Home › Game Forums › ArcheAge
Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
16.000 Spammers and Botters Removed from Alpha
lunatiquez
Member UncommonPosts: 381
in ArcheAge
"In the latest forum post, Scapes, the Community Manager for ArcheAge announced that thousands of illegal accounts have been banned from Alpha (some of them can be found in the picture above). Over 16.000 accounts that were purchased using suspicious funds and have been used to either bot for gold or to spam and advertise various gold selling sites were removed."
Wow, that's $150 x 16.000 = $2.400.000
Way to go, Trion. I think they have a good reason for the delay.
Comments
Sounds more like a company got hacked, rather than someone used thousands of stolen info, be they CC or what have you.
Details, it is always in the details.
As always, if it sounds to good to be true....
Scapes stated earlier that with the current build of AA they can't ban characters/accounts in the game and banning has to be done manually. As the linked post states, the upcoming build 'gives more tools', meaning they can insta ban you in-game.
Of course, a F2P game always has botters & goldsellers, but with the lack of ban tools in-game with the current build, they'll rampage quickly. With the upcoming build I think GMs will be more active in-game and keep these pests at bay...
Every mmo game, including P2P. Look at their forums, full of people complaining bots & gold seller. This mind set should stop already.
They are certainly doing their best, but I almost get a sense of naivety about how they are approaching this entire goldseller/bot nonsense.
Fingers crossed though
Every game has bots, but i m afraid this game would be the Kingdom of Bots...
All Time Favorites: EQ1, WoW, EvE, GW1
Playing Now: WoW, ESO, GW2
Money from suspicious sources will not arrive or will very likely need to be refunded in the future
It takes one to know one.
In War - Victory.
In Peace - Vigilance.
In Death - Sacrifice.
I believe that gold selling (linking in game to websites for purpose of gaining money off the game) is against the terms of service and your account can be canceled and no refund warranted. I am more curious if somehow the free accounts given out somehow got out of control since they were give-aways and maybe not monitored as closely. Or perhaps there was a hack. It is my hope that 16000 accounts were from gold selling sights and gold farmers. So basically they lost a ton of $$ and will think for a second about starting up again when game goes live. Just will be strange though since there will be many ways to still exploit loop holes and they will have free to play option so the risk is gone.
Stolen credit cards or account details. It speaks volumes that there are people out there willing to buy stolen credit cards for the purpose of farming gold to sell in a online game. There is surely a lot of money in these kinds of activities.
SIXTEEN THOUSAND ?!
And that's only in the "closed" ALPHA where accounts have to be bought (requiring extra effort of buying stolen CC lists, etc.). This must be a world record of some kind, I'll bet.
What's it going to be like after launch when it's F2P and freely accessible ? Will 1 in 10 "players" NOT be a bot ? The mind boggles...
All those gold selling site's buy stolen credit card info from hackers on the black market.
People should know by now that no mmo's can escape this fate as long as the real cancer remains, the gold buyers.........
make an account.
Put in creditcard info.
login untill the person from the stolen creditcard sees wtf happened and calls the company its stolen / not authorised payment has been done.
2 to 7 days later the gaming studio sees that this account is a scam account and locks it.
In the meantime new creaditcard info has already been bought and the circle continues.
There was a top notch Discovery program explaining and showing how easy these creditcard company's get hacked and how easy it is for scimmers to obtain that info.
There is no escape from this as long as GOLD BUYERS buy that gold en masse.
It is not closed, it is early-acces. What surprises me though is that this happened. Trion is a publisher of several mmo's already for quite some time. They kow how to deal with this problem and still let it happen.
It takes one to know one.
I made the assumption that stolen credit card information is registered. Maybe I underestimated the scale of a problem for which I should be barking up a different tree. Or not. Maybe indeed all these companies are to blame for letting it happen. Maybe you are right in that.
It takes one to know one.
Maybe, just maybe, nobody is doing that and the goldfarmers do not see a return of their (small) investment.
Does that thought lighten up your day?
It takes one to know one.
No, it doesn't "lighten up my day at all". All these kinds of announcements do is remind me how bad things are getting.
If Trion aren't banning 16K accounts per week, they've probably lost the battle before it even started. I'm sure those accounts will all be replaced in 24 hours at the most.
The goldsellers are running quite a sophisticated operation nowadays. Nobody but them has a clearer picture of how much demand there exists for illegal currency, items and services. The mere fact that they make so much effort (16000 accounts ?) to bot, scam and farm MMO's is proof in itself that they know there's a market for their "warez". It's free money after all !
They work dozens of online games simultaneously and they know exactly how many hits their website(s) get. They know which games get the most attention, and they know how many "browsers" are converted into buyers. You're not dealing with a few "script kiddies" that are pulling pranks, this is serious business.
The goldsellers profit off of the work of the game developers. They pay no licence fees or royalties, they need no loans to cover their development costs and they have minimal risk or investment. If someone else builds a successful game, they're in business !
That is a perfect analogy.
Death is nothing to us, since when we are, Death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.