Posts tagged Gold selling at WOW Insider

Posts with tag gold-selling

Breakfast Topic: The price of flight

Posted Mar 21st 2008 8:00AM by Amanda Dean
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Economy, Breakfast topics, Making money, Mounts

As recently reported, Kharmen EU Talnivarr has reportedly paid 20,000 gold for the Amani War Bear. Kharmen reportedly raised the cash for the enormous land epic ride on her which raised questions about how much gold grinding would trigger a gold farming alert.

The 20,000 price tag seems pretty outrageous considering I'm still puttering along, like many others, on my regular Windriders on all of my 70s. If the Artisan Riding Skill were important to me, I'd make more of an effort to save the 5,000 gold for the mount, but I find it to be low on my priority list. There is no indication that the cost of epic flight will be reduced in the future.

Continue reading Breakfast Topic: The price of flight

Blizzard lays down the science on gold selling

Posted Feb 23rd 2008 11:31AM by Matthew Rossi
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Blizzard, Economy, Leveling

It may seem like it didn't need to be said, but they're saying it anyway: gold buyers are financing the hacking of accounts and the selling off of people's gear. Since we at WoW Insider have seen a lot of these cases (have even had them happen to some of us) we know how profoundly irritating and even emotionally painful it can be to have all of your work on a character or characters gone in a heartbeat, much less seeing them transfered to other servers and even in some cases having their names changed. Blizzard points out power leveling services as a particular culprit in this trade, saying "Through our normal support processes and the assistance of players, we also find that many accounts that have been shared with power-leveling services are then hacked into months later, and all of the items on the account are stripped and sold off. Basically, players have paid money to these companies, sometimes large amounts, and they're then targeted by these same companies down the road."

Now, this doesn't mean that you shouldn't still be careful with add-ons you download or keep a good anti-virus program on your computer, as we know there are many malicious trojans out there targeting World of Warcraft players. But just as clearly, if you use a power leveling service or buy gold, not only are you funding account hacking, you're in danger of seeing your own account hacked as well.

Anti-gold-seller FAQ page goes up at the official EU site

Posted Feb 22nd 2008 8:30AM by Daniel Whitcomb
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Blizzard, News items, Economy, Making money

Why do Shattrath City banks have no guards? Do they just assume the Naaru will smite anyone with sticky fingers?

World of Warcraft's European site has posted a new page of their FAQ aiming to describe the effects and consequences of third party gold selling, also known as RMT (Real Money Trade or Real Money Transactions). There doesn't seem to be a similar page added to the American site yet, but we've seen enough to know very well that they disapprove as well.

The page mostly focuses on the more underhanded tactics the companies use to get money, such as keyloggers and trojans, or simply stealing the accounts of people who paid for powerleveling, and using them as farming bots, or spamming in high traffic areas on level 1 characters with hard to spell names. It's a good start, and certainly reminds people of the harm that these gold farmers do, and how it can hit close to home.

As a veteran MMORPGer who's watched Johnathan Yantis and Brock Pierce practically invent the industry and most of the dirty tricks it pulls, I'm glad to see Blizzard continue to make a stand against these types of leeches and hope they continue to do so. I'd love to see them explain more fully how the constant amount of kill stealing and spawn and AH camping they do hurts the game. A campaign of information might be just what we need to stop the gold farmers once and for all. Legal measures and community shame (and thus shrinking of their customer base) for a one-two punch? Here's hoping!

Thanks for the heads up, Richard!

What is the definition of cheating in WoW?

Posted Dec 28th 2007 5:00PM by Dan O'Halloran
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Cheats, Leveling, Alts

Michael Zenke, the blogger behind MMOG Nation and regular contributor to our sister site Massively, has posted an article covering the latest dust up over gold selling.

The interesting part about this latest debate is that it has become a larger discussion about what is considered cheating. Most people would probably say that cheating is breaking the rules. Paying someone else to level your character or to give you gold for RL money is currently viewed as "unfair."

