It's a rare event when I wake up, walk to the computer, yawn, and think to myself what I could possibly write about only to have an article walk up to me, sit in my lap, and cuddle. Today it happened.We've all seen what I call the evolution of spam in-game. First it was just straight tell spam. Blizzard fixed that. Then it was group spam. Now it seems gold farmers have taken to just sitting in the capital cities and screaming their lungs off until they get reported and/or zapped by a GM.
I think the reporting mechanism is starting to get to them though. Every time they lose an account (when it's reported) they have to make a new one. In the scope of the money they're making it's really not a big deal, but it's tedious repetition and I saw the first signs this morning that they've shifted their focus and are moving to more aggressive tactics.
I fired up Adium (my Mac instant messenger) and was immediately greeted by a request for contact authorization. I'll stop here for a moment so you can gasp, because what happened after this is exactly what you think. I looked at the address that was requesting authentication and it didn't really ring a bell. I looked at the display picture and saw a cropped screenshot of two blood elves staring back at me. I reasoned that it had to be someone from my guild, even though I wasn't sure who. I accepted the request and the contact appeared on my contact list. As it turns out, they were online.
I greeted this person and asked who they were because I was anxious to know. My question was ignored, and the response came "hello. how are you." Out of courtesy I responded to their question but repeated my original question. The mysterious contact responded "i'm betsy from xxx company. can i ask if you play the wow" at which point my gold farmer anger (which often transforms me into the Incredible Hulk) kicked in and I simply said "Good bye" and blocked the contact. My Adium privacy setting were borked though, and it took several seconds to effectively block this person. During this time she continued her sales pitch even though I had told her I wasn't interested.
I have never ever bought gold, so I have no idea how this company got my Windows Live ID. You can rest assured though that if they got mine, they may have gotten some of yours as well. So if you get a contact authorization from a "corporate sounding" hotmail address with a WoW-themed display picture, be forewarned.
What's next? Telemarketing? I cringe at the mere thought.
[Note: The name of the company and the representative have been edited. I do not want to give this "company" any form of advertisement whatsoever. And as tempting as it is to reveal their Windows Live ID, I'm not going to do that either.]
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
1-16-2008 @ 11:08AM
Boola said...
Cuddling with articles may be a sign you need some time away from the computer.
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1-16-2008 @ 11:13AM
Itchster said...
Ohh you have to be joking? I already get spammed in game from these "people" (And I use the term loosely) now my IM client is going to possibly spammed as well? What is the world coming to!
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1-16-2008 @ 11:18AM
JPN said...
oh hai that wuz me i wanted 2 talk about wow :(
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1-16-2008 @ 11:24AM
LostOne said...
Probably a scripted program and depending on your responses it'll automatically generate more appropriate replies. If you had said you didn't play, they probably would have politely thanked you for your time and left you alone. They probably buy MSN e-mail addresses from e-mail spammers and hit them all up. If I don't know someone trying to add me I don't let them, and I block messages from unknown people. If you want to IM me, you better warn me in e-mail first, I get enough spam in e-mail, thanks.
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1-17-2008 @ 12:52AM
Hoggersbud said...
Or it would have said "Well, you should start playing, and our company will help you get to level 70 in the fastest way possible" .
They have no percentage in leaving people alone. None.
1-16-2008 @ 11:24AM
Brian Carnell said...
"I have never ever bought gold, so I have no idea how this company got my Windows Live ID."
I'm sure its just automated. They've found some way to scrape Windows Live ID's somewhere, and the cost of spamming them looking for WoW players is probably not that high.
What I'm surprised about is that people actually buy gold anymore. I know people who bought gold pre-TBC, as well as people who farmed gold to sell to companies like this.
But post-TBC, amassing large amounts of gold is trivial. I'm pretty much a completely solo player -- I have a guild, but it's just my toons and my wife toons, and we're both fairly casual, but its still pretty easy to rack up thousands of gold without really trying these days. I usually put in about 15 hours a week in WoW, and can easily make 2500-3000 gold if all I do is farm in that time period.
What's the point in buying it anymore?
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1-16-2008 @ 11:56AM
Ian said...
"I usually put in about 15 hours a week in WoW, and can easily make 2500-3000 gold if all I do is farm in that time period."
I'd love to know your farming secrets as I have no idea how I can make 200g an hour consistently... I'd love to get my epic flying skill, but 5000g is a long way off on the horizon. Any farming tips?
1-16-2008 @ 12:39PM
Baluki said...
Daily quests. Although I think Brian's estimates are kinda high. I guess if you're really dedicated to making money, you can just farm the hell out of something that drops motes.
1-16-2008 @ 2:17PM
Brian Carnell said...
""I usually put in about 15 hours a week in WoW, and can easily make 2500-3000 gold if all I do is farm in that time period."
I'd love to know your farming secrets as I have no idea how I can make 200g an hour consistently... I'd love to get my epic flying skill, but 5000g is a long way off on the horizon. Any farming tips?"
Unfortunately, you need the epic flying skill to make that much money consistently.
What I did to get the 5,000g requires mining and helps a lot if you play a rogue.
I pretty much farmed the 5,000 gold all from the ogre cave that is north of Telaar in Nagrand. The Ogres their respawn fairly quickly, have decent drops, can be pickpocketed as a rogue, and that area has about 8-10 mining nodes that spawn. At least on my server, it also is not a very highly trafficked area. My wife has an enchanter, so I disenchanted every green and blue that dropped (except a few very rare items that actually sell in the AH on my server...got a surprising number of Darkmoon Faire cards, for example, which are still pretty expensive on my server).
