Raph’s Website » Gold farmers get creative about advertising

Gold farmers get creative about advertising

July 4th, 2007 (Visited 18971 times) Tags:

Kerri Knight writes,

Using the age-old client-side memory hack, or ‘teleport hack’, gold spammers have reached a new low (albeit a creative one). Using the exploit, they caused level 1 gnomes to rain from the sky in Ironforge near the bank and auction house (typically the most frequented area on a server). The bodies died upon impact and remained in the world, after a short time it became clear they were dropping in a such a way as to spell out the name of a gold-selling website. I’ve not been able to locate any news of the incident (its late, and tomorrow…err today, is a holiday). So I can only leave you with a Blue response to the issue on the CS forum for verification. (see link below) May have been inspired by this amusing comic. Oh, and Happy Independence Day! :9

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Endgame wrote on February 9th, 2010 at 11:04 am:

Best. Hack. Ever.

Joystiq wrote on February 9th, 2010 at 11:04 am:

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Ordinal's Cabinet of Ephemera wrote on September 11th, 2007 at 9:35 am:

Life, the ratio and effectiveness of marketing communication is way better in WoW than in SL.” – Stupid quote of the morning, noticed in Are Marketers Dying on Second Life? So – marketing in WoW – how does that work then? Are we talking aboutgnome dropping?

Clickable Culture wrote on July 5th, 2007 at 3:53 am:

[Clickable Culture's Atom feed is intended for your personal, non-commercial use.] The skies of Azeroth rained gnomes today, but none survived the impact,according to a reader of Raph Koster’s blog. The gnomes left behind corpses arranged to spell out the name of a web site dealing in virtual gold sales–an effective means of advertising third-party services Blizzard (creator of the Azeroth setting) is firmly against, allegedly carried out using

It's Raining Gnomes, Hallelujah, It's Raining Gnomes | Broken Toys wrote on July 4th, 2007 at 8:23 am:

[...] the latest frontier in gold spamming involves gnomes falling from the sky. I am really not making this up. I ask that any player that witnesses these to report them strait [...]

It's Raining Gnomes! - Video Games - Gamewad wrote on July 4th, 2007 at 1:16 pm:

[...] has to get pretty tedious. *Brian Schulman – Associate Editor, GameWad.com [source] [...]

Clickable Culture - Gnomes Rain From Azeroth’s Skies wrote on July 4th, 2007 at 7:21 pm:

[...] skies of Azeroth rained gnomes today, but none survived the impact, according to a reader of Raph Koster’s blog. The gnomes left behind corpses arranged to spell out the name of a web site dealing in virtual [...]

Gnome corpse advertisement in WoW by gold farmers - Joystiq wrote on July 5th, 2007 at 7:08 am:

[...] forced to stick to the creative since their free advertising power was diminished. As Raph Koster reports, “using the age-old client-side memory hack,” farmers dropped Gnome bodies from the sky to spell [...]

It's raining gnomes! - Jointhesaga Discussion Forums wrote on July 5th, 2007 at 8:58 am:

[...] raining gnomes! http://www.raphkoster.com/2007/07/04…t-advertising/ __________________ In OtherNews: Order OtherNews 2006 in paperback or download at [...]

LifeParticles.com » Gnome corpse advertisement in WoW by gold farmers wrote on July 5th, 2007 at 8:58 am:

SiH Forums: It's Raining Gnomes! wrote on July 5th, 2007 at 1:23 pm:

[...] Gold sellers are getting creative, now that everyone has spam blocker addons, apparently. [...]

Pro Game News » Gnome corpse advertisement in WoW by gold farmers wrote on July 5th, 2007 at 2:00 pm:

GAMING: Gnome corpse advertisement in WoW by gold farmers - Primetime Central Forums. wrote on July 5th, 2007 at 2:59 pm:

[...] forced to stick to the creative since their free advertising power was diminished. As Raph Koster reports, "using the age-old client-side memory hack," farmers dropped Gnome bodies from the sky [...]

controller code » Blog Archive » World of Warcraft Gnome Showers wrote on July 5th, 2007 at 10:13 pm:

[...] Raph Koster] Share This Tags: haha, online, world of [...]

Posts by Alexander Sliwinski at Joystiq wrote on July 5th, 2007 at 10:16 pm:

Griefing or Advertising with falling Gnomes in World of Warcraft - PlayNoEvil Game Security, Game Cheating, Gold Farming and RMT News & Analysis wrote on July 6th, 2007 at 12:57 am:

[...] or Advertising with falling Gnomes in World of Warcraft Raph Koster notes a recent ploy by a gold farming firm to advertise in World of Warcraft by having a large [...]

bit-tech.net | Gnomes rain down on WoW players wrote on July 6th, 2007 at 4:31 am:

[...] Azeroth, one company has gone to extraordinary lengths to get some in-game publicity. Using what Kerri Knight calls "the age-old client-side memory hack", advertisers for Wowmine.com rained down a [...]

SpraticNet.com :: View topic - Gold farming fallout. wrote on July 6th, 2007 at 6:43 am:

[...] raining gnomes! halleluah! http://www.raphkoster.com/2007/07/04/gold-farmers-get-creative-about-advertising/_________________Baylor – Tetran [...]

RLMMO :: View topic - Gold graffitti wrote on July 6th, 2007 at 6:45 am:

[...] http://www.raphkoster.com/2007/07/04/gold-farmers-get-creative-about-advertising/ [...]

WoW gold farmers getting creative » VTOR - Virtual TO Reality wrote on July 6th, 2007 at 8:46 am:

[...] the past due to some advertising dollars that we were offered. So gold farmers have now resorted to creative methods of advertising such as using dead gnome bodies from a client-side hack to spell out domains where [...]