But if receiving money you didn't earn is in-game is cheating, does that extend to farming for gold with your main to give to your alt? What about having your higher level friends run you through a loweer level dungeon quicker? Isn't that powerleveling? What about twinking? Did your alt "earn" those items?

For many, I think the distinction is whether RL money is involved. It's acceptable to send gold to your alt because you main earned it, but it's not fair to buy gold because you are using your RL cash to get ahead in a game.

So if using RL resources to get ahead is cheating, what about people who are rich with time? After all, the principal mechanic for MMO progression is time spent playing the game. Aren't people with enormous amounts of free time using their RL resources to gain an unfair advantage of those who have limited play time?

Where is the line between cheating and working within the game rules to get the most out of your game time? And how much RL can developers expect to keep out of their games in the interest of "fairness"?

Legal files reveal IGE and Affinity connection once and for all

Posted Dec 20th 2007 8:30PM by Mike Schramm
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Virtual selves, News items, Making money

You may remember that earlier this summer, when Affinity Media purchased Wowhead (to add to their acquisitions of Thottbot and Allakhazam), we were able to interview Affinity Media CEO John Maffei, and he told us, in a very roundabout way, that Affinity and IGE had supposedly parted ways-- Affinity and its content sites were, he said, no longer associated with the company that sold gold in World of Warcraft. However, if you read the comments on that interview, you may have doubted what Maffei told us, and now, thanks to legal documents surfacing because of a legal action against IGE, it appears you were exactly right: Affinity and IGE are (or were, according to Affinity Media) still two peas in the same pod (see Update).

I know for certain right now that some of you commenters are preparing the "aww geez, not this again" (NSFW) macro to post, and I don't blame you. You're exactly right; this is boring business stuff, not new news about the Sunwell, and anyone paying attention back during the Wowhead acquisition knew that the two companies were still connected anyway. If this isn't news you to, fine-- I don't mean to reopen Pandora's Box, we just want to make sure we do due diligence in covering this issue.

Continue reading Legal files reveal IGE and Affinity connection once and for all

Pricy mounts support goldsellers

Posted Oct 9th 2007 5:30PM by Mike Schramm
Filed under: Items, Analysis / Opinion, Blizzard, Economy, Making money, Mounts

We talked about this a little bit on the podcast the other day while speaking about the mail delay now built into the game. I asked what goldsellers were even selling gold for anymore (because there's so much of it to be found in Azeroth, and both Turpster and Robin answered me with: "epic mount."

Yes, there is no bigger drain on the funds than the epic mount price of a whopping 5,000g, and Bornakk says that isn't changing any time soon. I completely agree that having an epic flying mount is definitely an epic achievement, and if Blizzard doesn't want to lower the price, that's their business. But as Captnclaw notes, the refusal to change the way epic flying mounts are obtained is almost singlehandedly keeping goldsellers alive.

There are lots of ways to give out epic mounts and keep them epic-- one we mentioned on the show was daily quests (which is what you're doing anyway, if you're trying to raise 5k gold legally), but anything in that vein would work-- a reputation grind, an item turn-in, an epic questline, or a combination of all of these. Making one of the best, most wanted items in the game simply cost a chunk of gold is more or less creating a market for goldsellers. And refusing to lower the price (or, better yet, take the whole process out of the gold market entirely) is leaving the door wide open for gold sellers to continue hawking their wares.

A one-hour delay on AH winnings in 2.2

Posted Sep 25th 2007 6:54PM by Eliah Hecht
Filed under: Patches, Economy, Making money

Alright, so maybe this morning's "final 2.2 patch notes" weren't so final. They were based on the files distributed with the patch, and there are a couple things that got changed after those files were put together. One is the Daze mechanic not having been retuned as the patch notes claimed (that change in fact got repealed last time on a very special episode of Daze of Our Lives). There is also a change that isn't in the (shipped) patch notes: when someone wins an auction that you're selling, it takes an hour for the gold to get to you.

