A short time ago I was reading an excellent post from Jeff Freeman’s blog which discussed the plague of spam which is threatening to drown out meaningful comment and quickly turning into one of the most effective predators in the ‘virtual’ sea.
He focussed mainly on blog comment spam, but the business plans behind the need for cheap and effective advertising are pretty similar for all the companies involved in direct marketing – find the most cost effective opportunities and exploit them to their limit. This is rapidly becoming relevant to the MMO support industry, and not just since that old EQ boogeyman Yantis is plotting to stuff the tubes full.
Jeff’s post (and Tobold’s apocalyptic April Fools post) highlight the point that these companies have no qualms about ruining the usefulness of the communication channels they hijack. It also seems pretty clear that the virtual systems employed by most modern MMOs are too vulnerable to this short term thinking, as a short visit to the WoW or Vanguard forum will quickly confirm. From previous PR posts from WoW especially it seems there is at least some kind of effort to keep the RMT suppliers on the backfoot, but as with reactive tools such as email spam filters the response to bans is just to throw more cannon fodder into the fray, since after all the overheads are minimal with trial accounts.
It seems that the worst affected company is Blizzard, perhaps unsurprisingly given its long standing market leader position, although it does finally seem to be ready to make some unspecified restrictions to its communication channels. CM Aeus snuck out a short post on the Interface Customisation forums regarding the plan for changes to whispers which indicates that it aims to make this change ‘in an attempt to reduce spam and advertisement’
The genie was out of the bottle a long time ago, and I have to wonder if this arms race is really going to be won by incremental steps which fail to tackle the demand for gold from the player base, or the dedication shown by suppliers to send out as much spam as possible.
To win this war, will the price simply be too high?
