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Post by Herbcrusher on Mar 17, 2010 12:06:27 GMT -5
This has happened exactly to a co-worker of mine, and is still happening right now. He quit playing somewhere in october last year, and since i see him at work every day i know he hasnt sold his account, and has not reactivated it either. Yet his main toon (and only lvl 80) is online, every day, all day, farming in Stormpeaks. That is really interesting, I haven't ever heard of that happening. And very weird that blizzard doesn't just block the account.
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Post by Herbcrusher on Mar 17, 2010 12:12:54 GMT -5
I think of it from the point of the economy. If a character gets hacked, let's say for 10k gold, that's 10k gold the gold farmer is pumping into the gold stream. However, as Blizzard makes a habit of trying to return items, let's say this character regains all of his items. So that means 10k of gold would have 'miraculously' appeared. So this would harm the economy because there was an extra 10k gold. Of course, this doesn't seem like a big deal, but if you imagine this happening at least a hundred times a day, then yes it becomes a big deal. It can't be that many. Wow census puts the number of characters on my server as 21.000. Let's say each player has 3 characters on average, so that's 7.000 actual accounts. If hundreds of people from those 7.000 people were being hacked every single day you'd see gulldies hacked every week.
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Post by Phaerae on Mar 17, 2010 12:59:04 GMT -5
Hmm, the numbers might not be right, but you get the idea. A steady influx of gold into the economy would probably imbalance it somehow.
And of course, if these people are stockpilers - say they hacked someone who has been painstakingly gathering Frost Lotus, then there would be a lot more Frost Lotus on the Auction House for example, so the price of that would drop - at least for a bit. Aaaaand other stuff like that, lazy to think of any. xD
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Post by valgav on Mar 19, 2010 15:34:06 GMT -5
I've seen a friend's inactive account reactivate and start farming. For a week I thought maybe he had started playing again, then when I talked to him IRL he was as surprised as I had been. So he had the account banned.
As for gold buying, I have a sort of survival of the fittest sort of mindset. If you buy gold and then lose your account, either through hacking or by banning from ToS violation, you can't cry about it. (The former moreso from a leveling service.) It weeds out the dishonest players.
However as for gold selling, I make bank just casually farming. If I sold the gold I farmed up myself I wouldn't have to pay for my WoW sub with my hard earned cash from work, and maintain a beer and smokes budget besides. But I of course like my pixels, so I don't risk my account buy selling gold.
The fact of the matter is this, buying and selling gold is a violation of the ToS. You do it, you'll probably get burned. No skin off my back. You'll never stop the farmers, there will always be a market of people dumb or impatient enough to buy it. Only thing you can do is be smart and keep your account secure as best as you can.
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Post by Tarinae on Mar 19, 2010 21:52:24 GMT -5
My nephew had his account hacked and the hacker stayed online for nearly a week between Wintergrasp and Icecrown. When Allex got his account back, he had in his personal guild bank and bags over 500 stacks of ore including saronite and titanium. My account was hacked a year or so ago and the hacker held it for ransom talking to my nephews, best friend, and boyfriend saying he would give me the password (he had a bot changing it every so many seconds) for an insane amount of gold. He held the account hostage for 2 hours until a GM pinged him after servicing my boyfriends ticket.
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Post by eumenide on Mar 22, 2010 10:00:01 GMT -5
At the risk of bringing the combined wrath of the community down on my head, I've been both a gold buyer and seller in a couple of games (though not WoW). Most of this thread has been about account hacking, which is obviously deplorable, but to balance the argument here's an essay I wrote on the simple pleasures of RMT.
My Interesting Life selling virtual goods and services.
I've played online games for quite a while now, starting with the text-based MUD's (Multi-User-Dungeons) in the late 80's, then moving on to Meridian 59, the first graphical MORPG, in 1996. At that time there really wasn't any trade in virtual items or cash, basically because there weren't enough players. However, the situation changed when Ultima ONline was launched a year later. This was based on the popular Ultima series of games and was the first MMORPG with a population in the low hundreds of thousands. Big enough for a market to develop.
UO had few of the restrictions that WoW has. Anyone could use any Item. There were no levels or quest rewards. Anyone could kill anyone else and items could be looted off your body or stolen from your pockets.
Also, you could build your own housing or buy houses for cash. There was no restriction. You could own lots of houses or buy huge castles. But there was a land shortage. All the good land for housing was taken, so the prices of housing in prime locations rocketed. Location, Location, Location.
UO housing was not just for vanity. The bigger your house, the more stuff you could store in it. And you could place your own vendors. Vendors were NPC's who you could load up with stuff which would be automatically sold. Since there was no auction house, this was the way that trade was conducted.
