck. And according to US law, it's illegal to transfer funds for online gambling. In other words, it would be illegal to pay to play an MMO where randomness dictates whether you win or lose. And that definition covers.. almost every MMO out there. RMT could end up killing the very industry it leeches from.

The most boneheaded thing about the whole issue is that Blizzard's Terms of Use were irrelevant in the lawsuit. They can't ban people for cheating. Granted, for Zubon's nightmare scenario to become reality, there would have to be a precedent in the US establishing the same principles as in the Chinese lawsuit. But the lawsuit in itself is bad enough. It's like taking your stuff back from a thief and then being convicted of theft yourself. Or being a victim of a can flipper in EvE. It's life imitating art.

Sex, Drugs and RMT

Broken Toys has quotations from an another IGE lawsuit. Only this time it's the insiders suing one another. The feeding frenzy has begun, and I have my popcorn ready. Virtually Blind has more.

The dog who yelps..

..is the dog who is smitten. Apparently 2.3 introduced changes to Warden that to one writer are quite worrying:

The changes to Warden effectively remove our ability as a community to police Blizzard's activities, and may lead to undetected violations of personal privacy, among other possibilities.

Now.. which privacy watchdog group is this? Or a concerned citizen? Perhaps some government entity?

Nope. A company that develops farmbot software. While an argument should not be discared solely on the basis on who is making the argument, I'm too cynical to think that there's no ulterior motives hiding behind the scenes.

With that out of the way, let's tackle the argument itself. Yes, polymorphism is used to obfuscate the inner workings of a program from it's users. Yes, Blizzard could snoop personal data from your computer without you knowing anything about it. But why would they? They already have your personal information, including your credit card number. As a business, they have no interest whatsoever in snooping what's on your computer. Unless you're trying to cheat in their games, that is..

However, a lone programmer could try to sneak in an unauthorized modification (and risking detection by bypassing all of Blizzard's Quality Assurance processes along the way) and collect your data for his personal benefit. So I'd consider that risk to be fairly miniscule.

But how about the whole notion of having a program in your computer that you don't know what it does? Is that a cause for alarm? It depends. Unless you are one of the few that use an Open Source operating system and have read through all of the source code in it.. making a fuss out of Warden is a bit hypocritical. Your computer is filled to the brim with software that might do things that you have no idea about. Quoting Microsoft's 10 immutable laws of security:

If a bad guy can persuade you to run his program on your computer, it's not your computer anymore.

If you don't like unknown software doing stuff you don't know about on your computer.. don't install it.

(via Slashdot and WoW Insider)

Edit: Broken Toys is on the case as well.

The rise, fall and re-emergence of IGE

Tobold noticed this interesting article about IGE's past and present. Apparently Blizzard's one-hour timer on gold transfers has really hurt IGE, and it had to flee to tax-free Vanuatu, out of reach of litigous players, disgruntled gun-toting gold farmers, scared-off investors and banstick-wielding legistators.

Of course, should Blizzard's efforts continue to interrupt the flow of (virtual) currency between IGE and the gold farmers one might find the island nation quite isolated..

Gold sellers changing tactics

Apparently Blizzard's mail filters are so effective that gold sellers have switched to using the Auction Houses. Of course, this should be easy to detect as well, just monitor the AH for wild anomalies in item prices.

RMT driving away core players

Nerfbat argues that RMT drives away players that an MMORPG requires to survive. In other words, core players, the early adopters, the enthusiasts.

Nerfbat compares RMT to monthly subscriptions. If a company uses subscriptions it's overcharging the casual players and undercharging the hardcore. RMT on the other hand is closer to microtransactions. You pay for what you use. If RMT is prevalent in a game, the casuals will most likely get more bang for the buck while hardcore players end up paying much more to stay on the bleeding edge. If the L33t Sword of Uberness drops only from The Nigh-Impossible Boss of Doom, they'll kill it. If it can be bought for 50€, they'll buy it. To them, it's all about getting everything out of the game. If RMT is banned, the hardcore will get a lot of value for their subscription. This is one part that keeps them playing: great value for their money.

But why would a company cowtow to the hardcore? Surely the casual player market is larger.. It is, but the hardcore are the early adopters, the grassroots recruiters, the review-writers and the fansite creators. They have extensive knowledge of the game, and the casuals do listen to them. They are the initiators of the network effect that attracts the casuals into the game. Without them, there is no casual market. Their opinion can literally decide a game's fate.

Block inter-account gold transfers?

Tobold has come up with an idea to distrupt gold farmers, and it's surprisingly simple: Block gold transfers between accounts by mail.

