I want to apologize to those of you who are uninterested in this sort of post. I always strive to write gold making posts for you guys, but this really needs to be said today. I really don't intend to make a habit out of this because I know that a large number of you would never buy a guide. As someone who has a voice in the Guild Wars 2 community that can reach many people I feel it is important for me to let you guys know about a scam when there is one present.
If you are uninterested in this post I really do apologize and tomorrow I will have a post about gold making for you again. I assure you – this is not going to become a habit. That being said here is my review of Tyria Guide.
I was recently contacted by a guy named Jeff from TyriaGuide.COM to do a review of their guide as well as place their ads on this site. I have made it perfectly clear from day one that I wouldn't, under any circumstances, review or even support a guide unless I have personally seen it and approve of it. Since this review is a clear warning for all of you to avoid buying Tyria Guide I will not be linking to the site except in my Youtube video-review of the guide.
I approached this guide and the review I was going to do just like any other guide that I have received thus far. I judged it on its sales page, it's content, and it's relevancy as to how useful it would be if you were to purchase it. It took me just a few minutes before I realized that this guide is one that I would classify as an "avoid at all costs" simply because they are stealing the information in their guide from other free guides.
Tyria Guide is a scam.
Now – I want to be clear when I say stealing information. There is a such thing as having duplicate information and then there is flat out plagiarizing information. This guide falls into the category of plagiarism. The first thing that I looked at was their breakdown of each profession in the game. It was exactly what you expect they have basic information on each profession in each race which was largely comprised of information you could obtain by a quick visit to Guild Wars 2 Wiki.
The second thing I looked at where their crafting guides. I have seen a ton of discipline leveling guides in the last few weeks and I even posted some Free Guild Wars 2 Disciplines Guides earlier this week which were created by a very dedicated member of the Guild Wars 2 community. I was absolutely stunned at what I sought immediately after clicking on their Huntsman guide. What they had done was literally copy and paste the guides which I had featured on my site. I don't mean sections of the guide either. They click that the top and drove their mouse although it on the bottom and copied it all. Images, grammatical errors, nuances, writing habits and all. They did not change a single thing!
Here is what I am talking about in case you are interested. This first picture is a screenshot straight from Tyria Guide's 1-400 huntsman guide. This is the last few lines of the guide which really show that they did little more than copy and paste the guide from the Free 1-400 Huntsman guide I posted earlier this week.
I apologize for the yellow writing, but it was written that way in the free guide as well so I wanted to make sure I didn't change a single thing. As you can see the last lines of this guide say "combined warhorse in torches...and TADA!" A nice sign off from the guides author after you just spent all that time leveling up your discipline. Then you get a hearty "!!!CONGRATS!!!" at the end just to top it all off. You can see just by the way that this was written that whoever wrote it followed a very strict format and kept everything not only grouped together, but also color coded to make things as easy as possible. The image you see here is from Tyria Guide. Now lets take a look at the last few lines of the Free guide I posted earlier this week.
I don't have to get into too much detail here, but if you take a look at this picture and compared to the other one you will find that they are absolutely identical in every single way. The same items are color-coded the same words are used and it even has the exact same sign off. This is a cut and dry example of stolen content from a free site which is being put into a guide or somebody is trying to make easy money off of people who may just not know any better.
Last question that I'm sure someone is going to ask is how do I know that the free guide wasn't stolen from the paid version. I know this because I have seen this free guide for a few weeks now and I've spoken to the author of it on a few different occasions. The author of the free guide has contacted other bloggers as well who have copied and pasted his guide. He didn't make a big deal out of it. All he did was ask them to either take it down or give him credit for his work. The creator of this guide isn't out to make money or be a jerk and start fights with people, but he does want credit for the over 60 hours he's put into creating all of the guides for Guild Wars 2. It's rather disheartening when I run across something like this where people would actually take information which is readily available to people for free and place it within the pages of a paid guide and not say anything about it or even give credit to who wrote it.
Tyria Guide is obviously a scam and one of those guides that is written by shady people for the only purpose of making easy money on unknowing people. I would tell you all to avoid this guide like the plague because all of its information can be found free somewhere else on the Internet. Do not fall victim to their sales pitch. It was not written by professionals and the people who wrote it don't have years of experience nor will they get you leveled up in record time. In fact – it is the opposite. They know so little about Guild Wars 2 that they are actually going to copy free information from others and try to trick people into believing them.
Their site is complete with fake testimonials from people claiming that this guide is change their life in Guild Wars 2. It is obvious that those people are either friends of the guides creators or nonexistent people altogether.
Bottom line:
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If you are uninterested in this post I really do apologize and tomorrow I will have a post about gold making for you again. I assure you – this is not going to become a habit. That being said here is my review of Tyria Guide.
 |
| Tyria Guide is a scam. Stolen FREE information. |
I approached this guide and the review I was going to do just like any other guide that I have received thus far. I judged it on its sales page, it's content, and it's relevancy as to how useful it would be if you were to purchase it. It took me just a few minutes before I realized that this guide is one that I would classify as an "avoid at all costs" simply because they are stealing the information in their guide from other free guides.
