As some players point out to me in the numerous emails I receive each week, I apparently look like an idiot/hypocrite/uninformed child when I praise a company one day, and then crush them like a bug the next (literally) for doing something insanely inane. What these emails forget is that here at MMO Fallout, we shy away from sticking labels on a company, as long as that company is not Mythic entertainment and that label is not Mark Jacobs. But I digress: I feel that events should be taken as they come, and that there really isn’t some kind of point system you can keep to tell how good an MMO is in your graces. Oh well, Turbine gave us some free stuff so that gives them…five points? And the pay wall…You see my point.
Yesterday Turbine introduced the Dungeons and Dragons Online pay wall, where players could opt to complete offers to gain Turbine Points, not unlike MyPoints. The community, for lack of better words, exploded in response to this news. What originated as a shady new way to gain Turbine Points by taking an IQ test by some company in Malaysia quickly turned into controversy:
- Players discovered that the user’s username and email address were being transmitted, unencrypted, just by looking at the wall, to the survey providers.
- Forum users confirmed that one of the offerers, SuperRewards (or one of its affiliates) was harvesting emails for use in World of Warcraft phishing emails. A number of users, some of whom who have never played World of Warcraft, received similar looking phishing emails shortly after viewing the offer wall.
- Offers that require users to download software that secretly harvests information, cookies, and potentially passwords, credit cards, and social security numbers.
- Cell phone scams that require you to send a text to complete the offer.
- Offers that require you to partake in long surveys that then disqualify you.
Turbine has since completely removed the offer wall, temporarily, to address these issues, but the fact remains: For a few hours yesterday, Turbine was literally walking their players directly into a developer-backed trap. Players who were offered an alternate method to paying for Turbine Points were herded into a trap where they could have had their accounts compromised, or possibly even becoming victims of identity theft, depending on what some of the advertisers were sticking on player’s computers.
Players are, understandably, livid about this and Turbine has released a list of rules that offerers must adhere to. Hopefully this will calm down an inflamed situation.
Offer Wall Rules
Any offer to be published on the Offer Wall must meet the following criteria:
- 1No unapproved required downloads – ever. This includes toolbars, helper applications, plug-ins, and ActiveX Controls. Player security is our top priority.
- All offers must be certified spyware-clean and confirmed in internal testing against a cleanroom environment.
- Surveys must be legit. No lengthy prequalification surveys followed by a disqualification and no points. If the pre-qualification is more than 20 questions for our test cases, we won’t host the survey.
- Surveys must not ask for game account information or information which could be used to discover a player’s credentials.
- No deceptive offers – i.e. take this IQ test and get the results via SMS (free IQ test, SMS costs $).
- Partners must display a privacy policy in a public location that can be checked.
- Offers must pay out as expected. All offers must deliver the points promised in a clear and straightforward fashion.
More on Dungeons and Dragons as it appears, and no there is no news on the lawsuit.
MMO Fallout 