I have been playing MMORPG’s for about 10 years. I can honestly say that I have never received a solicitation via an in game chat or mail system within that 10 years. That is why this post by Ed Castronova on TerraNova got me thinking about how susceptable MMORPG’s might be to spam.

It is bound to happen. Spammers have infiltrated every part of our lives to this point, from email, to cell phones (both SMS and sales calls), to your physical mailbox (no counting how much shit I get in the mail), to your home phone. Sometimes it is easier just to white list everything and don’t answer a number unless you know who it is. I love Vonage for that simple reason. I don’t answer my phone. I let it hit the messages if it is a number I don’t know.

It is bad that we have to live with it all, but I think it would be an extra miserable experience inside an MMO. I say this because it ruins the major aspect of the game.

The Immersion.

There is nothing that will kill the immersion factor of a game faster than an advertisement selling something in real world dollars (this also applies to “code authorities” who advertise real world products or service in a game but that is for another post). I know for people who don’t play MMORPG’s this probably sounds like something that people who play MMORPG’s (and other online games) should just deal with. Well, it has the ability for me personally, to actually ruin a game.

The scary part is that this is just now becoming something that is feasible, both financially, and to a point technologically, to companies. The total MMORPG player base has increased exponentially in the last 8 years, with that comes a.) more people playing a certain game (that might have the potential to purchase in game currency using real world cash) and b.) As games get more popular, more people will try to figure out third party APIs to hack the games, thus making the availability of a programming interface to a game more susceptible to scrupulous people trying to write code to create mmospam-bots.

These bots would harvest player information using multiple methods (for EQ2 what comes to mind is just doing /who commands in a zone to see who is online to send tells too, or crawling eq2players.com for an x day period looking for people who have advanced their character and sending them in game mail) and distribute advertisements via communication channels in a game.

Minus the post-infringement reports to the devs of this (assuming it is against the EULA), I don’t really know if game developers could fight this on a massive scale. My thoughts on a way to combat this via in-game developments would be to apply the following to a MMORPG (specifically eq2):

a.) Recognize and Log all URLs that pass through the in-game tell and or mail system (reg. expression, whatever to find) . Watch for alerts for x number of tells in a row using URLs in chat or mail.
b.) Cap how many in-game tells/mailing can go out within a certain period of time.
c.) Have an easy to use reporting mechanism that customer service can readily check in an instant after a user base submission of a mmospam-botter sighting.

The real issue here is this; if the price of paying for a disposable account is worth the profit that might come from an in-game currency seller and minimizing the profit that can be attained. The weapon that a dev team would have would be the cost at which an account could be obtained and also paid for per month to have available to send the spam.

Right now I don’t see the profits from selling the gold/plat in game for EQ2 to be worth the cost of creating and spamming via a mmospam-bot. The game company has the fact that in-game currency selling companies have already established a fierce marketplace (in which they are battling with prices) on their side.

Let us hope as players it stays that way.

-Cyan