Another week, and another wall of text for you to read. Couple of weeks with big stories now; I was afeared I’d have nothing to talk about until I saw Lum’s post. Oh Blizzard, you make news-discussion so easy.

Sometimes it’s the smallest flames that spark the biggest fires. A post to the world of Warcraft forums by Community Manager Eyonix started simply enough:

“As many of you know, the latest content patch, along with many great new content additions, contains technical counter-measures designed to combat in-game gold spamming. Our efforts to reduce in-game abuse and create a fun, safe environment for everyone are never-ending.”

While anecdotal evidence suggests these measures haven’t completely eliminated gold spam, they’ve certainly reduced it. In-game mailing systems in other games are choked with commercial messages requesting that the reader conduct some EULA-violating business. If you’ve ever gotten one of those, you probably noted that a lot of them come from the same source.

Also! Brian Crecente over at Kotaku put up a very nice writeup on the series. “Massive Damage!” Punny!