This is a massive story, so I thought that I would expand on the original article. If it was in the automobile industry or the banking industry it would be front page headlines. But the old people who are in charge of the media don’t understand games. So firstly I will do some explaining.
Gold farming I have written about before. It is the practice of playing games to generate valuable in game items which are then sold in the real world to lazy Western players who can’t be bothered playing the game properly themselves. It is a massive industry employing around 400,000 people in asia, mainly in China. Gold farmers are often on the edge of legality and they use every underhand internet technique to market themselves. They generate mountains of spam as they attack blogs and forums with their advertising. They are amongst the bad boys of the internet.
Free MMO (Massive, Multiplayer, Online) games are known as persistent world games because they are always running and provide an alternative reality. The big names are Runescape, Habbo, Club Pernguin, Maple Story and Free Realms. They have many millions of players each, all around the world. Whilst the game is free to play they have revenue models based on purchasing in game items, playing an enhanced version of the game, carrying advertising etc. They are a huge phenomenon of our times and many people you know play them.
Eric Lam is a Chinese businessman who owns or is associated with a whole cloud of companies and websites. He was sued by Microsoft for online advertising click fraud. It is thought that Lam owns the gold farming company Wowmine and that he could be earning as much as half a million dollars a day from this alone.
Now it looks like Lam has decided to go first party with his own MMO, thus cutting out the middleman. That game is Evony. And its heritage shows. When you play the game, just about everything in the game can be obtained by paying instead of playing. A blatantly exploitative business model never seen before.
The game itself is a rip off of some very well known games. The game mechanic and some in game content comes from Sid Meier’s highly successful Civilisation series. Much of the graphics came from Age of Empires.
The game itself is so flaky and bugged that it is very easy for things you have paid good money for to just disappear. Lots of people are losing money this way. And, surprise, surprise, Evony never give a refund.
Something very devious is iEvony. This is an application that you download into your PC to invite your friends to join the game in exchange for in game rewards. This could very well be a Trojan designed to harvest email addresses messenger passwords and much else. Would you trust a Chinese gold farmer inside your computer? Many gullible people are.
The advertising for Evony consists of fairly lurid female imagery. These images were mostly lifted from lingerie catalogues and, amazingly, have zero relevance whatsoever to the game. Evony are carpetbombing game websites with these adverts using multiple accounts of Google AdWords. When website owners block one source of these adverts another appears. Site owners have complained repeatedly to Google, but to no avail.
But advertising isn’t the only marketing going on. Evony are using automated spam programmes to add comments to articles on blog sites. Not once or twice. No, they are blanketing game related blogs with comments that advertise the game. Exactly what you would expect of a Chinese gold farmer.
This article just skims over what is going on here. There is enough to write a whole series of articles or even a book. What is for sure is that Evony is best avoided by everyone. Go and play Runescape, Habbo or Free Realms instead.
Edited to add:
Evony advert ridiculed by PopCap.
Permalink
They have been spam bombing me, too. Their marketing strategy has actually turned me off from checking this game out.
Permalink
“When you play the game, just about everything in the game can be obtained by paying instead of playing. A blatantly exploitative business model never seen before.”
Well EA having been doing this with DLC on the Xbox 360 for a long time. Many of their games offer DLC that unlocks everything in the game for lazy players.
Permalink
Here is the story in the Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2009/jul/15/games-evony-spam-internet
Permalink
they bombarded me like 100+ evony spam comment (image here: http://www.mmogrindhouse.com/images/evony-spam.gif ). When we complained it to their support desk, they suggested me like:
If you block the string tsenseless from appearing in his URL, he will not spam you anymore.
He is using a 3rd party program to do that and I would suggest that you deal with it the same way you deal with other kinds of spam bots.
Let me be very clear. Your website is not our responsibility because we are not facilitating nor promoting this behavior.
Please don’t make empty implied threats like “I’m watching you. Thats a bit absurd and does neither of us any good.
