Microsoft Live lives but does it breath?
Who’s playing Who? Cheating to win…
Recently I read two articles about Microsoft aggressively taking market share with it’s Live search engine while google and yahoo seemed to be dropping (Computerworld.com and Informationweek.com). Both credited Lives’ growing to the Live Search Club (club.live.com) where users can earn freebies by playing games that are well integrated into the search engine.
I love the idea of earning prizes for searching while I am playing games and I am sure thousands of other people do as well as suggested by the spike Live has seen or by the popularity of other “incentivized search” clubs such as Blingo.com or SearchChips.com. Live Search Club has gone further though by taking the randomness out of winning and rather than earning credits to enter into raffles or searching at the right random time to win, Live Search Club gives tickets for games played witch are then used to order their freebies. Anyone can “win” using Live Search Club and Microsoft even makes it easy by giving you easy access to the answers. Genious.
What these two articles did not touch on or maybe just didn’t know about is that a quickly growing mass of enterprising game players have tired of earning a few tickets an hour and instead created “bots” and “macros” to play for them. And I don’t just mean a couple kids in Kentucky, I mean EVERYONE is jumping on the bot thing (more after the jump) It only takes a quick search (choose your weapon wisely) to see how many of the largest message boards on the net are onto this bot thing. Worse yet, many are not happy with their one free copy of Vista, they want it all. There have been post from people stating they have played enough games on enough accounts to earn well over 50 copies of Microsoft Vista or others claiming they have ordered 20 or more Microsoft Zunes. And they aren’t stopping. In fact the bots and macros they are using have been getting better by the day and there are now even bots that you don’t even need the browser to be open and can “earn” the max amount of tickets in a matter of minutes as apposed to the months and months of playing hours a day that it would take to earn legitimately.
What does this do to the stats that Compete.com, who was quoted in both articles, gathers and reports on? Well to put it into perspective a bit, there are easily tens of thousands (my humble assumption) of “players” all gunning for multiple Zunes all using these various bots and macros. Sure, there are probably plenty of legit players but the work just one botter can do far surpasses the searches of the legit players. In fact, some of the bots don’t trigger the searches while playing so, in either a strange show of respect or just a way to help hide their tracks, many of these bot players even have macros that simulate searches. Nothing more. False searches that are automated every 5 seconds, or whatever they set it to.
How much of an impact does this darker side of Live Search Club have on the real metrics being reported? Who knows, I’m not a search guy and not very good with numbers anyway. But I do have a feeling it’s a bigger impact than people realize.
Does Microsoft know about the rampant cheating? It would have to right? There are reports of the available tickets possible to earn on each game being “capped” so only so many points can be earned even when botting. There have also been prizes pulled off the list that were being scraped up by the botters, like Microsoft Vista for example. Of course it could just be that all the available copies of Vista were already ordered as it seems that was the gift of choice because of it’s low ticket cost and higher resell value. There is also the fact that the games highest current prize, and Xbox 360 bundle, isn’t even possible to get with the current allotment of available tickets. It could be that Microsoft didn’t intend for users to be at the ticket level to order an xbox 360 this soon, after all, to earn the needed 35,000 tickets to order one would take a legitimate game playing user a very long time.
Some argue that Microsoft has capped available tickets to slow down but not stop the cheating. After all, there are potential benefits from all the activity even if hollow. Not only is the spike in search market share great for hype and that alone could bring more users to Live Search but even just considering the brand awareness of all those users, it could well be worth sending out the loot even to the cheaters. Neither Vista nor the Zune have been huge movers but with tens of thousands of players winning both of these, even if through cheating, there is now a new market with their products…well many instances of their products to be more precise. I don’t know how prizes are worked into “retail sales” metrics but a spike in either of these products could also be very beneficial to Microsoft. Of course that market share is only directly beneficial if those users keep or share the 10 copies of vista they get with their friends and family. But odds are, many of the copies will end up on ebay or craigslist if they are not able to dupe retail stores into accepting them as store returns for credit or cash. In fact, many of these players have already speculated on the drop of market value on ebay and such because of coming masses of copies for sell.
Who loses out in this scenario? Well possibly the legitimate players who are earning their tickets the hard way. If Microsoft decides the cheating it too rampant or not easily tracked and filtered out the program could just be shut down. I personally doubt that would happen because of the obvious success regardless of the cheating. But what about the advertisers who are getting all those false impressions? Or worse yet, false clicks. I don’t see them winning regardless how many copies of Vista are pilfered.
After witnessing the insane amount of cheating these players are doing and how quickly the bots and macros are advancing I am pretty confident that the next set of metrics that is released by Compete.com will show an even larger spike. Maybe even large enough that the rest of the industry wakes up and sees the traffic for what it is. Well at least some of the traffic for what it is. Of course there is the opposite possible scenario where Microsoft does decide to put an end to the cheating and their market share takes a huge hit all of a sudden. Regardless which way the spike points, you heard it here first…from a metrics noob 
.
*I will not be posting links to any of the many bots or macros mentioned or even any of the large message boards that are taking part. But some simple searching should be enough for anyone to find the evidence needed.
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