MMORPG: Get Rid Of Spam Bots, Please!

This is a shoutout to developers and publishers of massively multiplayer online games: "Get rid of spam bots!" For those who remain unaware, spam bots are not exclusive to email and social networking sites like Friendster and Facebook where spam goes into the inboxes of unsuspecting users on a daily basis.

The only difference between receiving spam in email and getting spam in an online game is, in the latter, spam comes in a wide array of forms, from chat, a common function of MMOs (for obvious reasons, as it is the only way to communicate in a virtual world ... at least at the moment), to whispers and in-game mail.



What are they spamming? Well, mostly advertisements for websites that sell in-game currency in exchange for real money, or some sort of service that almost always include power leveling. Yes, some people actually pay other people to level characters in online games.

The sad part is some MMO developers and publishers take pains to either block these spammers from setting up shop in their virtual worlds while some don't—at least nothing that is transparent to the inquisitive minds of some players.

Take, for instance, two of the MMORPGs that I currently play: Allods Online and Atlantica Online. These two are great games. For me (read: in my opinion), these two titles are at the cutting edge of today's generation of free-to-play online games. They do suffer, however, from minor flaws, and foremost among these is the existence of spam bots in the game.

In Allods Online, owners of these spam bots take advantage of the game's multichat functions, particularly the one that lets players broadcast messages to all players in a given map or area (for reference, check out the screenshot). Thank the gaming gods that they haven't exploited the in-game mail yet!

In Atlantica Online, spam bots have been plaguing all servers since the commercial launch. What's happening in Atlantica is actually worse than the situation in Allods Online. In NDOORS Interactive's gem of a game, spammers not only utilize the chat system, they also send spam mail to players via the mail system.

The question now is: Whose responsibility is it to get rid of these spammers?

My take on the matter is the responsibility falls on MMO developers and publishers. Hey, players may be inconvenienced by the daily barrage of advertisements in their chat windows, but they're not the ones losing money—that is, unless they patronize these so-called gold sellers whose reputation is always suspect.