…well they got pissed of with me when i did a “Meet the Parent” line…”I’m watching you”…hahaha
Permalink
I find everything you have described above to be 101% accurate. Now I am wondering if you have any insight into how much damage the game does to your browser, and your system in general. What I thought was very flaky software appears as though it may have malicious content. In Firefox, shortcuts have been re-targeted and attempting to fill in text fields gives mixed results.
Permalink
Oh yeah, it shut off my sound too.
Permalink
I will sheepishly admit that I am an Evony player and a female; and the players who give a damn are all aware of the issues and have been bombarding the forums and mods with requests for change.
Believe me, I hate those ads both as a gamer and as a girl and it makes it to where I can’t tell anyone that I even play the game if I want to save face.
The bottom line is that we complain, we rant, we get a warning, and then we hear that the change is coming but have yet to see it.
We still play because despite the advertising and bad rep, the game is actually pretty fun and is something you can play at work without draining bandwith. The commraderie and the ability to chat with your alliance real -time is the main factor most players have stayed this long; but most of us are getting fed up with it and if things don’t change I know that many of us will be leaving.
Permalink
Heres a link to an Evony forum thread started by concerned players about this issue:
http://bbs.evony.com/showthread.php?t=31512
And Evony’s responses:
http://bbs.evony.com/showpost.php?p=259522&postcount=218
http://bbs.evony.com/showpost.php?p=259523&postcount=219
And here is some irony for you, when someone mentioned that there are no ads targeted for the ladies, these were made as a joke:
http://bbs.evony.com/picture.php?albumid=359&pictureid=2346
http://bbs.evony.com/picture.php?albumid=359&pictureid=2276
That person was warned that they had to cease and desist since the fake ads may be confused as real and may damage their perception…and this was before the blatant lingerie ads!
I dunno about you guys but these are funny and way more tasteful to me…
Permalink
I’ve been playing this game for a while now, but I think this is the end for me.
The poster above me mentions the ads, but it’s more than that. UMGE is potentially harvesting emails for spam, spamming comments, scamming paying customers and violating copyright law left and right. The ads are the least of the offenses, as far as I’m concerned.
The forum thread to which this post was posted has been shut down by the “representative”, no doubt in an attempt to keep this swept under the rug. Even the people that posted in that thread didn’t see past the “hot girl” to the real meat of the issue. They’re blined by the boobies and lingerie. Still, even discussion on the hot girls is verboten in the Evony forums. Forum members have been banned and threads are locked left and right to stifle the discussion about this issue. That’s more important than the ads themselves.
Most of the players in my alliance are younger and don’t read blogs, so how would they know what’s going on? A couple of them are happily spreading their iEvony codes around and spending money to advance. What have they gotten into by doing either of those? That’s the greater question. Is UMGE going to take their parents’ information and help themselves to it? How safe is you PayPal information with that company? From the looks of this article and the links contained therein, I’d say it’s not very safe at all. I’ve no doubt that things will get worse with this game and company.
I’ll be leaving the game and I don’t wish them luck. Thanks for the indepth review.
Permalink
Thought I would just make a point about just how big this sort of game is.
Habbo has 118 million avatars, with 75,000 new ones created every day.
Maple Story has over 50 million subscribers.
And a new one, Free Realms, is gaining half a million users a week.
This is a huge crop for the Chinese to harvest.
Permalink
Evony now has 31 servers going.
That looks like a lot of players to me.
There again, Runescape has about 170.
Permalink
Evony just bragged they’ve reached the 5 million milestone. I can only imagine half of them being duplicate accounts for rewards.
Secondly, Evony developers obviously new having a referral system like the one they have setup will cause a bulk load of spam and I’m sure they enjoying the flood of traffic while they just blame it on the players.
Permalink
Good grief that’s horrible. I knew about gold farming and the like from World of Warcraft, but I never knew it was such an industry. Having read all of this I’m pretty disturbed. I’m going to make sure nobody I know gets caught in this sort of mess.
Permalink
I don’t see the big fuss. I haven’t received any of those SPAM emails and if they’re the one’s sending them it’s bad. Really bad, but it won’t make me stop playing.
