On the topic of spamming again: it was very welcomed to have a reprieve from the incessant hounding of gold spammers. A few days before the patch I created a new character that was literally spammed within 15 seconds of it being created and me logging in which was depressing.

Their spam filter introduced with the patch works very well, except there are still some minor spammers who persist. Hilariously, I've seen some try the trade and local defense channels. I'd be interested in finding out whether the spam has stopped as a reaction to the suit, or as a result of the spam filter.

I have faith in Blizzard when it comes to lawsuits. If nothing else, they are as brutally effective in thier legal tactics as a Russian infantry contingent that is enforcing a scorched earth policy. i've followed the few lawsuits they've filed before, and don't recall there being anything left of thier target.

This "rule" is akin to a legislator saying "it is illegal to smell putrid odors". Attempting to rule in-game activities that happen out-of-game is doomed to abysmal failure. By definition, Blizzard has zero enforcement powers outside of its game servers, and has no way to directly figure out those out-of-game activities.

From the same EULA, just above your section:

"allow players who are playing characters aligned with the "Alliance" faction to chat or otherwise communicate directly with players who are playing characters aligned with the "Horde" faction, or vice versa;"

By this EULA, anybody who uses Ventrilo or Teamspeak is potentially a cheater. After all (two paragraphs above), using those programs is a third-party software that significantly alters "the World of Warcraft experience;" (I sure play very differently when I'm using the guild Ventrilo server - it's faster and easier). Most of high-end guilds are cheaters, then? After all, they're probably paying real money to run that Ventrilo server, in order to gain in-game advantage.

Another section of the EULA, the one covering "legal" names, if taken at face value, leads to a large majority of characters being "illegal" (you'd be surprised at what can come under the label of "offensive", particularly taken in an international multi-cultural context - I know, I've fallen in that trap of labelling myself a Nazi unknowingly by randomly creating a nice-sounding name, which happened to be the crotian name of the Nazis partisans during WW2).


Ultimately, cheating is:
Which means that cheating is defined as whatever Blizzard wants it to be at any given time.


That's the difference between rules that are for the balance of the game, and rules that are for morality reasons. The rule against running a hack/file modifiers are for the balance of the game. The rules against out-of-game activities are purely a morality stance from Blizzard. Blizzard says "gold selling is cheating because... we don't like gold selling, period".



Now, after this little bit of trolling (yeah, this is intended to be a contrary piece, which I said in my first post - I know perfectly why people & Blizzard consider this cheating), let's go to the solution to gold farming.

People buy gold for two reasons. As I said above, because they don't have the time to get gold in-game, or, because farming is inherently boring.

That is the real problem, and why you can do whatever you want, and scream until you turn blue, but gold farming will remain a strong force: Because people DON'T LIKE TO FARM. As soon as gold/reagents/craft materials is required somehow, and acquiring those involve repetititve and too simple tasks, most people, except the most obsessive-compulsive ones will hate this. And if you don't like something, you will look to alternatives.

I found TBC to be "almost" perfect regarding to this. The major gold need when you reach 70 is your epic flying mount, and, if you finish all the possible quests in game, you get a large chunk of the required money - without ever having to farm anything for more than the amount of time required to complete the current quest. It's a minor failure in that, unless you spent a lot of time in dungeons during levelling, you will not have enough quests to get all the gold. I had, and when I ran out of non-dungeon quests to do, I had 4300 gold. If I didn't do each instance from 60 to 70 twice or three times, I would have ran out of quests sooner.

The gold selling market is Blizzard's failure. Blizzard has made getting gold required, but didn't provide enough interesting (meaning: non trivial) means of getting it.

I'm quite surprised that there is still a large market for gold, though. I felt the urge to buy gold when I was 60: there was little gold to be had, and farming money is horribly boring - I would rather fork some a couple months subscription rather than run on internal autopilot to get cash for hours on end. The sheer amount of quests at 70 was a good start, but you still run into the problem that you end up with no more non-trivial content to do, and the recurring need to get cash.

