 | Blizzard sues in-game spammersMay 27th, 2007 |
You can read about it on the WoW Forums , or catch the f13 thread.
As others have already noted… this is said to be a federal lawsuit… but the company being sued is in China. This could get interesting. 
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I’m honestly not sure what these people expected to happen. Some kind of back and forth hackfest? For Blizzard to use a deterrent method like banning their own players for using the service? I certainly wouldn’t play those games if I had that kind of dough…
Because I got back into WoW for the 10 day trial, and man… not only was everyone complaining about this, but I got so angry that eventually I made a macro to spam the bots back.
That’s right. I was spamming bots. Or Chinese children.
I don’t really get it though. If *everyone on WoW* got one spam a day from these guys, that’d be considered a huge problem. But everyone on WoW got one of these spams every fifteen minutes… they were doing nothing short of begging for some kind of serious retaliation.
The latest patch 2.1 has quick methods for reporting this, and the number of spams per day for the average user has gone from dozens to 0.
Honestly, I’m not sure how this is going help.
As long as there is a free trial out there we’ll have spam in game. There is a never ending supply of usernames out there for them to use in circumventing whatever Blizzard throws at them.
And lets keep in mind, as with all spam, if people weren’t ultimately giving folks like Peons4hire real life money they wouldn’t be around. And as long as they are getting money, we’ll see them out there.
Mnemon, I think that’s exactly why they’re turning to the courts for some relief.
Interestingly, there’s a precedent for using “trespass to chattels” laws to file civil cases against people and companies for electronic trespass. The burden of proof is thus:
(1) defendant intentionally and without authorization interfered with plaintiff’s possessory interest in the computer system;
and
(2) defendant’s unauthorized use proximately resulted in damage to plaintiff.
I think you could easily make such a case against chronic in-game gold spammers — or really, any banned player who returns to cause more mayhem in the future.
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Blizzard is suing a company doing in-game spamming of their gold-farming services. Normally, going the legal route is a last resort. It would seem that in an in-game scenario, for a game for which (a) Blizzard write the policies
Blizzard is suing a company doing in-game spamming of their gold-farming services. Normally, going the legal route is a last resort. It would seem that in an in-game scenario, for a game for which (a) Blizzard write the policies
[...] http://www.raphkoster.com/2007/05/27/blizzard-sues-in-game-spammers/ My 360 My StubleUpon [...]
[...] down on a company, Peons4hire, that sends in-game spam to offer gold in World of Warcraft (see Raph Koster, Blizzplanet, Virtual Worlds, Real Problems, … and many others at this point). They made a big [...]
[...] down on a company, Peons4hire, that sends in-game spam to offer gold in World of Warcraft (see Raph Koster, Blizzplanet, Virtual Worlds, Real Problems, … and many others at this point). They made a big [...]
[...] down on a company, Peons4hire, that sends in-game spam to offer gold in World of Warcraft (see Raph Koster, Blizzplanet, Virtual Worlds, Real Problems, … and many others at this [...]