Gold selling ads on Nihilum's site

After months of denials, Nihilum has finally introduced blatant goldselling ads on their site.

Corpse graffiti spam - a way around spam reporting

Apparently the gold spammers are now using hacks to transport a bunch of gnomes to Ironforge and having their bodies spell out the URL of the goldselling site.

While many commentators find this hilarious, there is a very strong reason why the goldsellers are doing this. With the current reporting feature, the spammers are up against every single player that doesn't like spam. With the corpse graffiti, only a GM can stop the spam. It's much easier to overwhelm a bunch of GMs with spam than to overwhelm all WoW players.

If it walks like a duck..

Apparently Wandering Goblin isn't convinced that Affinity Media is out of the goldselling business.

Poor downtrodden gold farmers

Anda's Game, a goldfarming sob story by Cory Doctorow.

Won't somebody think of the poor girls in the sweatshops?

(Via MapWoW)

WoWHead sold to IGE?

There goes the neighbourhood..

Update: The official announcement is out. John Maffei, the (former?) Senior Vice President of IGE says that Affinity Media has nothing to do with IGE anymore. I'm trying to verify that claim now.

Gold farming in raids? Unlikely.

New York Times has a new article about gold farmers. Most of it is the usual whining about poor downtrodden farmers working in sweatshop conditions and being harassed by racist westeners. However, the article gets more interesting near the end. The writer laments how mean old Blizzard has shut out the farmers from a large part of the game: raiding. And then offers a solution: Goldfarming guilds. 24 skilled goldfarmers who take you (for a price, of course) to the raid instance of your choosing, kill the boss for you and let you loot the item you wanted.

This caught my attention since several guilds do this already, although not for real-world money. Pre-TBC it was not uncommon to see a high-end raiding guild advertise runs to Molten Core, Blackwing Lair or even Temple of Ahn'Qiraj. You paid them a certain amount of in-game gold and they would let you tag along and grab any epics that their own members did not need.

However, I think this article has more hot air than glimpse of future gold farmer tactics. Why? Gold farming raid groups are a very risky business. TBC had already diminished these "charity" runs since the importance of a single raider increased when Blizzard shrunk raids to 25 people. The goldfarmers would have to be overgeared for the instance to complete it while being handicapped by the presence of their customer(s). Getting that gear requires a whole lot of effort and thus carries a significant risk. Playing and gearing up 24 hunter bots takes a whole lot less time than playing and gearing up a 24-man balanced raid group in full epic gear. And all that effort can go to waste if Blizzard bans your goldfarming guild. Getting your main raid group banned would be a devastating blow to many gold farmers.

There are also limiting factors. The raid timers prevent you from killing a specific boss several times in a week, so only one of your many potential customers would even have a chance to get that piece of loot each week. If the piece doesn't even drop you have an unhappy customer on your hands. Unhappy customers don't like to pay you money. Raid IDs prevent the customer from joining other raids, so you can't sidestep the problem with multiple groups, either.

IGE sued.. poorly

While suing a gold seller is all well and good, one should take a look at your legal arguments before filing the lawsuit. Handing a favorable precedent to the gold sellers is counterproductive at best.

Blizzard vs Peons4hire

Blizzard is going on the offensive against gold sellers. They have sued Peons4hire. Interestingly enough, Blizzard is not suing them for gold selling or Terms of Service violations per se. This lawsuit is about spamming. Since there are successful precedents of email spam victims and ISPs suing spammers, this lawsuit might even succeed.

Curse Gaming & Markee Dragon?

I was a bit surprised to see a post in Curse Gaming which denounces the most recent wave of bans for botting, trading gold and trading accounts. Although it appears in their "Editor's Notes"-section, it was not written by the staff of Curse. The post was submitted by AlexandraMD, but the post itself mentions that it was written by Marcus Eikenberry of Markee Dragon. And sure enough, Alexandra is one of the editors there.

The Markee Dragon site doesn't hide the fact that they do support botting, gold trading and account trading. WoW Glider links, IGE ads, botter interviews, links to gold selling sites. .. you name it, they've got it. Apparently Markee Dragon has personally been banned by Blizzard as well. One other thing that I found was an utility called FreeGameCam (not to be confused with the GameCam), which can be used to monitor your bot's progression remotely.

If I were a Curse staffer, I'd be more careful who I allow to post on their front page.

WoW Gold 8.33 times cheaper in EU than in US

A recently released study shows that World of Warcraft gold is 8.33 times cheaper in the EU than in the US. Is Blizzard US just taking gold selling reports more seriously? Is Blizzard EU hindered by having their GMs split across 4 languages? No. The report says that Blizzard EU is simply neglicent.