They use half naked ladies to get players. So what? It works! Detergent commercials also promise that all your clothes will always get clean…well do they? If you don’t like the game, don’t play it.
I started playing a bit over a week ago and I’m enjoying myself. There might be some bad elements in the game, but hey which game doesnt have that? The game is fun! I’m not paying a dime for the game, but if people are willing to pay, why not take the money?
The game is copied from other games? Well…tough shit, there’s loads of these kind of games.
Permalink
“Would you trust a Chinese gold farmer inside your computer?”
“Exactly what you would expect of a Chinese gold farmer.”
Now I find these two comments extremely racist. He is not Chinese! He is Chinaman! Its about time we have a special word to brand those despicable person coming from China. I am Chinese as well, but I hate Chinaman, extremely, and I speak from experience. Every encounter I have with them, is not a pleasant one.
To GharF: Yes, there are loads of games that copy other games, but these games just copy the overall game experience. For Evony, a lot of the building images are taken from Age of Empires, a lot of the written text are taken from the Civilization game, exactly the same.
Permalink
The real irony is the Evony ad right next to this article. DAMN INVASIVE ADVERTISING!
Permalink
@babablacksheep
“Chinese” is not a racist term.
Your suggestion that people from China should be referred to as “Chinaman” and that the term “Chinese” should be used for people not from China is absurd, not to mention racist with a chunk of sexism thrown in for good measure.
That said, I can only hope that neither these lowlife Evony spammers nor troublemakers like yourself manage to whip up animosity towards China in general.
Permalink
We have a comic that sums up the ad campaign quite well.
http://toblender.com/comic/?p=438
Permalink
Really interesting post – but spoilt somewhat by your repeatedly referencing the fact that Eric Lam is Chinese.
His being Chinese is hardly indicative of the fact that he appears to be very dubious and definitely not someone whose software you should be installing on your computer.
I just wonder if you would state the nationality of a fraudster, as if it were relevant to their fraud, every time you mentioned them, if they were American.
Permalink
I use the term Chinese in these posts because China is the home of the gold farmer and because there are other such games coming from China.
I have been to China many times and have great admiration and respect for the Chinese people and their culture.
Permalink
This game is free to download and play for the first hour or so, then you either have to wait forever or pay to play. I was enjoying it until i got stuck because i didn’t have enough game coins. They even want you to pay for the online chat in the game. What a bunch of crock!
Permalink
While I am thoroughly disgusted with the completely irrelevant and explicit ads coming from this scam of a game, I do agree with a previous comment that some language in this post, intentionally or not, borders racism. As someone with partial Chinese descent, I find the repeated emphatic use of “CHINESE gold farmers” offensive. Simply mentioning that they are gold farmers would suffice, maybe with a statistical mentioning of their locale. Make no mistake in that I do very much despise the scam and low-taste that companies such as UMGE employ, yet I do implore that we lay the blames on these companies and individuals rather than pointing fingers at an entire race or country of people.
Permalink
ive been a gamer for a while and while i do see how someone would find it offensive, the term “chinese gold farmer” was never meant as a racial slur. just at the outset, that ‘industry’ was almost all chinese employees from china. and from then on the phrase stuck, like pwn or leet. just another phrase in my book. i dont think he was emphasizing that they were chinese. in-game (WoW esp.), its been my experience that professional gold farmers are called chinese gold farmers – derogatory or not.
but yeah, evony bad, blah blah.
