Power Leveling News

Many power leveling companies use automated bots to level your character. One well known bot in the US is called ‘WoWGlider’, however there are many chinese bots which also do the same thing.

Bots are able to do almost all of the same functions as a normal human player would. The makers of these bots use increasingly stealthier tactics to evade Blizzard’s warden, including using virus-like rootkits to hide their footprint.

However, many bots are still found and reported by players, who can easily detect the botlike movements. So, before your powerlevel, just think about how these companies could possibly offer you such a low price. One of the reasons is because they are not playing them at all!

Check out our forums for people who have been banned,

This was a comment I saw in an article and I felt it was a really interesting read.

A new trick up WOW’s sleeve. This just may bring WOW’s business ethics into the light and out from under the mossy covered rocks. Having been involved in the gaming industry for quite some time now, you hear lots of things. I was talking to a friend who had his account permanently banned by the good folks at WOW yesterday. He forwarded me a copy of the letter he received, the letter was formatted for bulk mailing. I would get ready for another announcement from the WOW folks regarding this latest purge.

The friendly folks in the front office at WOW are no dummies sports fans. These cats are smart business poeple and while ethics may be in short supply, the bottom line is their motivating factor. Make no mistake gang, these bannings are based on a business plan and have nothing to do with “cheaters” and everything to do with profits. No company with WOW’s background does anything without considering the potential benefits and losses.

Here is the scoop. The suits in the front office of WOW have profited for years by allowing gold to be sold by many “3rd party” companies. Third party is the term used when you want to disassociate your brand (in this case WOW) from other parties or companies. WOW has partnered with a select list of companies for years. The bannings last year were nothing more than an attempt by WOW to monopolize on who can sell gold to it’s customer base. They eliminated the competition plain and simple. This act, were it to take place in the “real” business world, would be tantamount to criminal business practices and prosecuted.

Part two of the genius of the WOW bandits. WOW only really succeeded in slowing the competition down between their “3rd party” front companies (for gold sales and power leveling) and their competitor companies. This forced these other companies to invest in the purchasing and maintaining of all new accounts which these companies look on as the cost of doing business. Who profited by this? Why WOW of course, you all getting the picture here?

Part three of the WOW empirical plan. More than 50% of the accounts that were permanently banned in the January 2007 bannings are private individuals. These poor gamers more than likely purchased gold or power leveling from WOW or other companies. This act gave the WOW Corporation the right to ban these accounts under the user agreements.

“They waited until these customers purchased the new expansion and then banned the accounts in question”.

Now as most marketing guys at WOW know these folks are hooked on the NEW INTERNET CRACK. The customers who were banned will now have to replace the accounts and the expansion sets as well. Whoever termed the phrase “Business Ethics” is not employed by WOW. The genius behind this business plan is that WOW hasn’t lost any customers. These people are going to go out and buy new accounts and expansions for those accounts. These guys are worse than drug dealers; they take the drugs back and make you pay for them again.

It’s days like these that I am really glad I don’t play on line games. Have a nice day gang and beware, injustice is all around.

It’s interesting to see this. I’d take it with a grain of salt but it definitely is plausible. However, if this was the case it would be rather easy to find the companies in question as everybody else would be put out of business. If something like this came to light, Blizzard would be *screwed*. Talk about PR nightmare. I have my doubts this is true, though, because Blizzard is rolling in so much cash they don’t even need to team up with these gold farming companies.

Both power-leveling and buying accounts share similarities. Both allow you to skip the “boring” parts of the game. Most purchasers of these services are usually people who have their own characters and don’t want to spend the time. So what should you do?

First, let’s start with the basics. Who power levels your character? Power leveling companies employ people from third world countries to play games 24/7. Companies that buy and re-sell accounts typically buy from regular gamers who no longer wish to play their account. As a result usally power-leveling is cheaper, although buying accounts isn’t too much more expensive as gamers are happy to just make a buck out of a game that they had fun with.

The problem now is that because of Blizzard (and other MMO) companies are taking a very aggressive stance against power-leveling and buying accounts, risk factor must be taken into the consideration. Because there is only one way to tell who is playing an account - by IP, this causes powerleveling to be easily detected and as a result makes it VERY risky.

