I found out something very interesting yesterday pertaining to the cheating issues in some of Facebook's gaming platforms. Thought I would share for anyone interested.
From what I understand, companies like Zynga and Kano know very well who is using multiple accounts to play their games. They just choose not to do anything about it, especially if the cheater is putting money into their games. Now, many gamers have said this over the years, but now I have indisputable information to back up the theory.
Two words: Financial records.
Someone mentioned it yesterday in a forum, so I decided to do a little digging and ask some people I know. Namely: an accountant for a big gaming firm and a legal consultant. I'll say this the way it was explained to me in the best way I can explain it since I'm no financial person.
Picture a long document with the names of players on the left hand side, their IP/ISP addresses in the middle, and any kind of monetary payments they have made to the game (either directly or through credits) on the right. This is what has to be reported to avoid business fraud, like false advertising and unfair business practices like making themselves seem more popular than they actually are by using their own employees as "customers."
Now, in every game there are going to be developers of that game who play. They have to because they need to be able to experience what the gamers are experiences in order to help with known issues and to understand the pros and cons their users might report. These employees/devs must be listed on these financial statements as such.
Okay, so now we get to the multiple accounts.
One of the ways a company can defraud the government, FTC, the competitors, and the public is to count each account that belongs to one individual as a separate user. This has been deemed illegal in order to keep companies from doing this. If they want to allow users to have multiple accounts, they must list them as such on their financial records.
How would they know if a person has multiple accounts? The IP/ISP addresses. And if an investigation is required, a comparison of accounts' activities.
What about Internet cafes and school libraries? Those have specific numbers within the IP addresses. This I know because of my work with LE tracking pedophiles and online predators. This, then, is where the account comparisons come in, but a company usually isn't going to go through all of that trouble unless a complaint is made.
Some people would have users believe it is very difficult or tedious to research a claim of multiple account usage (which is against Terms of Service agreements for the games on Facebook as well as against Facebook's own TOS). On the contrary, looking up the accused and finding out if they have other accounts in use is as easy as typing their IP address into a program "Find" window and pressing "Search". All financial documents are stored in the computers of the gaming company, so this can be done in a matter of seconds.
Once the person is found on the list, if there are no other accounts with the same IP/ISP addresses, the person is probably innocent.
If there are other accounts listed with the IP address, the researcher looks for the code to tell them if it is a public access computer. If it is a personal computer, the accounts are scrutinized to determine if they are separate people. It could be a home with a family computer. The investigation goes on from there and appropriate action should be taken if it is discovered the person is running multiple accounts.
So if it's so easy, why don't the gaming companies do something about the cheaters? Particularly those who use multiple accounts to hurt other gamers and bully people on the site? Money and popularity. This is where the FTC comes in.
The gaming companies like Zynga and KANO will go out of their way to protect these multiple users because there are so many that if they banned them all, the popularity ratings for their individual games would plummet and the money they make from the cheaters who use credit cards or Paypal would be lost. They simply cannot afford to banish all the people breaking their rules.
Okay, so if this is the case, why are they getting away with the fraud? Well, they aren't. They turn everything over to the FTC. As long as they don't lie and the FTC is shown the multiple accounts and it can be proven that the company isn't claiming each of the accounts that belong to a single person as belonging to separate people, they aren't breaking any laws.
The popularity rating doesn't come from financial statements. The private agencies who gather the numbers to report to the public on the popularity of internet games don't care about multiple accounts. They simply look at what everyone else sees: The "Number of users" counter on the homepage of every game's official website. And the more these companies, who half-ass their jobs and are paid by the gaming companies to half-ass their job, report on the climbing numbers of daily users (more multiples being created), the higher in popularity the company will go, the higher the stock prices will go, the more users will sign up, and the more money they will make.
Therefore, Zynga and KANO depend on the cheaters to survive.
No comments:
Post a Comment