However, my server isn't all that bad. Especially Alliance gold is relatively quite expensive (cheaper than in US, though). I like to think that my farmbot ganking is doing some good. :)

Getting "paid" to play

Gitr has done some math on the average salary of a gold farmer.

Video clips from a goldfarming operation

Although gold farming operations are usually quite secretive, one San Diego grad student has scored some interviews with goldfarmers and even has footage of their daily operations.
(Shamelessly stolen from Tobold)

In defense of the gold farmers?

Friggingawesome.com has an article written by an author who, strangely enough, advocates buying gold. He first tries to justify the advantage gained by buying gold:

It's unfair for those players who does not have the extra cash to spare or would prefer to play it the old fashion way. But for example, we all know what Nintendo is right? Well when game shark came out did Nintendo try to stop or prevent them from selling? No, they didn't.

Although Nintendo did temporarily shut down the sales of Game Shark's precessor, the Game Genie, let's allow him to refute his own arguments:

But of course, for those who chose to cheat the game was not required to play with others that didn't want to cheat.

Incidentally, this is the same reason why game verification addons were very popular emong FPS gamers before they were integrated into the game engines themselves. Nobody wants to play at a clear disadvantage and lose.

Let's move on to the distruption caused by farmbots stealing all the kills. Let's allow him to describe the problem:

Yes I'm sure we've all experienced that farming now a days have been a little difficult due to the overwhelming population of WoW gold farmers. If gold wasn't able to be sold using real money the farmers wouldn't exist and players would probably be able to enjoy the game more.

Shock and horror, players being able to enjoy the game more? We can't have that.

Perhaps blizzard should enforce a law to farming? Or allow players to tag a mob and allow them preparation time to kill the mob they were targeting? Well, Blizzard is not a government and even if so, the government today isn't perfect either.

Fortunately, we don't have to rely on the big bad government. All you need to do is to contact a helpful player on the opposite faction. Tell him where the farmbot is and he'll take care of it. You'll be able to resume your farming and he'll get some free honor. Win-win. Unfortunately this doesn't work on PvE servers, so you'll just have to tag mobs just before the farmbot attacks them.

Let's move to economic effects, shall we?

Another reason why I can understand players hate the idea of buying/selling gold is because it disrupts the economy. If there is excess gold, then the value of gold drops and the value of the item will rise causing players to spend more gold on the item than what they would normally need to pay. Basic economics 101, inflation and deflation. A player can only farm an X amount of gold over a given period of time. The more gold there is, the more the item will cost, the more a player will have to farm unless they purchase the gold of course.

In other words, goldfarming results in a vicious circle that requires you to keep buying more gold. Surprisingly he doesn't want to refute his own arguments, and instead blames the almighty Blizzard:

Well with all these problems involving selling gold, why hasn't Blizzard done something? I believe they probably are working on a solution but believe it not, farmers do make up about 30% of their population. Somewhere in the back of their mind I'm sure they don't want to get rid of all subscribers. What they do instead is ban a few at a time and they would be required to buy a new world of warcraft cd key. Extra cash flow for the mighty O Blizzard. Yes farmers and sellers do get their accounts banned. But have not heard of any buyers getting banned however. Lucky for us?

While the buyers can be tracked, it might not be worth the trouble. Cutting the gold supply and making goldfarming unprofitable is most likely more effective.

He then moves on the topic of developer-sanctioned gold selling:

The Sony Exchange is a secure market place for players to auction their currencies and items to other players for real cash. In return SOE of course takes in a small fee for themselves. Charming isn't it?

Of course Sony can do whatever they want with their own games. Of course, it might have some consequences:

Believe it or not, but World of Warcraft subscriber base more than quadruples what SOE has in total.

I'm not saying that Blizzard's gold selling policy is the sole reason to WoW's success, but reactions to the Station Exchange weren't exactly favorable.

As you can see SOE is accepting the new trend and making a huge load of profit, I'm sure Blizzard would follow up on the idea as well. EverQuest was the first mmorpg hit ever, Blizzard known for their real time strategy games now has the most popular mmorpg as well. I wouldn't see why they won't follow and collect some of the cash themselves.

How about not wanting to kill the golden goose? Blizzard's competitors are already lining up and promising not to repeat their precedessors' mistakes. While the network effect might provide WoW some protection, customer goodwill can only go so far. Blizzard does need to keep their customer base happy, even if it means passing on some short-term profits.