Permalink
hello everyone, i have been playing Evony- free forever for about 3 weeks now. I play on server number 43 on my character twiceborn66. I have to say it’s a pretty decent game. It may not be for everybody but, it’s for me atleast. i like how its not one of those game where you have to use real world money to be any good at the game. i started out just following the quests, you don’t really realize that while u are following them you are getting stronger and stronger. me personally this game is best when u wanna multi-task and play two games at once. especially when you progress further into the game and things take a while to build. like i said this game isn’t for everybody though, i have talked to quite a few people about it and most say it isn’t for them. but once i joined an alliance and started chatting with people while playing the game [166 words]that i reallly got into it most people get 1 look or spend 2 minutes looking at it and quit on my server (i notice due to all the people with 0 prestige), of course that wasn’t for me i though of quitting at first but i quickly realized that it gets better, especially once u get an army u can start terrorizing the players that just get out of beginner protection. if u want to play this game i recomend that u join an alliance as soon as possible, once you do player don’t want to mess with you because if u are in a decent alliance they have your back when u get into a tight spot, and they can help you get rid of whoever is bothering you. this is a low animation game so it runs well on my computer when i have another program running (my computer is ghetto). I RECCOMEND THIS GAME HIGHLY TO EVERYONE DON’T STOP TRY IT A WHILE U WILL GET INTO IT TRUST ME. some people say that the “explicit ads” annoyed them but they caught my attention and im glad because i probobly woundn’t have started due to them. [348 words] you may have noticed im counting my words, the whole reason im writing this is to earn evony cents for medal boxes. the only difficulty i have with the game is that u need to earn medal to upgrade the amount of cites you can have in the game (i currently have 2 cities). if u wanna try this game which i really recomend you do go to EVONY.COM and make an account u wont regret it if u have any comments on my blog please email me ryan_w66@hotmail.com.
you all have great lives
thankyou for reading my blog
Permalink
Evony.com is the games website. Its free to play and kind of has a civilization feel to it. You build a city, gather resources, build armies, conquer land, and battle other players.
When I started I could just play a little here and there and be content, now a week or so into it, I realize I’ve had the browser open and been messing around in it for the last 6 hours! I’ve been drawn in by the gameplay and the community. I’ve found that I can’t wait to see the results of a battle. Did my army win or lose, did I gain honor and prestige with some exp for my hero, how many millions of resources did I plunder this time?
Evony does have some draw backs though. It isn’t visually stunning, which the world has unfortunately become a fan of. Its a browser based game though, and for that I have to say the graphics are decent. They definitely beat the hell out of runescapes crayon drawn graphics. It also requires large amounts of time for the completion of constructing higher level buildings, defenses, and troops. Fortunately it trains in real time, so even if you’re not sitting at your PC, or even logged in your constructions continue to progress. My play times have easily been in coordination with my work schedule or my time spent in the Aion beta. Its been quite easy to keep my progression towards building my city / army going strong as well as maintain a constant flow of attack on numerous other players while working or playing an MMO.
City progression is simple. For the first seven days you’re awarded protection from being attacked by other players, so its important to take advantage. You start of small with few buildings available to make and a small population of people in your city. Eventually you build more cottages for the peasants to live in and provide them with jobs in the fields for food, lumber mills, stone quarries, and iron mines. As your population grows and you build resources you begin building more advanced buildings such as an academy for various boosts to many different attributes of the game or a barracks to make your army with. You can also build walls around your city and put defenses on them such as archer towers to keep invaders from stealing your resources and taking your city.
As for the combat aspects of the game, once you’ve built your city up and started making troops, you can choose to march on another players or on an NPCs city. The NPC cities are more trouble than they’re worth to conquer, but they typically provide good plundering loot (resoources). Player cities also provide good resources and as you progress through the game and get your title (similar to level) up you can have additional cities, these can be started from scratch like your first city, or conquered from other players. You build up your army and then unleash hell on your chosen target. How much pain you cause them is up to you, as you can repeatedly attack them, or just hit them hard once and walk away with all their gold and resources.
They have forums out there as well with lots of great info to help beginners. bbs.evony.com are the offical forums, so start there. If you need additional help and find yourself on server #43, look me up, my username is Levens.
Permalink
How come the game, EVONY, cripples my ability to train archer towers after some number and actually disallow me to train anything, although I have tons of money and lots of resources?
Permalink
I’ve made an article about this game on my blog, which is more of a mixture of what I could find over the Internet. Feel free to read it!
