Death is in the air for gold sellers
by Amanda Dean 
Aug 8th 2008 at 1:00PM
What smells like dead Orcs and flies? Goldseller spam in Orgrimmar. In the last few weeks it has been dead Gnomes in Ironforge. The dead bodies spell out the name of a gold selling website. This tactic has returned from about a year or so ago, but this is the first time I've heard of it in Orgrimmar. The body advertisements look sharper than the old versions. All in all it seems like an awful lot of work to get around spam filters.
Gold sellers have used several means to get their message out to the public, and Blizzard has found ways to combat it. I remember back in the day when we used to get spammed with whispers. Blizzard introduced the report spam feature for users to flag this content, the whispers nearly completely ceased overnight. I have to hand it to them, the gold sellers come up with innovative ways to market their product. Sure it violates the terms of use, but gold-selling by its nature is a violation. What's one more script here and there for them?
Filed under: Cheats, Making money
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
Scott Aug 8th 2008 1:06PM
This happened on Aggramar (US) in Ironforge last week. Gotta give 'em props for creativity, but seriously... enough with the gold spam! Just let us play the game!
dAnixx Aug 8th 2008 1:32PM
If no1 would buy gold, they wouldnt spam
Zep Aug 8th 2008 1:08PM
But don't they lose money from the amount of time spent spelling it out? And that's not a message easily read... who's gonna take the time to read spam?
Why do they do it anyway? If I wanted to buy gold I wouldn't wait around for a spammer, I'd google it o_O Does anyone really get spammed and then say "omg buying gold, I didn't know about that!"
Taytayflan Aug 8th 2008 1:21PM
I'd read it just for the sake of curiosity, but I'd never buy gold.
Also, wouldn't suiciding/ressing/ run in/resuicide leave corpse letters? Look cooler...
Shisho Aug 8th 2008 2:40PM
((Does anyone really get spammed and then say "omg buying gold, I didn't know about that!"))
To answer your question. Yes. Lots of people.
Juneau Aug 8th 2008 3:08PM
No, but people who do buy gold respond to the "50% extra gold!" crap they send by mail. It's just advertising.
Saelorn Aug 8th 2008 1:14PM
Without access to normal flying mounts, how could anyone get into position to even read the message?
jshtan77 Aug 8th 2008 1:17PM
Props?? These are the same people who hack into your accounts and make keylogger posts on the forums using your toons, steal all your gold, sell and destory all your equipment, delete your toons, so that blizzard has a harder time restoring everything and try to sell your hard earned gold back to you.
QUIT ADVERTISING FOR THESE ASSHOLES.
/nerdrageover
emptyrepublic Aug 8th 2008 1:23PM
A lot of gold farming occurs overseas. I don't understand why Blizzard doesn't regionalize the servers; so only US IPs can connect to US servers. EU IPs to EU servers. Chinese IPs to Chinese servers, etc.
I understand very well how such protections could be countered, but anything that makes it more difficult for the gold farmers the better.
In the end the only way to stop the gold farmers is to make the cost of business > revenue gained. That means people also need to stop buying from them. You can easily make several hundred gold a day with a single lvl 70 now; there is no need to ruin the fun for everyone but supporting gold farmers.
Iwanttobeasleep Aug 8th 2008 2:15PM
Because people travel, relocate, or even roll on European servers to play with European friends. How would you like to be banned from your account because your company moves you to their England branch?
wowtard Aug 8th 2008 3:43PM
Blizz made it easier to farm gold while not making it any easier to farm for mats (especially gems and enchanting mats). The result? Huge inflation on everything except for NPC sold goods in player economies, forcing players to either do an hours worth of dailies to keep up, or (you guessed it) buy gold.
Harmun Aug 8th 2008 4:36PM
actually wowtard, inflation causes the value of the gold the spammers hold to go down, and thereby makes it less profitable for them to do business.
Also, these changes came in with a shift from gold to other measures of work being used to acquire gear- badge loot, for example. Now most of the crafted epics that go for thousands of gold can be replaced by something better for less work than farming the gold would have been. These days most people only use gold for sinks like flying skill and bags.
perseus Aug 8th 2008 11:53PM
So just cause i'm Chilean I couldn'y play on US servers¿?
Silverrealm Aug 8th 2008 1:24PM
One of the people I met in game bought gold all the way up till he could do dailies.
I was extremely angry with him when I found out. I make a point of causing a ruckus in major cities when I spot one.
Although it was been really quiet lately on our server.
So these spammers are not only making the initial sale they are prob getting repeat business too... that is why it's worth it.
But I never did understand how spending that much time spamming ever did make them that much money. I would assume they are breaking even.
I just want to play the damn game, I wish they would all DIAF.
Verit Aug 8th 2008 1:55PM
You assume someone is actually sitting there doing this? No - they have some automation script doing it for them. Any QA lab at any software company has the tools to pull this off.
Anyhow they run the script - walk off and take 5. All the accounts they user are trial accounts so its no water off their back when they get banned.
Culhag Aug 8th 2008 1:26PM
The placement of bodies is so perfect I tend to think they used a teleport hack...
Also, how do they kill their peons, and in mid-air on top of that ?
(I've never seen that form of advertising myself, so my questions are based on the post's picture)
Verit Aug 8th 2008 1:57PM
There's a lot of client state/data the server inherently trusts. So teleport the toon to a certain xyz coordinate, then kill the character.
Hoggersbud Aug 8th 2008 1:29PM
So, who votes that Blizzard form a team of commandos to hunt down the Gold-spammers?
Jasperwind Aug 8th 2008 2:49PM
I do.
Mark Aug 8th 2008 1:34PM
I'd love it if Blizzard would do something about the gold selling spam in /trade, /lookingforgroup, etc.