The ad that annoys me so much – Evony. …
The ad that annoys me so much – Evony.
(Now we all only look at the registration fields, right?)
Guardian discusses Has Evony become the most despised game on the web? http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2009/jul/15/games-evony-spam-internet
Here is some evidence that Evony has been spamming blogs with comments (that are thankfully caught with Akismet): http://www.bruceongames.com/2009/07/10/dont-play-evony/
And they had this ridiculous program iEvony: http://www.arksark.org/blog/2009/07/05/evony-a-patchwork-of-stolen-parts/
Lee and one other person are discussing. 
uzyn 4:10 pm on July 25, 2009 Permalink
I didn’t know they spam until this.
I just thought they have too much marketing money and decides to buy all Adwords’ inventory.
1. Sex
2. Spam
3. ????
4. Profit!
kahwee 12:25 am on July 26, 2009 Permalink
Yeah and they are apparently very successful considering the amount of money they can spend on the ads. Terrible business practice.
uzyn 12:44 pm on July 26, 2009 Permalink
Just wondering, would you have a problem with them had they only buy a huge load of google adwords (ie. you get to see the busty lady everywhere but there is no foul play, ie. spamming) ?
kahwee 11:41 pm on July 26, 2009 Permalink
I think I’m just sick of seeing that art work. Maybe they could rotate the ladies? Haha
But that’s how ads are. Evony ads are better then some ads that promises you won something. I gotten used to it already.
Lee 11:54 pm on October 29, 2009 Permalink
I am a student studying computer games design at uni and decided to investigate Evony.com.
Just to see what some of these games are like etc. etc.
The game is actually kind of cool (found myself addicted and even spent a little money on it).
But I started to notice HUGE bandwidth use by the site as I played.
I am not the only one either, there are comments on the evony forums about this.
This is odd because all of the client info, the animations etc. are all downloaded in one big download at the start.
There is no streaming media so I began to wonder what was going on.
To cut a long story short I decided to break the law and reverse engineer Evony’s client.
Not to cheat. Not to rip them off or even to use even a scrap of the code.
But just to poke about a bit and find out what was going on, maybe even offer them some ways to improve things.
Aside from the fact that the whole thing is very poorly constructed (it is really very beginner coder level stuff. Reminds me of a lot of
what the first year students produce for assignments) it contained some very interesting information.
Included with the client are 2 peices of tracking software that monitor your web use and which applications you have open while the client is running.
These do not install independently on the machine though due to the limitations of flash and do not actually damage anything.
But they harvest massive volumes of information. My firewall was blocking a lot of outgoing transmissions and it turns out that these
were the data trying to be sent out. So they know nothing about me. lol.
However there is a LOT of data coming IN over the ports the client uses. In otherwords it is downloading something into my cache for use later.
I have bandiwdth restriction which slows these types of tricks down and I completely clear my cache every couple of hours if I am heavily using the net.
I also noticed that all the varanbles etc. are named Civony still and that there are multiple references to UMGE.
Even a couple of folders are simply called UMGE, one of these folders contains one of the spyware programs.
So I can only guess at where the data would end up if I didnt have a good firewall.
There are also commented out sections in the code which contain references to UMGE and Lam himself, though low on details.
Thank you for reading this.
Lee
kahwee 4:39 pm on November 5, 2009 Permalink
Thanks Lee.
calvin 11:38 am on December 2, 2009 Permalink
I couldn’t agree more. The shamelessness is almost impressive in its absurdity. I finally broke down myself and had to write about it.
http://machetesquadhq.com/2009/11/15/shameless-advertising-evony-pulls-the-titties-card/