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Post by Nogamara on Mar 13, 2010 12:39:38 GMT -5
Was actually a bit shocked when reading it, and as I've read KTR for over a year I think I've read quite some posts by Suzina, and I wouldn't have expected such a post.
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Post by flow on Mar 14, 2010 1:13:59 GMT -5
People get upset about buying gold because it breaks down the fantasy we have that WoW is a separate world with its own economy, which is part of the immersion for a lot of us, even if we don't usually think about it.
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Tufva
Ooze
The Art of Cat Herding
Posts: 17
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Post by Tufva on Mar 14, 2010 11:27:10 GMT -5
Buying gold harms other gamers - that is why I don't like it.
I don't really care what the statistics are as to how much gold comes from hacked chars vs botting - if one person loses their character then it is one too many. People can say "it's just a game" until they are blue in the face but my mobile phone "was just a thing" and it still felt like a violation that someone had slipped their hand in my bag and taken it (unfortunately no Blizz restore function, so had to buy a new one). It's wrong for hacking to happen and I cannot believe that there are people that would fob it off with "it's just a game" when someone gets upset over having a character stolen, putting the blame on them for being upset "over mere pixels" rather than on the people doing something that is wrong.
Sorry, I'll go back to my cave now - but this is just one of those things that infuriates me.
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Post by Tarinae on Mar 14, 2010 12:45:40 GMT -5
I have no problem with people buying gold. I even got hacked a while back. It's just pixels either way. Some people take this game a little too serious, and i worry about them. Gold buying leads to hacking. Hacking means that while it's "just pixels", someone is being deprived of entertainment they're paying for while the stuff is restored. Doing something that indirectly causes others aggravation is something to be avoided if possible. The benefit gained by the gold buyer is not outweighed by the aggravation to the hacking victim. Why should someone elses want to be lazy negatively effect MY gaming experience. I have been hacked, my nephew has been hacked, my boyfriends best friend, and another GREAT friend are all the victims of someone else wanting to be lazy. Would I put someone on ignore for it? Probably not, but depending on my like for the person I would probably report them. If it were a good friend, I would make it blatantly obvious that I was disappointed in them...VERY disappointed. Watching your account be hacked and held hostage is the worse feeling in the world. Is it a game? Sure...but it means it can happen IRL too. You're not immune...you're just another means to an end. If you want to think about buying gold, you should consider that they can't make this stuff out of thin air. |
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Post by Issy on Mar 14, 2010 15:02:08 GMT -5
I have actually had a friend I had met in game, and spent a lot of time playing with, buy gold.
There was never any question of me having nothing more to do with him, however he was subjected to a few hours lecture of me being *disappointed with him* and the implications.
I would consider myself a really shoddy person/friend if I ditched someone over one thing they did (in my opinion) wrong.
In this case he was really sorry, and I don't think he had considered it as a *bad* thing to do - simply because he was fairly new to the game and people around him were buying gold like it was nothing.
I don't know what I would have done if he had continued to buy gold. I think maybe I would have agreed to disagree with him, but I don't think I would report a friend.
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Post by indecenthealer on Mar 15, 2010 3:15:44 GMT -5
I haven't bought any gold - or any in game item, for that matter - with real currency (no, not even blizzards own vanity pets). I think it is the wrong thing to do. i already pay enough per month to play the game, and am not willing to shell out more just to get ahead.
On the other hand, if i heard a friend was buying gold - i would not ditch them per se. I would however be more careful around them. Oh, and give them a piece of my mind.
In my eyes, the real issue (and i am sure others have said that before, and see it that way), comes with the side effects. Account hacking is one of them. People farming for gold because they paid for it is another.
What (to me) is an invalid point is how people can "get ahead of others" with this. That is part of the game anyhow. I just cannot compete with someone who plays 12 hrs a day, be it for gear, leveling speed, achievements or anything else. So there really is no "equal chance" at things anyhow.
One side note : Would Blizzard "legalize" gold selling, or sell gold themselves, the account hacking would not stop. It is not "just" the gold.
Nalon
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Post by Herbcrusher on Mar 15, 2010 4:51:26 GMT -5
I seriously doubt a substantial part of money that is for sale comes from hacking. There simply aren't that many accounts on a server to keep the price as low as it is (1000 gold for a few euros?). Do people get hacked? Yes, sometimes. But in reality you see about 3 or 4 hacked accounts per raidgroup per year. Many of these people seem to become serial victims in that they get hacked again and again, probably because of low computer hygiene. Most of the money that is for sale comes from farmers endlessly grinding primals, ore, herbs and other tradegoods. Tobold or Player vs. Developer wrote about this not long ago and the analysis made sense to me then as it does now. Account hacking is just a sidebusiness, it can't be anything else as it is not a guaranteed source of income. Farming tradegoods is predictable enough that you can build a business on it and keep prices low. Ah, the article I meant is by Tobold. tobolds.blogspot.com/2010/02/do-gold-farmers-hurt-economy.html |
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Post by maerdred on Mar 15, 2010 7:58:01 GMT -5
While I didn't spend the money for it, I did accept a gift of 500 gold from a friend who had bought it back in Vanilla.
About a year later (after I had learned how to make money on my own) one of my guildmates got hacked, I gave him 500 gold to replace what the hackers stole. I feel this somehow evened out my moral compass.
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Caste
Ooze
80 Holy Priest
Posts: 11
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Post by Caste on Mar 15, 2010 8:45:50 GMT -5
I don't have a problem with it. I know people do, but if that's how someone wants to play, go for it. If people find a way to get more gold so they can focus less on drudgery like farming and more on enjoyable gameplay, I can't judge. We're all big boys and girls, we can make our own decisions here.
