Posts with tag goldselling

If you've been using an addon like Spam Sentry to quickly and easily report ingame gold whisperers, it turns out Blizzard might not be completely happy with you.

You'd think Blue might be happy players were helping them get gold spammers out of their game, but apparently Spam Sentry isn't actually helping... at least in the way Blizzard wants it to. Blue poster Kaone says, in a thread repeatedly linked to by Coreiel, that reports need to be submitted as soon as possible (Spam Sentry collects gold spammers, and then either lets you report them when you click to do so, or all in one go at the end of the day-- apparently more players have been going for the easier option). Addons, Blizzard says, aren't cutting it, because they aren't hearing about the spam quickly enough to catch the accounts while they're logged on.

Which is kind of understandable. But what's not understandable is that Blizzard is going to remove the ability of addons to create a GM ticket as of the next patch. So as of 2.1, we can pretty much say goodbye to Spam Sentry in its current form.

The good news is that Slouken (the addon CM, if there is one) promises that Blizzard is working on a "much easier-to-use method" of reporting gold spammers in 2.1. However, as we all learned from the LFG system, what Blizzard thinks is easier doesn't always match with what the players want to use. And my guess is that if Blizzard is getting "spammed" with Spam Sentry warnings now, their system will be a lot more full when everyone has access to a quick-reporting ability. It seems like a better plan to help Spam Sentry fix itself by building functionality into the addon system, rather than remove that functionality for a tool that players aren't familiar with.

Let me preface this by saying that I'm absolutely notorious for giving out free trial codes. You want to check out WoW and see if you like it? Sure! Let me get you a code -- and get myself 30 days free in the process if you sign up. You think your cousin might dig the game since he plays EverQuest, but you're not sure? Here, let me email you a code to forward to them. For you see, I am every inch the devoted WoW fangirl, and I say that without any shame. As such, it is my mission to share the fun!

Now, with that said, I think I've easily managed to score four or five months of free time from people converting trial accounts to paid accounts. And as WoW gains even more ground, even hardcore devotees to other MMOs are starting to be curious about what all the noise is about. (Well, okay, maybe that's just my older brother who has been staunchly refusing all my free codes and continuing to play City of Heroes/Villains... But I sense his will starting to falter now that he's hit endgame there. Mwahaha!)

Of course, if you listen to Terrorantula on the (European) WoW General forums, trial accounts are everything that is bad with the game. They bring in gold spam mails! They let those advertisers come on and harass us! Now personally, while I'm all for Blizzard writing in some kind of process that immediately bans any account who sends certain gold-selling domain names in chat or mail (and they know who they are) I don't know that I would back the total removal of all free trial accounts.

If you've been a longtime reader of the site, you know we've dealt with this issue before: We use Google Ads here on the site, and since those ads are keyed to words that show up in the site's content, we've been seeing gold selling and powerleveling ads for a long time.

We, of course, don't condone or endorse gold selling/buying or powerleveling at all, or any other actions against Blizzard's Terms of Service. And many of our readers, myself included, consider goldbuying and paying to get your characters leveled akin to cheating, and just as despicable. We do realize we're presenting a mixed message, however, when we champion fair gameplay, but also run ads that feature sites meant to sidestep that same fairness. Until now, it's been nothing more than a technical problem: there hasn't been a way for us to keep the Google Ads running while singling out the ones we don't want.

But now we've heard that it will be possible for us to create a blacklist of ads we don't want to see on the site. We have been told that we can single out sites by domain name, and inform Google of certain domain names we don't want to see popping up in the ads. All we have to do, then, is build a list of sites in our ads that advertise services against Blizzard's Terms of Service. And to do that, we need your help.

Complaints on the forums suggest that they aren't really gone, but I've noticed an astonishing lack of them on my own server in recent weeks.  All of the obvious bots - the ones who followed a specific pattern through the same area day after day - seem to be missing lately, making farming Timbermaw reputation a nearly pleasant affair, having only to compete with the human reflexes of other players.

While I'm thrilled to see this lack of farmers on my own server, I have to wonder if any of it will last. At the end of last week, I pointed my web browser in the direction of a major gold-selling site to see to see what I could find out.  I checked the stock on gold for US servers, and for nearly all servers saw the text "NOT IN STOCK! PRE-ORDER THIS ITEM NOW AND RECEIVE CURRENCY AS SOON AS WE RESTOCK."  Another check today yielded much the same results. The servers that do have gold available for order only had it in smaller quantities (if you can consider 200 gold a small quantity).  Does this imply that Blizzard's continued efforts to weed out gold-sellers starting to have a notable impact, or is this just a temporary setback on the part of the gold-farming professionals?