Finally, in order to make your character truly L33t, there were power scrolls which could be won by killing huge bosses in the deepest dungeons. These required big freeform raids of up to a couple of hundred people, of whom maybe a dozen would get a scroll.
finally, to even cast spells, magic users needed herbs, which were available only from the game vendors, in limited supplies.
Thus, we had a situation in which I needed cash to buy armour, weapons, houses, crafting materials, power scrolls and even herbs for my mage. I had a skilled miner, who could dig up precious ore, for weapons, and I had a character who could tame dragons to kill big monsters for magic items and even power scrolls. However, I had nowhere to sell this stuff, since houses for vendors were far too expensive.
So, I bought a house off eBay. It was in a prime location, with a nice vendor area, and it cost me £300. I set up my vendors, and filled it up with goodies for the discerning passer-by. I sold out in a day. I needed more stock, so I turned to automation. I automated my miner, and left him bouncing around to the best mining locations. He mined day and night. When I was actually playing, I went out with my tamer, a dozen dragons in tow, and killed monsters like there was no tomorrrow. I sold ore and magic items and the money rolled in.
In fact so much money rolled in, that I started selling it on eBay. It wasn't much in real terms. I was making maybe £100/month and had 2 boxes running macros.
Then a few things happened. UO started to crack down on macros, and reduced tamers to only 1 dragon. Plus people were leaving the game to go to Everquest, which had a far superior graphical interface and was easier to play. People are shallow like that. My supply of goods dropped, and my customer numbers dropped. The price of UO gold on EBay plummeted. And I had a baby. It was all too time-consuming for too little reward. I left UO. The next game I started on was EVE Online (not to be confused with the popular wimmins support network). This is a space simulator with a highly developed economy. Essentially, nearly everything desirable in-game is constructed by the players from ore, which could be mined: ships, weapons, various add-ons to make you faster or more powerful. All of this could be bought off the market. You had to have the skills to use the item though, and skill training cost more money.
I wasn't getting very far in EVE, which is a harsh game for newbies, so I spent £50.00 to buy a few hundred million ISK (the in-game currency), and bought myself some decent ships.
Now, in EVE, the best ships, tech 2, were the most desirable, and expensive. However they could only be built by people who had the appropriate tech 2 blueprints. These could then be rented out to other players for serious money. I went into blueprints in a big way. The only way to get tech 2 blueprints, aside of buying them - and no-one was selling - was to win them in a kind of lottery. This depended on the number of research agents you had, so I bought all the lottery tickets I possibly could, by setting up loads of research agents.
Then I waited. Over the course of a few months I accumulated a number of Tech 2 modules, until finally I got one of the coveted ship blueprints. I was in business. Since I still didn't have much time, I rented my blueprints out to another concern, who actually made, and sold, the ships. They gave me a share of the profit, and I sold It on eBay. Life was sweet.
I never really made as much from EVE as I did from UO, probably becuse the subscriber numbers were lower, plus the chinese macro-ers had moved in to mine vast quantities of ore and flood the market. This pushed the currency price lower. I reckon I made £50/month or so for a couple of years, but the advantage was that it took me no time at all.
All this came to an end When eBay stopped selling virtual items of any sort. Plus my manufacturers decided to go into business on their own. Time to go. I sold my ships and my blueprints and liquidated the profits.
And that's about it. I've never played WoW seriously enough to be a gold farmer, and to be honest I think that the number of chinese gold farmers make it hard for an independent to succeed. Plus Blizz go on banning sprees periodically.
I never really enjoyed buying gold or ISK. It always reduced the challenge, and hence the enjoyment of a game for me. It might be different if I was achievements driven, cash rich and time poor. However, I always enjoyed gold selling. It was kind of winning the meta-game. And I've always loved the idea of making real money by creating entirely imaginary things. In some ways I think that it's a harbinger of things to come, where the economy is global and online, and prices are pushed inexorably lower, reducing the wealth disparity between the developed world and the others.
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Post by hadawako on Mar 23, 2010 13:12:10 GMT -5
A fascinating story, Eumenide. I didn't really undertand these things at the time, but from talking to people afterwards, I get the impression that quite a few students were funding their beer through college like this with the earlier MMOs. It probably beats working at McDonalds.
Whilst I don't think it would work in WOW, it's interesting to speculate how a game that had real-money player-to-player transactions might work.
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Post by eumenide on Mar 24, 2010 5:13:42 GMT -5
If RMT is something that interests you, there's a blog at terranova.blogs.com/ that you may like. Its been around for many years and takes an academic perspective of online gaming and virtual worlds, with an emphasis on RMT. In fact it was an article on there by Julian Dibble which started me off. He was a journalist back in 2004 who gave up his day job to try and prove that he could make more money from playing UO than he made as a journo (around $30,000 iirc). There's a blog about it at www.juliandibbell.com/playmoney/ but it's a bit of a historical artifact now.
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