Mythic's fun way to remove gold sellers

[IBBoard]

Mythic, the guys behind Warhammer: Age of Reckoning (Warhammer Online, the MMORPG) are apparently being pro-active in their banning of gold sellers/spammers. What's better, they're apparently even being creative and in-character about it!

The best part is that they're not just banning people, but one at least one server they're putting up in-character messages. I don't know what most of them are (I've only found the one example so far) but I like the one from the blog post:

Tchar’zanek has ordered the slaughter of [Spammer] and all others of his kind who weaken the Raven Host by providing wealth and power to the unworthy

As some of the commenters have said, I can see it being great fun to see those when you're used to MMOs being full of gold sellers spamming people, and the fact that they're being creative with the in-character messages is just great

[stfas]

he does certainly have right.

[MariusLecter]

Go to hell.

That guy sticks to his guns.

Kind of dissapointed after reading the article. When I first saw...

Tchar’zanek has ordered the slaughter of [Spammer] and all others of his kind who weaken the Raven Host by providing wealth and power to the unworthy

I thought it was going to be something like when a gold spammer starts up in chat in a major city everyone would be able to target him as an enemy. Does WHOnline have a suggestion forum?

[IBBoard]

He does stick to his guns in his response to gold sellers, but if the alternative is to cheapen the game and make it suck then I'm glad at least one developer has some integrity!

It might have a suggestions forum, but I'm not sure. You're probably best starting to look on WarhammerOnline.com.

As for targeting them, I think the problem is that they're booted and banned as soon as they get picked up as spammers by the WAR 'strike team'. Before that point they're just another player and any targeting could start a witch hunt, and after that they're not on the server any more. Having said that, depending on what area they're in and what faction they're a part of then you might be able to attack them anyway

[MariusLecter]

Before that point they're just another player and any targeting could start a witch hunt

At the point after identification by the strike team but before the point of boot and ban, Announce: Tchar’zanek has ordered the slaughter of [Spammer] and all others of his kind who weaken the Raven Host by providing wealth and power to the unworthy!

A distinct ping shows up on everyone's mini map, people out of range see a direction arrow. And those within sight see a flashing red name or some other obvious indicator...

Then... the HUNT begins...






The boot and ban can occur upon the spammers death

EDIT: Searched through the vn boards for suggestion... if it's there I can't find it

[stfas]

i actually agreed with him, gold spammers are bad, have you never seen WoW? people get their accounts ripped off just for gold that they get for real money.

[IBBoard]

Yeah, I've seen World of Warcrack (or at least heard enough about it and seen articles about people making ad-hoc adverts in-game by summoning creatures at high altitude and making them splat in the shape of words). Gold spammers and similar are always going to be a problem on any RPG-type game because some people will always want to take the easy way and be willing to pay for it.

As for hunting the person down, it'd be an interesting way to do it but I can imaging it requires a bit more coding than a simple message on-screen It would provide a lot of fun for people, though, hunting down and killing people in-character. The down-side is that they can still be spamming in the period until they get killed and the account is normally just a throw-away intermediary account anyway.