Permalink
Makes me glad i accidentally misspelled my e-mail on sign up
Permalink
You want the boobies? Head on over to iStock. That’s where they got that image and several others. It’s not even all that well ‘shopped in. But I’m a designer and notice these things.
Permalink
This seems like a lot of inflammatory nonsense. I played the game for a month or so when it came out and moved on because it really wasn’t my thing but I can see why so many people play it.
This article seems misleading to me in the following ways…
1) You are never forced to pay for anything in the game; chatting in your alliance is free and if I remember correctly private messages are also free.
2) Once you click the ad you never see the buxom beauties again in the game. The ads are mildly offensive but have you ever seen a beer commercial? Have you ever received a bikini-clad woman in your case of Coors?
3) Show me a game that doesn’t borrow any elements from other games and I’ll be amazed.
4) You don’t provide any proof that the game is linked to gold-farming… it’s all fine and good to speculate but unless there’s proof you’re simply misleading the reader to generate hits.
5) I do not understand the allegations of the game using trojans or other types of malware. My PC is hopelessly outdated in terms of anti-virus protection but I never had a problem while playing or afterwards.
That iEvony thing must be new because I didn’t see it when I played… admittedly, it sounds a little spammy and I can understand that concern.
Again, I don’t play this game anymore (because to be honest I got bored with it after a while) but the content of this article doesn’t sit well with me. I appreciate the hard-hitting ‘journalism’ but there’s too much speculation for this to be considered a thoroughly credible piece of work.
My advice to gamers is try it out with a fake e-mail if you’re really concerned. If it isn’t for you move on. It’s really not as insidious as this blog and some of comments make it out to be.
Just my two cents.
Permalink
I’m so glad that there is a nice discussion going on here about the invasiveness of Evony’s advertising. I also find it incredibly distasteful. My kid sister is a regular on Crunchyroll.net and it’s suppose to be a clean, all-ages site and this Evony trash is polluting its pages. Earlier ads were more representative of the game but all this reliance on in-your-face-sex to sell screams of desperation. What a turn-off. As one commentor mentioned, advertising now simply relies on a heavy, heaving bosom. Besides, I couldn’t help but notice something about the last model pictured and even pointed it out to my sis… Pictured is a guy-turned-girl with huge implants bolted to the chest. The dimpled chin look’s suspiciously male and it is turned down to disguise an Adam’s apple. The point is, Evony is THE PREMIUM SITE you want to click on if you want to consort with trannies. End of story. And if you look closely at the synthetic heavy, heaving bosom, it’s from the aforementioned model. This is just speculation on my part, of course……
Permalink
I play Evony, I’ve never received spam from the game, I’ve never paid for anything in the game, however really it is worth paying for.
The game play is easy yet complex and well balanced, the help is there from day one; and the community is fantastic.
The adverts… L O L, I played on recommendation from a friend – I’ve only seen the averts in articles about the game… Anyone who takes offence at the adverts needs their head examined, a pretty human girl poses for something… L O L, they must be afraid of their own skin too.
The graphics are poor, however the gameplay more than makes up for it, as with games of old – gameplay is excellent which eclipses any faults. Bugs? Really? I’ve been playing for what is coming up to 2 months now – not seen any to speak of.
Money? SHOCK HORROR! Someone is trying to make some money from a product, well bugger me – nobody else ever tries that!
Copy ideas from other games? Like that hasn’t happened before… Really the guy who wrote that article is just an ass.
Permalink
umm, why is there an ad on this page to some other scungy looking ‘free’ mmo/rpg game when you’re (rightly so) paying out on the crud that is Evony? 😀
Permalink
I have heard on the news that one of the managers of the game has actually been involved in under-age pornography, but not charged.
Maybe that’s why the ads are so sexual?
Seems like they’re just a bunch of old guys trying to get young people to play their games to prey on them?
Also this site seems to be full of evony staff pretending to be game-players (saying the game is good) to cover up the fact that this game REALLY IS LAME and going down-hill fast…
Permalink
>3) Show me a game that doesn’t borrow any elements from other games and I’ll be amazed.
