I was actually a bit surprised a few months back when I started playing EVE Online. Within an hour of creating my character I received an in-game mail offering to sell me the in-game currency for EVE-Online, ISK. It was crudely written but to the point, “ISK for Sale.”
That seemed, at that moment, to be outlandishly brazen. Somebody surly reports these to CCP? The account sending the email must surly get banned and through enough clever network tracking the source of the accounts must surly get blocked from creating new accounts eventually? I thought surly this would be a short-lived phenomena?
I can be somewhat naive at times.
Yes, I thought wrong. Three months later I still find such mails coming to me in-game every so often. I won’t get any for a week or two then, suddenly, I will log in and find three waiting from me. Sometimes they direct me to one web site, sometimes to another. It seems that this will be with us for a while.
Well, at least it is only in EVE I thought.
Then I started getting messages like that in World of Warcraft. At first they were equally crude and pretty random.
The other night however, they started getting more sophisticated and more pervasive. I logged in and found an ad on Blintz. Then I logged onto another character and found he had an ad as well. Then I went through ALL of my characters, on four different servers. Every single one of them had either one or both of the ads below:
(information obliterated to prevent any gain to the sellers… no gold ads here!)
These are actually starting to look professional. And they appeared on every one of my characters!
Gold Spam Comes To WoW!
I still haven’t seen this sort of thing on EverQuest or EverQuest II as yet, but perhaps the market isn’t big enough to warrant this sort of effort. All I see there is the occasional message on the OOC or Trade channels pointing to gold selling sites, but their days may come.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 