Once I had the epic flying mount, I leveled my engineering so I could make the gear necessary to farm the gas clouds in Outland as well. Between the mining nodes and gas clouds, I can make 175-200g/hour if I don't do anything but actually farm. Typically I like to stop and gank Horde, so I spend a lot of time in PVP and end up around 125-150g/hour.
Time of day also matters a lot. If I log on in the morning when I wake up, say 6 a.m. or so, I can make that 200g/hour easy because very few people are also on my server farming at that time.
Obviously playing a rogue makes it a lot easier because I can sneak in and get mining nodes that other toons have to fight and kill 4-5 mobs to get to.
1-16-2008 @ 11:27AM
Aichon said...
This happened to me over a year ago. I've been contacted a few times now via MSN IM from the same group. I was polite and listened to them the first time, but they've been on my ban list ever since, and I Deny any new requests for Authorization from similar names.
The odd thing was, it wasn't quite gold selling that they were after. They basically wanted to "borrow" my high level character so that they could farm gold, then cut me a share of the profits.
Uh, sure. Let me just hand over my account name and password to a complete stranger...
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1-16-2008 @ 11:29AM
Todd said...
"And as tempting as it is to reveal their Windows Live ID, I'm not going to do that either."
So who will I know to block?
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1-16-2008 @ 11:42AM
Zumwalah said...
ya ive had this happen in my MSN, i believe They Actually Buy or Steal Email lists from WoW related website.. forums. and what not.. My guild also gets posts on our guild forums of the same nature, and i get emails...
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1-16-2008 @ 11:43AM
Ollej said...
Might I point out that they have also taken to Myspace. I recently got a myspace friend request. Same thing, didn't recognize the name, but it was a pic of a Blood Elf, so I thought, maybe it's a guildie. Sure enough, the whole profile was designed to help a company sell gold. i quickly marked as spam.
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1-16-2008 @ 11:44AM
Milktub said...
That's awesome. I mean, really awesome (from a shady business perspective).
If Blizz ever legitimizes gold selling, I'm definitely going to be a door to door gold salesman.
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1-16-2008 @ 11:47AM
Arras said...
if your AIM/MSN/Yahoo s/n is even remotely close to the name of your toons they'll probably cast a wide net that way too, or just use the name in hopes of catching someone
at least one of my toon's name is similar enough to my AIM s/n that it wouldn't take long for their generator to come up with it and start spamming me.
None of this will stop though as long as selling gold is the slightest bit profitable. The amount of work they're putting in to spam major cities and now IM accounts is trivial, especially if just a few people actually buy gold. If blizzard truly wants to make gold spammers go away, they have to find a way to make it unprofitable - either provide the service themselves (at a much cheaper rate) or make gold even easier to come by and make it insanely difficult for them to operate.
Drive up their operating costs and you'll see them disappear pretty quick
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1-16-2008 @ 11:55AM
icer said...
but what's the sense of reporting them (they're on a trial account witch will be deleted in a couple days) even if blizz puts the effort of trying to track them is only gonna lead them into a dead end, what they need to do is ban the IP address in the 1st place, i'm sure those people aren't working from home
i got flamed before for saying that trial accounts should be removed, so keep them so that spammers can do what they do best
so whatever...
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1-16-2008 @ 11:56AM
Paul said...
It wasn't a person, it was a bot. It would have continued on with its sales pitch even if you had said no. It is the shotgun approach to marketing: spam everyone and eventually you will hit someone who plays WoW (there are over 8 million of us now right?). A few of those people will actually bite and buy some gold or items. This encourages their behavior. Ever wonder why you get so much spam email?
It turns out that people actually click on spam links and they buy stuff! I saw some crazy statistic one time about how 10-20% of people who are spammed bought something linked in a spam message or email.
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1-16-2008 @ 12:02PM
John said...
"I think the reporting mechanism is starting to get to them though. Every time they lose an account (when it's reported) they have to make a new one. In the scope of the money they're making it's really not a big deal, but it's tedious repetition"
Um, don't the gold sellers use trial accounts for their spam? I mean why pay 20 bucks for an account that's gonna get shut down in like a day or two, even with the money they're presumably making. As to it being tedious repetition, these people likely use bots for their farming and spamming, so I find it pretty likely they have a script or something to apply for a new trial account when their old ones get shut down, so I don't think it's quite as tedious as you suspect. All that said, I really don't see why Blizz doesnt block american/european acccounts from logging in via a Chinese IP address, Blizz should jsut detect the IP address and be like, we're sorry please try to create a trial account via our chinese service, or something like that.
What I've been noticing more of, are spammers with non alphabet soup names spamming in /s across multiple lines (as opposed to one big /s message) for a certain website where they claim you can get the "undetectable wow stat changer", and who apparently speak english well enough to respond to people who make the argument that the only undetectable thing you're gonna get at said site is a keylogger.
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1-16-2008 @ 12:21PM
Seper said...
I work in the cellphone industry.. if you sign up for some cellphone services... they will collect your phone number and sell them to other companies .. usually advertising companies..
So these gold buyers are probably buying a big list of email addresses.. or scanning forums that have your email address listed..and adding or emailing who they can.
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1-16-2008 @ 12:54PM
Aticus said...
I have had many emails from gold sellers. Apparently, yahoo users are marking them as spam because most just appear in my bulk. They'e fighting; we're resisting.
-Aticus, http://www.paladintales.blogspot.com