Evony Spam – Desperation?
Posted by: The EvonyNet Team in Evony, Evonynet, tags: 5 million users, ads, desperation, Evony, Evonynet, friends, ievony, rewards, spamEvony has upset us a lot here at EvonyNet pretty much ever since we decided to create supporting websites to a promising up-and-coming Civilization style game rather than the hugely popular World-of-Warcraft. The list of reasons include the ones that may upset you and additional ones like branding us scammers, endorsing competitor sites with much less value and without talking to us about endorsing us, and generally treating this company as if we were a bunch of Groupies that will always stick around no matter what. I guess the fact we call ourselves EvonyNet ties us to the game, but it’s only a working company title, we have no problem changing it anytime.
You sat through that short rant, great, I apologize for wasting your time with it. Here is the part the you should care about: yesterday evony announced in-game (snipped):
We wanted to thank all of our players for making the iEvony Open Beta such a success so far! Keep up the good work!
Evony continues to grow primarily thanks to word of mouth recommendations from our fantastic players! Thanks to you, Evony has grown to over 5 million registered players from every part of the world!
We’ve lifted cap of 50 credits per day for invitations, and players may now earn a maximum of 1500 credits total just by sending invitations, so you can earn credits as much as 30 times more! Each invitation earns 1 credit.
Now, we also improve the iEvony client to ensure that you can receive all credits when you use it to invite friends.
Remember my previous post about iEvony and how they support spamming the net? Of course you do, it was very funny, especially when that tsenseless guy spammed my comments. He’s been busy around the net, it’s not personal. And Evony banned his account. Well, as a thank you to all your wonderful work, now you get paid for each invite 1 credit! Go ahead, find e-mail addresses on the web, spam them, Evony pays you, yay. 1500 spam messages per player. Sure, you could have done so before, but it would have taken you a month.
Some may think, wow what an amazing advertising strategy, instead of paying for more ads (as if there was anywhere left to advertise) they give money to word-of-mouth. Well, spamming is wrong, and it’s damn wrong if it’s your friends you’re spamming. It’s okay to send collective generic email about stuff you care about, though I hate those in general, it’s much different when getting paid for it. Imagine one of your friends getting a job with an ad agency and emailing you all their different offers. Hope you’d ban him, if you know how to do it that is.
Did Evony just remove the cap in gratitude to a program that worked far better than expected? Would you pay more money if something that cost less was such a success? Are there really 5 million Evony players? Is that why there are new Evony servers everyday or is it for user retention cause the game offers little for experienced players who are not millionaires? Feel free to check quantcast for Evony.com traffic. About 250K users a month from the US alone. Is showing breasts on website ads a good way to attract future Evony players? Sure, the people who would click on it are willing to pay, but will we, in the near future, see x-rated videos when upgrading a town-hall to level 10? Will a surprise MPEG be in a bonus package for buying in-game cents? And what’s the deal with that last sentence in the quote? You didn’t receive all your credits before? Well, now for sure you can trust them!
Without commenting on the quality of The Guardian, I leave you with an article of theirs – has evony become the most despised game on the web? That and saying that Evony is a great game that you should not be afraid to play just because the company’s policies suck. Just treat it like a casino and set a budget if you want to beat other people. Oh, and you won’t be getting any money back even if you win.
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July 18th, 2009 at 2:48 am
Does Evony put trojan malware on your computer?
I have written this article looking at the possibility: http://www.bruceongames.com/2009/07/16/is-evony-malware/
July 18th, 2009 at 11:06 pm
Hi Bruce, thank you for the comment! We actually discussed your blog post about Evony a few days ago, and I wanted to contact you with the real email of tsenseless (which is easy enough to find) but I’m not that cruel. I posted a fake one on purpose btw, just to scare him, but I don’t think he would care anymore that he cares about personal anonymity. He actually pays people to spam for him (2 pesos each blog comment that stays on), but given that all the posts came from one or two IPs, I don’t think he had many takers.
Anyway, I should have linked to your article in my blog post, and that oversight has been corrected.
Regarding the Evony game client, without admitting anything like hacking their source code and connecting to their servers until we got a cease and desist request from a guy who may or may not represent them, I can say confidently that the possibility of it being a malware is near nonexistent.
Regarding the iEvony client, I have no idea, and I do recommend people not install it and not use the iEvony spam reward program. I seriously doubt though that it has any malware. It’s more likely some people sent e-mails without being aware they did, or even that other players somehow found their email addresses and friends lists and spammed them with spoofed return addresses. Can you verify by comparing the IPs of the email sender with the IPs of your friends computers?