Creative Gold Sellers and Gnomes - Age of Conan Forums wrote on July 6th, 2007 at 2:05 pm:

[...] Gold Sellers and Gnomes I was browsing Raph Kosters site when I found this [...]

EverQuest II - Discussion Boards wrote on July 6th, 2007 at 9:36 pm:

[...] and I see nothing legitimate about the business at all. They've even gone so far as to launch widescale attacks on World of Warcraft servers in an attempt to bypass the spam [...]

Juice Daily - Gnome corpse advertisement in WoW by gold farmers wrote on July 7th, 2007 at 1:40 am:

TFans Transformers Community > Gnome corpse advertisement in WoW by gold farmers wrote on July 10th, 2007 at 6:08 am:

News Report: It's Raining Gnomes, Rich and Poor Gold Farmers [mmobux] wrote on July 19th, 2007 at 6:00 am:

[...] a gold selling company reinvented in-game advertisement and made a very creative advertising stunt. Raph Koster reported gnomes falling out of the sky spelling out the gold seller’s website. Watch this ad and [...]

The Political Gamer: Who said World of Warcraft gold farmers aren't creative? wrote on August 1st, 2007 at 11:39 pm:

[...] their in-game advertising. Yesterday a site named wowmine.com figured out how to do just that, and they did it in spectacular fashion:Using the age-old client-side memory hack, or ‘teleport hack’, gold spammers have [...]

EQ2-Daily.com :: View topic - Anyone else notice a huge incrase in in-game spam wrote on August 25th, 2007 at 8:24 pm:

[...] have to hand it to them for their creativity: via Raph via Kerri [...]

Lag-O-Rama:MMORPG News and Opinions wrote on July 27th, 2009 at 3:54 pm:

[...] yet another recent spate of “Hey! Here’s a marketing idea…let’s spell out ‘cheap wow accounts‘ in gnome corpses for advertising!”, I got interested in spite [...]

Andy Wright said on July 4th, 2007 at 4:18 am:

I’ve seen this sort of thing done before in other games – usually players putting out “Merry Xmas” messages and the like.

One amusing thing about this is that it does rather put the lie to some RMTer’s claims that they “don’t hack or exploit games to make gold”. We all “knew” they did of course – but there’s the proof…………

Sam said on July 4th, 2007 at 7:05 am:

By that point they reached a level where it got so entertaining that it becomes an asset again.

Patrick said on July 4th, 2007 at 8:03 am:

I want to take the opportunity to say that gold farmers are merely exploiting inefficiency in the design and business models of games that should know better.

Scott said on July 4th, 2007 at 8:13 am:

This is just too awesome for words.

In DAOC the best we ever got was someone who used loot bags to create a huge picture of Homer Simpson on the side of a mountain.

csven said on July 4th, 2007 at 8:15 am:

Our lesson for today: advertising can kill.

Amaranthar said on July 4th, 2007 at 8:25 am:

Lawn Gnomes? It would be alot more humorous if it wasn’t a hack and not about RMT.

(Remembers the 3 toads in UO named “Bud”, “wei”, and “ser”)

David Irelan said on July 4th, 2007 at 8:50 am:

ROFL! If I ever go back into Star Wars Galaxies, I’ll have to remember the toads.

Over00 said on July 4th, 2007 at 8:58 am:

Is this what we call “user-created content”? hehe

almagill said on July 4th, 2007 at 10:33 am:

Okay, if it’s true, I take my hat off to those creative credit farming little buggers.

Impressive.

Dirk Pfeiffer said on July 5th, 2007 at 8:07 pm:

That’s actually the first fun thing about goldsellers.
I usually don’t care about goldfarmers or sellers but atm they are really pissing everybody off in Vanguard. Receiving up to 15 tells per hour telling me to visit some dumb website and buy gold is just getting on everyone’s nerves. Even if I would ever buy gold I wouldn’t buy it from some *bleep* that keeps spamming me over and over.

Kerri Knight said on July 5th, 2007 at 10:42 pm:

Grrr, I’m really a bit miffed at all the sites sporting pictures of the whole website’s name spelled out. I think screenshots showing partially completed attempts that didn’t give out the address would have been a much more responsible decision. That would show the gist of what they were up to without furthering the very purposes of those responsible.

Perhaps there’s a bit of social engineering in the method they employed, itself; or is this just an unintended bonus for them?

Sean Bulger said on July 6th, 2007 at 3:16 am:

Oh yeah. This can give a site a lot of free advertising, so to speak. Save the many gnome lives that it cost.

I’ve seen players complain on forums about specific gold selling websites’ various hijinks in-game. This complaining, of course, just provides also happens to provide free advertising to the gold sellers. The irony of it all. Part of me really believes that gold selling sites like this take that into account with their tactics. I would be quite surprised if they didn’t.

… Still, this whole thing does make me chuckle.

Amaranthar said on July 6th, 2007 at 4:04 am:

It’s intended. There’s been mind games going on for a long time over RMT, as well as anything else you can think of about these games (PvP, cheating and hacks, bot programs….).

Using humor to get people on your side is one of the oldest tactics, and practiced even by young children. It becomes, not a question of right and wrong, but who you like. And even if your opposition still disagrees with you, they often will soften their stance.

This isn’t, like, deep stuff. It’s pretty normal. The thing is, you can’t take your eye off the ball, or you’ll lose sight of it.

Kerri Knight said on July 7th, 2007 at 10:48 am:

Well, I understand individuals propogating the information. I’m a bit more concerned over ‘journalistic’ sites doing so. I specifically did not make any mention of the name when I wrote Raph, and I chose to write to Raph because I trusted him to have the integrity to keep it that way :9.