Search Forum Home   General Topics  General Discussion  Spamming WoW Go...  Spamming WoW Gold Sellers to Get Rabid Lawyer Attack    29/05/2007 14:25:37 spektyr 84 posts Spamming WoW Gold Sellers to Get Rabid Lawyer Attack Aistee managed to beat me to the story HERE, but I'm going to go ahead and cover it anyway.  Why?  Because I want to.  And I have more to say than she did.  But mostly because I want to. Notorious in-game spammers "Peons4hire" (click HERE for their garish website) have prompted heavy-handed action from WoW designers, Blizzard.  As they said on their forum, the crushing regularity of these multi-line spam advertisements has caused Blizzard to push through some new code in their latest patch that will allow them to crack down on in-game spammers.  Furthermore, they've brought an undisclosed lawsuit against the owners of Peons4hire that demands (almost certainly among other things) an immediate cessation of all spamming. As usual I try to see this from the unreal-estate entrepreneur's point of view.  First and foremost I have to worry about what this means for other gold sellers.  What exactly is the nature of this additional "Big Brother" type code they introduced?  I couldn't help but notice that they said exceedingly little about what it is or what it does.  Presumably this could be merely so that spammers like P4h have few leads for tracking down a way to circumvent it.  But the paranoid part of my brain keeps nagging me about what else Blizzard is snooping into. Rationally I'd have to say that it's targeted at spammers and spammers alone.  But those of you running WoW oriented businesses should take note that the atmosphere has become just another tick more hostile. See, Blizzard didn't pick P4h out of a hat.  It picked them because they were absolutely deluging other players with these multi-line spam tells advertising their gold sales and powerleveling.  Players were reporting as many as "dozens" of unsolicited spam a night.  Almost certainly the lawsuit has very little to do with gold selling and a great deal to do with being a gigantic horse's ass to Blizzard's customers.  It's like the difference between walking into McDonald's barefoot (gold selling), and walking into McDonald's barefoot and yelling at the customers to buy your t-shirts. After all, if it were just about gold-selling they'd have gone after a much bigger fish: IGE.  If they slap that juggernaut down the other small-time operators would be infinitely easier to destroy.  Since they aren't attacking IGE directly we must assume two things: first, that the major purpose for this lawsuit isn't gold-selling, and second, that Blizzard is smart enough not to fight with someone who's pockets are deep enough to hire an army of high priced lawyers. So the moral of the story is that you can get away with annoying Blizzard, particularly if you're too small to notice or too big to attack.  Just don't be a retard and assault the customers too.  (Because, duh, they're supposed to be your customers too!) If your business violates some silly EULA, keep a low profile.  Apparently the people at P4h thought it wasn't enough to do business in a hostile environment, they had to make it additionally hostile and gloat about it as much as possible.  But that's my advice: keep a low profile.  Don't stir up the hornet's nest any more than absolutely necessary. As for the lawsuit against P4h, my guess is that Blizzard either has it's scope incredibly narrow or they aren't planning to actually win.  Rather, I think they're just trying to bleed P4h dry with lawyer's fees and then pursue some meaningless settlement or simply drop the whole thing.  It's a common tactic in a strong vs. weak legal battle.  It becomes a race of who can hire lawyers the longest without going bankrupt. Bet on Blizzard: their lawyers are on retainer.  Page 1 of 1   General Topics  General Discussion  Spamming WoW Go... Flat View Tree View Oldest To Newest Newest To Oldest