Tyria Guide is a scam.
Now – I want to be clear when I say stealing information. There is a such thing as having duplicate information and then there is flat out plagiarizing information. This guide falls into the category of plagiarism. The first thing that I looked at was their breakdown of each profession in the game. It was exactly what you expect they have basic information on each profession in each race which was largely comprised of information you could obtain by a quick visit to Guild Wars 2 Wiki.
The second thing I looked at where their crafting guides. I have seen a ton of discipline leveling guides in the last few weeks and I even posted some Free Guild Wars 2 Disciplines Guides earlier this week which were created by a very dedicated member of the Guild Wars 2 community. I was absolutely stunned at what I sought immediately after clicking on their Huntsman guide. What they had done was literally copy and paste the guides which I had featured on my site. I don't mean sections of the guide either. They click that the top and drove their mouse although it on the bottom and copied it all. Images, grammatical errors, nuances, writing habits and all. They did not change a single thing!
Here is what I am talking about in case you are interested. This first picture is a screenshot straight from Tyria Guide's 1-400 huntsman guide. This is the last few lines of the guide which really show that they did little more than copy and paste the guide from the Free 1-400 Huntsman guide I posted earlier this week.I apologize for the yellow writing, but it was written that way in the free guide as well so I wanted to make sure I didn't change a single thing. As you can see the last lines of this guide say "combined warhorse in torches...and TADA!" A nice sign off from the guides author after you just spent all that time leveling up your discipline. Then you get a hearty "!!!CONGRATS!!!" at the end just to top it all off. You can see just by the way that this was written that whoever wrote it followed a very strict format and kept everything not only grouped together, but also color coded to make things as easy as possible. The image you see here is from Tyria Guide. Now lets take a look at the last few lines of the Free guide I posted earlier this week.
Last question that I'm sure someone is going to ask is how do I know that the free guide wasn't stolen from the paid version. I know this because I have seen this free guide for a few weeks now and I've spoken to the author of it on a few different occasions. The author of the free guide has contacted other bloggers as well who have copied and pasted his guide. He didn't make a big deal out of it. All he did was ask them to either take it down or give him credit for his work. The creator of this guide isn't out to make money or be a jerk and start fights with people, but he does want credit for the over 60 hours he's put into creating all of the guides for Guild Wars 2. It's rather disheartening when I run across something like this where people would actually take information which is readily available to people for free and place it within the pages of a paid guide and not say anything about it or even give credit to who wrote it.
Tyria Guide is obviously a scam and one of those guides that is written by shady people for the only purpose of making easy money on unknowing people. I would tell you all to avoid this guide like the plague because all of its information can be found free somewhere else on the Internet. Do not fall victim to their sales pitch. It was not written by professionals and the people who wrote it don't have years of experience nor will they get you leveled up in record time. In fact – it is the opposite. They know so little about Guild Wars 2 that they are actually going to copy free information from others and try to trick people into believing them.
Their site is complete with fake testimonials from people claiming that this guide is change their life in Guild Wars 2. It is obvious that those people are either friends of the guides creators or nonexistent people altogether.
Bottom line:
AVOID TYRIA GUIDE
I just wish to thank you for taking the time and reaching out to the guild wars 2 community and letting them know about this horrid scam that tyria guide has produced. Being one of the many authors they've stolen from i can tell you that they will not last long and have a reckoning coming to them.
ReplyDeleteCan't the original author's sue? It's still very obvious plagiarism.
ReplyDeleteThe dates on the files uploaded to the server would prove that the content was created online before it was released in print.
If it's not copyrighted it's very hard to sue over things. For example, the flying toaster screensaver was very obviously plagarised from a jefferson airplane album cover from the 60s.
DeleteThey took the makers of the screensaver to court and the makers of the screensaver won by saying that there was no original copyright and they'd never seen the album before.
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/53/253485340_c7db13b4d8.jpg
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/d/d8/After_Dark_Flying_Toasters.png/250px-After_Dark_Flying_Toasters.png
That said, the fact that it's very obvious plagarism does make for a case but then the maker of the original guide has to pay legal fees etc and assume that the maker of tyria guide is even in the same country as him (cross-border lawsuits are again alot harder)
Assuming he did win, the judge would probably just make the maker of tyria guide remove it, pay the free guide owner what he made selling it and pay the free guide guy's legal fees ontop of refunding everyone he scammed with plagarised stuff.
I actually bought that guide before reading the article and even before the article requested a refund.
ReplyDeleteThey won't respond, what do I do?
I would file a stop payment with your credit card company or Paypal if you used that. You are exactly the type of person that these people are preying upon to sell their crappy guide.
Delete