Apparently you get an in-game mail as soon as the item sells saying the sale is "pending," and then an hour later, you get your cash. Nethaera simply says "By adding in the delay we can better track transactions to assure the legitimacy of them;" I'm betting it has something to do with the gold sellers' new tactics. When will you learn, Blizzard, that the gold sellers are like the borg? You can stop one of their channels, but they will simply adapt and find another. Resistance is futile.

Nah, I'm just kidding. One more inconvenience in the way of the RMTers is one more step in the right direction. In this case, it may be a little inconvenient, and it certainly makes playing the AH somewhat harder, as reader Vynn points out (thanks for the screenshot, by the way), but maybe that's not such a bad thing either. How do you guys feel about this change?

And as Blizzard loves to claim, the latest patch notes can always be found at http://worldofwarcraft.com/patchnotes/. Those notes do contain the AH change and don't erroneously list the daze change. The reason I don't always use that source is because it usually takes a few hours after patches for the notes to show up there.

Story	More like this
All things Wrath	Wrath of the Lich King
Leaked: Wrath to be released in second half of '08	Wrath of the Lich King
The Guild season finale: Boss Fight	The Guild
An illustrated guide to Kil'jaeden's hats	Sunwell Plateau
Biggest sale on the Auctuion House	Breakfast Topics
It Came From the Blog: Revenge of the Orc-moms	ICFtB
The WoW Insider Library
Put WoW Insider headlines on your site

Event	Date
WoW Insider Arena Tournament	FRI nights
WSG weekend	5/16 - 5/19
Stranglethorn Fishing Extravaganza	SUN 2p - 4p
Midsummer Fire Festival	6/21 - 7/5
Worldwide Invitational in Paris	6/28 - 6/29
BlizzCon 2008 in Anaheim, CA	10/11 - 10/12

#	Blogger	Posts	Cmts
1	Mike Schramm	103	9
2	Adam Holisky	59	42
3	Daniel Whitcomb	53	48
4	Amanda Dean	39	0
5	Moo Money	33	28
6	Eliah Hecht	31	21
7	Elizabeth Wachowski	31	3
8	Zach Yonzon	30	0
9	Robin Torres	22	21
10	Alex Ziebart	22	2
11	Matthew Rossi	19	85
12	Sean Forsgren	13	0
13	Lisa Poisso	12	4
14	Amanda Miller	9	0
15	Jennie Lees	7	8
16	David Bowers	7	12
17	Shelbi Roach	5	1
18	Matt Low	4	0
19	V'Ming Chew	4	0
20	Scott Andrews	4	0

Little bit of new Sonic screens unleash big impressions MGS4 screens show new terrain, hint at flashbacks SingStore updates their song selection yet again	What will we find at BlizzCon? The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Wrath on the horizon Overhauling the engine
First shots of Soul Calibur XBLA 'Pimp supreme' Ken Levine to keynote PAX Rick Nash covering NHL 2K9	Another Week in Japan: Hardware and software numbers 5/5-5/11 NGamer: Boogie Superstar is Balance Superstar North America gets exclusive love in We Love Golf
DS Fanboy Review: Crosswords DS Screenshot explosion: Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood Square Enix Members can play exclusive Final Fantasy IV card games	Pre-order Naruto Heroes 2, get bonus figurine SCEA announces US releases for PS3/PSP games Fading Shadows coming to US, courtesy of Agetec

Breakfast Topic: The price of flight

Blizzard lays down the science on gold selling

Anti-gold-seller FAQ page goes up at the official EU site

What is the definition of cheating in WoW?

Legal files reveal IGE and Affinity connection once and for all

Pricy mounts support goldsellers

A one-hour delay on AH winnings in 2.2

WOW Insider Features

Featured Stories

Upcoming events

RESOURCES

RSS NEWSFEEDS

WoW Insider on Twitter

Twitter Updates

Featured Galleries

Most Commented On (30 days)

Recent Comments

WOW Insider bloggers (30 days)

Weblogs, Inc. Network