On the otherhand, buying accounts also poses a risk. The seller can recall his account after you’ve paid - which is just as bad as getting banned. However the risk of being caught by IP is slim because switches in the US (even state to state) are common and happen regularly with normal players.

Now that powerleveling is out of the question because of IP tracking, what about buying accounts? In order to protect yourself, you MUST be positive you can change the email to your own. This includes making sure the seller has access to the email on the game account and can change it to yours. That way, if something happens, all notifications will go to your email address.

If you take the neccessary precautions, you can still buy accounts. But be aware of the risks!

You may have power leveled months or even years ago and never have thought twice about it. You ordered the service and you got your character back and it was fine. You might even be thinking of buying another service - but don’t.

What has changed since then? 9 months ago Blizzard did not have any automated detection methods in place to thwart powerlevelers and gold farmers. In fact I have reason to believe that up until about 3 months ago they were only using manual investigations and bannings because they would need quite a large workforce in order to weed out 100,000 accounts out of 8 million.

With the advent of IP-tracking and Warden, currently almost all bannings are automated or semi-automated, at least that’s how it seems (seeing as powerlevelers get banned very quickly, while some legit users complain they were unrightfully banned.)

So, what is the Warden and what capabilities does it have?

First of all, the Warden is meant to detect hackers and exploiters, but it can also view your visit websites, scan your memory, and your hard drives.

Here is a quote from the Terms of Use from Blizzard:

WHEN RUNNING, THE PROGRAM MAY MONITOR YOUR COMPUTER’S RANDOM ACCESS MEMORY (RAM) AND/OR CPU PROCESSES FOR UNAUTHORIZED THIRD PARTY PROGRAMS RUNNING CONCURRENTLY WITH WORLD OF WARCRAFT. AN “UNAUTHORIZED THIRD PARTY PROGRAM” AS USED HEREIN SHALL BE DEFINED AS ANY THIRD PARTY SOFTWARE, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION ANY “ADDON” OR “MOD,” THAT IN BLIZZARD’S SOLE DETERMINATION: (i) ENABLES OR FACILITATES CHEATING OF ANY TYPE; (ii) ALLOWS USERS TO MODIFY OR HACK THE WORLD OF WARCRAFT INTERFACE, ENVIRONMENT, AND/OR EXPERIENCE IN ANY WAY NOT EXPRESSLY AUTHORIZED BY BLIZZARD; OR (iii) INTERCEPTS, “MINES,” OR OTHERWISE COLLECTS INFORMATION FROM OR THROUGH THE PROGRAM. IN THE EVENT THAT THE PROGRAM DETECTS AN UNAUTHORIZED THIRD PARTY PROGRAM, BLIZZARD MAY (a) COMMUNICATE INFORMATION BACK TO BLIZZARD, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION YOUR ACCOUNT NAME, DETAILS ABOUT THE UNAUTHORIZED THIRD PARTY PROGRAM DETECTED, AND THE TIME AND DATE THE UNAUTHORIZED THIRD PARTY PROGRAM WAS DETECTED; AND/OR (b) EXERCISE ANY OR ALL OF ITS RIGHTS UNDER SECTION 6 OF THIS AGREEMENT, WITH OR WITHOUT PRIOR NOTICE TO THE USER.

Here is another quote from security expert Bruce Schneier (found on TGDaily.com)

In the excerpted post, Hoglund discusses having thoroughly examined The Warden, discovering it to be a process that runs every 15 seconds, running the Windows API function GetWindowTextA() to retrieve the title bar contents of all running processes on his computer. Next, he reported, The Warden sniffed out the e-mail addresses of his MSN correspondents, the URLs of all open Web pages in his browser, and the Registry names of all running processes, including minimized programs and toolbar functions.

All the collected character strings, Hoglund reports, are passed through a hashing function that generates derivative values, or “hashes,” that are compared against other hashes of the titles, brand names, or handles of known ‘bot programs. Next, he observed The Warden accessing his e-mail client and his PGP key manager, which is used to encrypt messages and authenticate senders. Hoglund writes:

In other words, Warden has access to your entire computer when World of Warcraft is running. Scary, isn’t it?

The Warden program has come under a lot of heat for is  spyware like  tendencies, but most gamers say that if it helps protect them, it’s okay. Unfortunately, there is nothing we can do about this except be careful.