RMT, Spam and you…
OK, so, for all those people out there that think buying yer way through MMO space is OK, I’m here to give you a few reasons about why it’s bad. I personally know a couple people at work that buy plat on WoW, and I scold them. Their gripe: “I don’t have time to make it in game, so I buy it.”
WHATEVER! If you don’t have time to be playing to support your characters in an MMO, the you probably should not be playing at all.
Today, SOE decided to stick it to the RMT spammers some more, and improve upon some of their spam filters in their new launcher. (as Loolee was kind enough to point out in a comment on my previous entry) It seems people were crashing things trying to send spam from the new Launchpad (thanks for the clarification Grim). Great to utilize the spam filters they put up over the summer, but as with all things in software design, sometimes there’s bugs you don’t catch until it goes into production. I personally have this happen all the time, then you sit there scrambling to fix it for however long it takes. It happens. Well as a result of their effort to keep the game a pleasurable experience for their customers, they FUBAR’d everything.
On a side note: the spam filters they implemented over the summer are absolutely a work of art. I have not gotten a single spam since they were implemented and tweaked, in either tells or mail. The spam is still sent, but you can disable anything that’s categorized as spam from reaching the chat window. The spam got so bad this year b/c of a certain website that I won’t name, that it was getting more than irritating. At one point you would end up with a spam every couple minutes in /tells. Very irritating…so, kudos for making a spam filter that works so well…
Back on topic…I’ve been sitting here all day, just wondering what happened and when it’s coming back up. I play on Kithicor exclusively now and that was one of the first to be off all day.
Supporting RMT makes this kind of crap happen. Maybe before buying plat, gold, isk, whatever, you should think about the possible ramifications of it. For one, every single one of us ends up getting barrages of SPAM IN A GAME WE PAY TO PLAY. Because some lazy ass won’t actually play the game, they make everyone else miserable in the process. SOE, CCP, WoW etc would not have to deal with code to defeat the spam if people WOULD JUST PLAY THE FREAKING GAME!
So, once these people, wherever they may be, find there’s a good market to sell virtual property, they become like Viagra ads in your email. Over and over, every passing minute they come up with their spam bot scripts, log in to their various game servers and send incessant spam. Do you like your mail filling up with Viagra ads? I sure don’t, so why the hell would you enable someone to do the same damn thing in a game you’re paying to play?
Here’s an blog from CCP on buying ISK (EVE currency):
http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=437
It’s a good read…
Blog from Ryan Shwayder’s Nerfbat, in his blog, he talks about microtransactions and why letting real money enter MMOs cheapens the experience amongst other things:
http://www.nerfbat.com/2007/09/12/are-microtransactions-the-future-or-omg-rmt/
It’s sad that people ruin the fun for thousands of subscribers b/c they’re too lazy to freaking play a video game.
“…they’re too lazy to freaking play a video game.” Does this statement qualify as ironic? Well either way it’s true, the bastards.
Actually, the spam filter was implemented this past summer (in-game). The beta of Station Launcher takes advantage of it and the crashes were related to an unexpected bug in the Launcher that triggered when someone sent spam out of Launcher and into the game. The filter still caught it, but something about the new delivery mode made things go BOOM.
Thankfully, that bug was identified and fixed yesterday (fix applied to all servers, not just the ones that crashed) so it’s no longer an issue, or possible exploit for jerks who like to crash servers on purpose.