Dan Thompson: He’s not talking about borrowing IDEAS from other games. He’s talking about copying actual _graphics_ from them because Evony’s producers were too cheap and/or lazy to hire their own artist.
> 2) Once you click the ad you never see the buxom beauties again in the game.
I have no problem with breasts in game ads. I put breasts in the ads for Tentacularity at every opportunity. However, this is because Tentacularity is a hentai game. The breasts are _in the game_. I don’t like having marketers trying to get my attention with breasts just so they can try to sell me something that has nothing to do with breasts.
(And, unlike United Multiplayer Gaming Entertainment’s product, the art in *my* game was actually made for use in that game. Although, admittedly, the concept was unusual enough that it would have been hard to find suitable art to steal.)
Permalink
Guess what Bruce. China isn’t the only country that gold farmers live. Believe it or not, there are loads of American gold farmers as well set up on smaller scales. I really detest the use of the wording. “Chinese gold farmers”? Also your insistence that the people that buy it are lazy doesn’t hold water. Spend more time on the pay for play online games.
Spend some more time writing about some of the detestable farming routines players have to go through in order to stay competitive. What Blizzard does along these lines is despicable compared to what Evony is doing. At least with Evony, they actually give away freebies to millions of players EVERY night.
Permalink
Guess what IronBob. China is the country in charge of this piece of crap game. Believe it or not, there are more gold farmers there than anywhere else. He uses the wording “Chinese Gold Farmers” because this game is run by people from there.
Spend some more time providing links to prove that other companies do the same thing in order to stay competitive. You have no idea what Blizzard is doing, stop pretending like you do. And Evony sure does give freebies out (but not to millions of players, they don’t have that many). They give you disconnections from their servers, rip you off and take your money, and ban you from the message boards for saying anything bad about them. All for free! How can one resist?
Permalink
I have been playing evony for 3 months now on server 9, never spent even a single cent on it. Aside from similarities with Age of Empires, other activities include conquering level 10 npc’s ( non-playable characters/or castles, if you will ) and farming level 5 barb towns , as we call it, to support the massively growing army of archers, ballistae and catapults. Occassionaly, I send reinforcements to other players who are under seige and once in a while do some attacks on other members of hostile alliances. I have earned the rank of General with the title of Duke, with a prestige of 680K, a ruler of 7 cities. No big deal, since some have achieved 1.7 million prestige with 10 cities and a title of Prinzessin.
All was well, then suddenly the “Call of the warlords” gimmick shows up. Basically, it crams all the players of 5 servers into 1, without regard to their prestige level or number of conquered or owned cities. They did this with a one-day notice before actually doing it. Cost cutting or otherwise, I personally think it was an under-handed move to cut down on the number servers they have or force players to battle it out in one over-crowded server and “kill-off” the weaker smaller players and anyone who is unlucky enough to be off-line when the attack begins.
Whatever the motivations of the developers were in doing this “Call of the Warlords” campaign, they ruined it for me and some of those who have been playing this game.They did this to server 1 to 5 and merged it into a single server called wn1.Alot of players lost cities, accounts and supplies. Many complained, no explanations were give. Now, they have merged server 9 with 4 other servers and by tommorrow, we will be battling it out, if and when we do get to go online again.
Maybe Evony is an Age of Empires clone. But I enjoyed every minute I played it for the past three months that I have kept my account. However, things will turn sour pretty soon. I won’t bore anyone with the specifics, but to maintain a massive army in an over-crowded server is not fun, and the cynical side of me is starting to think that this is what we get for players not buying game cents from a supposedly “free game’ and is a way to cut down cost in maintaining this on-line game.
Permalink
You have to take this game for what it is, a come-on to get you to spend money for not much. All you get for your thirty dollars per package is a bunch of medals, some game items, and maybe a package of something. The sad thing is, You are offered these “free” packages two and three times a month, for the same price, for the same items. I figured up the cost, if I had bought all the “free’ stuff. well over $300 at this point, and none of it is any different than the first package.