As an aside, I don't think buying gold = hacking, or is the biggest contributor to hacking and account insecurity. Hacking arises from people having very little awareness of protecting themselves and their personal info, and I'm of the opinion it's phishers, scammers, and naive players that leads to getting hacked, not of gold buying itself. (Though yes, gold buying is risky, without a doubt.)
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Post by pewter on Mar 15, 2010 9:51:48 GMT -5
Tobold is talking specifically about gold farming here, not hacking and gold selling as a whole. When a hacking happens, there are several ways that hackers will use the account 1) Liquidation - liquidation of all the assets an account has access to, up do and including the classic guild bank raid. If this is scripted or whatever, it can take very little time to do 2) Spamming - The account is used to spam trade chat with gold advertisements 3) Farming/Botting - the max level toons are used to farm up as many mats as possible before the account is reclaimed 4) Transfer of Gold between other hacked accounts in order to funnel the gold to an eventual buyer. While 'most gold selling' might take place off the back of old fashioned botting, there is no denying that hacking is an essential part of the gold seller's method for everything from the actual farming, to the actual in game transaction. And it happens a lot more often than you realise in game, and all those little amounts of gold add up. I personally have no problem with legal RTM. And yes, hacking would still happen in such a situation. If the gold has monetary value to someone irl (be it legal or illegal) then hacking happens because it is a way to profit. So don't kid yourself that gold selling isn't the major reason that hackers hack accounts. If you take away profit, you're left with maliciousness on the part of individual players, and that doesn't come close to the amount of 'impersonal' hacks that leave a toon stripped and standing in Sholazar. |
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Post by tessy on Mar 15, 2010 10:10:19 GMT -5
Out of curiosity, what other reasons can there be for systematically hacking accounts apart from cashing in on them in various ways and selling the gold?
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Post by Herbcrusher on Mar 15, 2010 11:00:41 GMT -5
tessy: One could do it out of spite to harass a player I guess. pewter: Yes, I don't disagree that accounts that are hacked get plucked empty and the proceeds used for goldselling, it's just that for this to be at all viable people would have to be hacked constantly and that's just not happening. Yes hacking is common but it's not like every week you see a guildie with a hacked account. I seriously doubt that hacked accounts are used for farming purposes, none of the guildies who've been hacked have seen this happen. Their accounts were just online long enough to make the sales and get as much as they could from the raidbank (we lost quite a few of our BLW shards and Karazhan cloth to this once) .
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Zan
Ooze
Altoholic Sorta-Anonymous
Posts: 11
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Post by Zan on Mar 15, 2010 15:09:03 GMT -5
I've never bought gold, but I've traded real world things for WOW things. This usually happens with RL my friends.
Situation 1: Friend A had a financial emergency and doesn't have monies for gas.
I'd give him the gas money just because, but he's been nice enough to give me some primordial Saronite in game to help me out. When I hand him the money (giving him a tank of gas) I say it's in payment for the Saronites. This way, he doesn't feel guilty about taking a handout.
Situation 2: I give my roommate gold for cold weather flying.
He buys pizza for the household. He has his flying and I've got delicious pizza. Yumyum.
I can see why people buy things like gold and powerleveling services: Time is money. Some people want to play the game with their friends, not spend forever leveling to catch up or farming gold to buy consumables.
I would consider buying gold and/or items, but only if the seller was Blizzard.
Blizzard selling gold at a price so low that it becomes unprofitable for hackers, third world farming businesses, and gold sellers will nip the problem in the bud.
Items I'd pay money for? The Zulian Tiger that I've been farming for since classic, the Judgement belt (the last piece I need) that won't drop, and the rest of the fragments for my Val'anyar so I can stop harassing my guildlings to go repeatedly into Uld25.
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Post by Ricah on Mar 16, 2010 5:06:18 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. I have told him about it, but he is not interested in putting in the effort to reclaim the account since he isnt going to play again. I've sent tickets myself, his account has been banned temporarily, and his toons were offline for a week, before it got hacked again. The interesting thing is this:
He quit playing before the Battle.net sync, meaning he never converted it into a battle.net account. He doesnt have an authenticator. His account is inactive. Yet his toon is online. How is this possible with an un-synced frozen account? Kudos if someone can tell me.
I have his account details (i know, against ToS). After getting frustrated with his account being hacked i decided to take matters into my own hands and sync his account with Battle.net in order to hook up my authenticator to his account in order to protect it from further harm. Well...i couldn't log into his account. It said his account was deactivated". i tried to get onto the account management, and it said iy was a "blizzard account".
His toon still has all his gear (yay for wow-armory and wow-heroes), so im assuming its just farming in Stormpeaks, and probably gets used for spamming too. And there's not a damn thing i can do about it. All that blizzard says is: get your friend to go on blabla website and fill out the form...which he cant be arsed to do.
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Post by Phaerae on Mar 16, 2010 6:55:33 GMT -5
I've never bought gold, but I've traded real world things for WOW things. This usually happens with RL my friends. Situation 1: Friend A had a financial emergency and doesn't have monies for gas. I'd give him the gas money just because, but he's been nice enough to give me some primordial Saronite in game to help me out. When I hand him the money (giving him a tank of gas) I say it's in payment for the Saronites. This way, he doesn't feel guilty about taking a handout. Situation 2: I give my roommate gold for cold weather flying. He buys pizza for the household. He has his flying and I've got delicious pizza. Yumyum. My personal view point is that if you want to trade IRL money for in-game gold with your friends, so long as that gold is earned legitly, it's fine. 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. And, of course, players interacting with their friends is welcome. ^^ If you have extra gold in-game, and your friend wants to trade IRL stuff for it... I say, why not? Oh, and your second example is more like doing a favor for each other.  |
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