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.

Prokofy Neva vs. Broken Toys

I wonder if there's a corollary to Godwin's Law that explains all of the Stalin references in this epic thread..

Is it so hard to understand that maybe, just maybe, sandbox and theme park-style games can co-exist? You may like one type more than the other, but that doesn't mean that everyone else is wrong and as bad as Stalin/Hitler/whatever.

But then again, this is the Internet. And when duty calls, we must do our part.

Blizzard 1 - Peons4Hire 0

Blizzard just won an injunction against Peons4Hire, forbidding them from interfering with the game.

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.

Paying 10k for.. nothing

In a move that surprised nobody but the buyer, Blizzard has banned the player who bought a Black Temple-geared, Twin Blades of Azzinoth-wearing rogue for $10,000.

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)