If you take the game at face value, it’s fun, you can play solo or alliance, however–the upward limit of lvl ten comes very quickly, and once you get there, (usually in about two weeks) there’s nowhere to go but another server (they are up over 60 now) and start again from the bottom.
It has a very limited life per player, and I suspect a huge turn over of players who max out and suddenly discover the same game every time.
The Ievony thing is a true rip, as you are expected to involve your friends by giving out their email addys to evony (my friends would have me drawn and quartered), who Im sure then bombard them with invitations. the draw? You get 500 ‘free’ game cents.
big whoop.
Im on my third time around, and it’s starting to get old very fast. Finally got my third fort, and I think thats about it for me.
I just wish the kids who use the chat function could spell…lol
Permalink
I am very angey that they ripped out the graphics of one of my favorite games of all time, and “Age of Empires 2” is filtered in the chat…
Permalink
Quick note:
http://i144.photobucket.com/albums/r200/Cream137/FAIL.jpg
Don’t take the “dumbass” part as personal; I did not intially think that I was going to post this here, but then I realized it would be a nice addition to… Well. keep on reading.
You have to realize that if you’re going to preach against one, you should also preach against the others, also blatantly (yet less obviously) exploiting the female image.
Permalink
I’ve seen ads for 4story and Empire Craft running along side these Evony articles. The very fact Google allows these kind of companies to utilise their advertising services is an insult to everyone who displays these adverts and even more-so those who have to view them!
Permalink
The ads get placed by Google. Google places its ads in a context-sensitive way, so basically it kind of stupidly sees an article slamming “free” browser-based games that make you pay to make them truly useful and it places ads promoting same.
Until he sees those ads coming in and specifically blocks them. Though they have ways around that, as well.
So Mike Byron and Dan, you’re dead wrong.
Permalink
Read his article on Evony called “Evony and Irony”.
http://www.firstpersonshouter.com/?p=577
Permalink
James (above) – it’s not cynicism mate – it’s fact.
Permalink
Evony uses a special system within the game that rewards spammers as “recruiters” they get paid in “cents” evony’s online currency that can only be obtained by luck, recruiting, or real life cash. In a way they are paying people to spam spam spam. The more people they get to follow their URL and register to more “cents” worth real cash they get for free. Its called iEvony.
Permalink
Are you all serious? I play the game.
IEvony is simply their affiliate program. Have any of you heard of affiliate programs? They are simply paying people with game cents who help being them more players. It’s SMART business. That’s all it is. There are millions of affiliate programs all over the Internet.
Evony is not telling people to spam other people. The people who are spamming are the ones who aren’t following the rules. You are’t supposed to spam others.
I have had technical difficulties and their technical team SUCKS, but Evony is not a criminal website like you all make it out to be.
And Evony isn’t spamming your websites. They are paying for ads from Google. If you don’t want their ads showing up on your website, you simply go to your Adsense account and block them. My God. Get real. Seriously.
Permalink
When i first saw the adverts i thought it looked nice.
but then they had all these racy pictures i started thinking it was one of those porn games.
I would never play that, its Napwar for me definantly.
Permalink
“Would you trust a Chinese gold farmer inside your computer?
Exactly what you would expect of a Chinese gold farmer.
This is a huge crop for the Chinese to harvest.
China is the country in charge of this piece of crap game.”
So Chinese are the scourge of the planet, I take it.
Permalink
it is the first RTS online multiplayer game I have ever played, its pretty fun. But if its true that the game is a copy then the other ones are probably better. I have been playing for a week now, and havent spent any game coins or real cash. I dont intend to, the starter pack has filled me with guidlines. The thing about the game is be patient or pay, but I have played plenty of games like this, for example Club Penguin is just a forum with penguins without membership and Runescape has limited armours and weapons without membership, you become a member about level 70 because you basically have to, to make the game interesting.
Although I take into account of the file being a trojan, although it cannot effect my computer as its just a trojan, however, telling them your contacts probably isnt a good idea.
I might give these other games you say a try. But I might just play evony :p