What is "based"? And scams in video games
"Anonymity, deception - these are your tools"
The marriage of social interaction and human stupidity
Everyone’s heard of World of Warcraft in one form or another. Video games are ever present in the Internet world: people who are online, especially the younger generations, are often gamers. MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) is one common genre of game, which seeks to combine RPG with multiplayer aspects. Usually, they are not just games, they are ways to develop social connections too. The social and community dimensions of these games are very strong, and as they are not one-and-done deals, people can play the game for several years.
And of course, these spaces have very little guardrails, meaning that scams and frauds can run rampant. While official customer service gives tips on avoiding illegitimate and third-party sources, they cannot prevent people for falling for them.
Impersonation is an art
World of Warcraft, released in 2004, the once titan and gold standard of MMORPGs, has a long and storied history of in-game frauds and intrigues. From in-game plague events to lore wars, this MMO has provided some microcosms of the human experience broadly. In more recent years, something that has cropped up is impersonation, or at least something akin to it.
How do these people impersonate, and for what purposes?
In WoW, there is a large group activity called “raid,” where groups of 10 or 20, or sometimes even more, players team up and go into an instance, fighting bosses (hard enemies with high health and specific mechanics) in succession and getting rather rare or unique loot for finishing the instance and killing the bosses. There are also varying difficulties to these raids, and they can inaccessible to more casual players who don’t have the time to dedicate to grinding for better equipment and practicing the raids. This is where “boosting” and “carrying” comes in. Teams of very talented raiders would sometimes sell their services to players who want those rare loot but didn’t want to spend time.
Scammers would then pretend to be reputable guilds or teams of raiders that could carry you through a raid on Mythic difficulty (very hard). To create more credibility, they would prop up Potemkin Discord servers as well. If one approaches them, an arrangement would be made and money would be handed over. However, this carry or boost would not actually occur, and any attempts to contact would end up with being blocked. And there’s not a whole lot customer service could do, as the transactions in-game technically legitimate.
User /u/WoWExposer wrote up on the World of Warcraft subreddit his process of being dubbed by these scammers in 2022. Similarly, user Septimos posted on the game forum about how he got scammed in 2021, leading to several pages of heated debate and chastising of the original poster.
Totally not shady in-game money reseller websites
Star Wars: The Old Republic is an MMORPG based on the Star Wars franchise and set in the Old Republic era of the universe lore. Its notoriety comes from its high development costs and its hobbling post-launch life, as well as accusations of being a clone of World of Warcraft.
A prevalent scam in the game is credit-selling websites. These are third-party websites that sells in-game currency (called credits). They are against the ToS to use, and they are inherently risky, as you have to fork over your account details to them.
The funny thing is, everyone knows these are scams, and yet there are still those desperate enough to actually use these services.
Atroc, a player based in France on the server Star Forge, was one such that suffered when buying into this scheme. He claimed he did it for necessity: “I really needed the credits to buy the gear needed for the operation, and I was short on time, so I reached the places I knew could help.” However, in giving away information for the sellers, his account was hacked at a later time, and those who had access to his characters used them to raid his guild’s storage. “I was demoted and stripped of my ranks from this incident. I really regret it all now.”
Even though everyone knows that they’re very risky to deal with, and that their spam pollute chats, they are still around somehow. In fact, they have contributed to the game economy’s runaway inflation, where prices are exorbitant and often out of reach for newcomers. Perhaps one day, the folly of man will help eradicate this scourge of botting and sleazy dealings.
Epilogue
While these MMOs are often sequestered to their own little corners on the Internet, and these currencies are very much illusory and digital, scamming players represents some of the most base forms of human interactions.
Term of the day - “based”
I am sure we have all heard this term somewhere before, often in connotations of Zoomers and politics. But where did it really come from?
The root of the term could be traced to the rapper Lil B and his alter ego “The BasedGod”, whose fanbase stems from his online presence. In an interview with Complex, he described what based mean and why he uses it:
Based means being yourself. Not being scared of what people think about you. Not being afraid to do what you wanna do. Being positive. When I was younger, based was a negative term that meant like dopehead, or basehead. People used to make fun of me. They was like, "You're based." They'd use it as a negative. And what I did was turn that negative into a positive. I started embracing it like, "Yeah, I'm based." I made it mine. I embedded it in my head. Based is positive.
An “in-joke” between him and the fans is “Thank you BasedGod.”
The term then was used by his fans online, then wormed their way onto 4chan, the wretched den of scum and villainy. Users of /pol/ (stands for Politically Incorrect) adopted the term to refer to people that expressed views that they agreed with, and in turn, the term disseminated to right-wing online ecosystems. “Based” is often paired with “redpilled,” referring to taking the red pill in the Matrix movie.
Eg. “My friend is based and redpilled.”
Left-wing ecosystems decided to co-opt the term as a way to stick it to right-wingers, so it’s no longer just “Tucker Carlson and Julius Evola are based,” it’s now also “Lenin was based.” And as Internet culture usually blends into one another, “based” started becoming common place, usually as a stand in for “agreed” or “you the correct opinion.”
Of course, when a term starts becoming commonly used, one cannot help but be tired of it, and contrarians started cropping up with their own memes against the term. Still, “based” remain in common parlance for Internet users.
While Lil B may not be an acclaimed artist, he has truly left a legacy on Internet lingo - “based” is indeed a positive term now.
Writer’s Notes
This is the fifth and final edition of HTTPS Addict! Thank you for reading and for your feedback over these past months. I couldn’t have completed this without the help of Professor Lacy and encouragement from family and friends.
If this kind of topic interested you, feel free to head over to Cosmopolitanism of Nations, where I will be writing more on the same topics but also history and society more broadly. Once again, thank you for your support!