If you want a magic bullet to kill the gold farming market, that's what you need instead of lawsuits. Make it so that getting gold/materials is far more efficient when doing non-trivial tasks. Increase the amount of gold obtained in dungeons/raids. Have almost all instances drop motes, plants, mines in amount comparable/better than a player would get farming outdoor. That will reduce gold farming far more efficiently than any lawsuit ever will. Reducing demand kills gold farming, and it's far better to reduce demand with a carrot than a stick - the stick, as people no doubt realise, drives away players.

Another aspect to think of would be this. Companies such as P4E / IGE are using services that Blizzard developed and supports to make their company viable. I would also be willing to bet that these companies are not paying royalties to Blizzard for their work either. It would be like me going into McDonalds and selling McD's French Fries at the front door so customers don't have to walk all the way into the store. It might not have anything to with the fact that they are spamming customers or even selling gold. It could be the ethic practice of how they are doing it.

This is the biggest reason gold farmers exist, I agree... though with the daily quests, farming gold through bombing runs, wrangling aether rays, etc. there are much more fun methods of making some gold. :] Looks like Blizzard is taking the game in a good direction by trying to fix both reasons gold farmers exist.

Oh, and I tried to type in guild chat: "peons4hire got sued :o" and the message just disappeared. Never made it to guild chat at all.

http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com...cgDBegDaegD7gQ

Interesting gold ad I saw today on wws. :P

Yeah I'll agree with that, putting daily quests in as a means to get gold is pretty ingenius, IF it's intended. I still have this feeling in 2.1.1 or 2.1.2 they'll remove gold from daily quests.

As a resto shaman I greatly appreciate the new daily quests, and I certainly hope they keep the gold in as a less-painful way of farming. I can complete the quests without feeling like I should spend 100g in respec costs (since you can only do 10 daily quests).

Getting the gold for progression/learning nights and all of the associated consumables is much less painful now that I can go do some easy quests and break even easily!

With a steady source of income, people will be less likely to want to buy gold. Although you will still always have the lazy people, you will greatly reduce the temptation for the average person.

It's not as nonsense as you might think... How is blizzard supposed to know whether this or that transaction is legitimate? It would be very difficult, I think, to determine whether a friend is lending you money to buy your epic mount or you bought gold. I hear some gold sellers actually will have you set up an over priced auction, ie: Gloves of the Suckiness for 2000g, and then purchase it to transfer the gold "legitimately".

The big thing here is that Blizzard is actually going to use money to fight goldselling/spamming.

It doesnt even matter if Blizzard has the law on their side, because ultimately you have a juggernaut company with a lot of money behind it going after a company who's income isnt 1% of what blizzard makes.

Lawyers cost money and these legal maneuvers are always drawn out. P4H cant compete. Blizzard/Vivendi lawyers will have them in legal hell for years. For Blizzard, who already have a company legal staff on retainer it really doesnt cost them too much. P4H must hire some to represent them.

P4H should know this and blizzard will either force them to settle, or bankrupt them.


Either way it will set a precedence.


The only problem comes if Blizzard take on a large enough company like IGE who can successfully fight Blizzard in court. A bad ruling and Blizzard could legitimize the entire gold selling industry.

It will be interesting to see what will become of this.

Is there a version of SpamSentry that is working for 2.1.0? The version I have is able to record all of the information, but is unable to create any new tickets. Any time I try to create a new ticket I get a message to the effect of Blizzard blocking addons from creating tickets.

For those interested, as this is a federal lawsuit, it will be publicly available at a small fee through PACER, the Federal Judiciary's centralized rsystem for access to District, Bankruptcy, and Appellate court records.

URL: http://pacer.psc.uscourts.gov/

Registration is required, though free. You are only billed $0.08 USD per "page charge".

I use this nonstop at my job, it's reliable and quick, but do your research ahead of time, as searching blindly on the system can add up over time.

You don't need mods like SpamSentry anymore, Blizzard's default UI has a "Report Spam" right click function for chat.

