goldseller
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The Mog Log: Gil rules everything around me
My original plan for this week was to step back into the experiment with soloing that I started in Final Fantasy XI what feels like an eternity ago, but the recent updates about Final Fantasy XIV's market system prompted a comment that interested me. A reader noted that the auction block in Final Fantasy XI was partly responsible for the enormous gilselling issue that's plagued the game more or less since its release stateside, with the theory going that the market wards and so forth in Final Fantasy XIV were a specific response to this. It seems fitting, in light of all of the gilselling issues that we've gone through in Vana'diel, to take a look at the sordid history of the currency in the game and at how likely it is to translate to the new kid on the block. I don't think the problem lies so much with the sellers as with the environment that Square-Enix unintentionally created, as well as with the perfect storm of circumstances that devalued the currency of the game to near-worthlessness with no alternatives. That's right -- it's time to look back six years or so to the launch of the game in the U.S.
Blizzard's legal case against gold spammers
Here's a real interesting commentary about the recent lawsuit Blizzard brought again a fairly heinous gold seller (we haven't mentioned their name yet, and I don't plan to, but it's easy enough to find out who it is). Blizzard hasn't shared much about the case at all, except for the fact that it's filed in federal court, and that they want this one to serve as a precedent, not just for them, but for any MMO dealing with gold spammers.Cmdrslack (who's a gamer and a lawyer) says there's three ways Blizzard could be handling the case. First, they could be filing under CAN-SPAM law, claiming that even though the in-game mail is never actually leaving Blizzard's servers, it's still illegal spam email (first of all because it doesn't identify itself as advertisement). The second possibility is an much older tort called "trespass to chattels," which means that Blizzard could be saying the gold seller is unduly using their servers, bandwidth, and game properties to advertise their own business. That, says cmdrslack, seems most likely, because there's precedent for it, and Blizzard can easily prove that the spammer has been working on their servers for a while.Finally, Blizzard could also simply say the spammer is violating the EULA, which they definitely are. More likely, as cmdrslack says, they're using a mix of all three cases to show the spammer is wrongly interfering with their business. (Strangely enough, says Tobold, the one thing Blizzard isn't suing the gold sellers for... is gold selling.) But cmdrslack closes with the same question I will: Seeing as the spammer is based in China, and Blizzard is an American company filing in US Federal Court, just how are they going to enforce the ruling when they win?
Missing in Action: Bot Farmers
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?