I'd actually be interested in anyone who knows how Report Spam works. My guess is that once a certain number of people report spam, the offender is automatically blocked from speaking and perhaps even temp suspended until a GM investigates. For the first few weeks Blizzard may have a human act as a filter but eventually I think they'll automate the whole thing.

Of course this opens itself up to abuse - could a guild or group of friends work together to get a player banned by having 50-100 people Report Spam someone?

Depends on what the money is being spent. A lot of it leaves economy quickly as it was bought on purpose for a gold sink.

If all gold would be spent on (raid) repairs, you'd have no inflation and no external effect apart from people raiding more. If it would be spent on flying mounts, it would be similar. All it would cause would be a (slight?) depreciation of flying mounts, depending of how much value (or utils) is tied to them being rare.

If all would be spent on consumables/craft items/Night elf strippers, you'd have a clear inflation.

What if I buy you 100g peons4hire gold the day Blizzard starts banning gold buyers? Who do you think will get banned, me or you? What if farmers start sending some free gold around randomly to drown the real RTM transactions?

Not to mention banning gold buyers would take griefing to a whole new level. Imagine Nihilum buying gold for all Death and Taxes MTs during a heated race to the next boss, even just for a temp ban during the investigation. Or all victims buying the smallest amount of gold possible for their beloved scammer. Currently, all you have is baiting the target to say something bannable.

If you buy 5000g for your epic mount, that means that the gold you'd have to scrimp and save otherwise is now free to be used for other things. It's not just what you spend your purchased gold on, it's what you spend your gold on overall.

SpamSentry is still really nice as it converts a 4 line whisper to a 1 line console message.

Also, as you noted a GM may be involved in high volume reports... if the message reported is not against the ToS, then no action will be taken and the reports flagged as "invalid."

You have to think about it from the perspective of businesspeople, though. If Blizzard sees that list, the game designers/programmers might go, "How do we ban these people?" but you can sure bet the guys over at business development will go, "These guys are willing to spend more money on this game than the $15 monthly fee. I wonder what other things we can sell them?"

A replacement copy of the game? :-)

Yea, to be honest, I don't think people are willing to take all that time for that level of faggotry.

Hm .... so people that buy gold now to get ahead in PvE races wouldn't buy that same gold for their competitors tomorrow to get them suspended. Personal morality and motivation is a funny thing, but I doubt you can say with much confidence that no-one would pull that kind of stuff if the option were open.

That's true. And new subscription as well.

So farming is booring; and repetative pointless tasks you can do in your sleep is something most people would expect to get paid for; and not have to endure in a game they pay for. But in the end time-sinks are just a way for Blizzard to make the content last longer so they can get away with spending less on intressting quests or instances to keep people occupied. I can see why Blizzard don't want you to buy gold and bypass the time sinks but really don't see why other players should have any moral objections really.

Not saying that buying gold is good in anyway. Its truly silly to fist pay for a game; and then pay for not having to play the game as much. But in the case of the epic mount sure its no big deal and really I don't care either way. For now not many I play with have bothered to get the mount anyway so it doesn't matter really. But if in a month or two everyone else have it and I don't I'd probably feel left behind (literaly since they travel faster).

That would be booring and not sure what I'd do. From Blizzards point of view its probably preferable that I'd buy gold; rather than quit in disgust.

In any case large parts of the game are very fun. But of course Blizzard tries to add as much pointless waste of time as possible to keep players from finishing the content. Ideally gold sellers, and even botting services, would give players an easy way to bypass booring timesinks and just play the fun parts of the game. Beeing able to bypass timesinks would mean there is no point in adding them in the first place; and the game would probably be more fun as a result (but with more effort required form Blizzards side).

I mean how many enjoy content like the Furbolg rep grind in Winterspring? Some will still do it because of rewards but really would the game be better or worse for players if you could legitimately download a bot that grinded the Rep for you while working? Eventually resulting in Blizzard having to give up trying to add 'kill 1000's mobs for 5 Rep each' grinds as time-sinks?


Sure you may say that buying gold takes away from the feeling of accomplishment after having legitimately bought an epic mount. But really is that a big issue?