World of Warcraft : gold

US Gamer Becomes First World of Warcraft Millionaire

Merah — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 16:03:14 GMT

I won't link the original article because it is containing links to a website selling gold which is against Blizzard's rules. Below is the copy of this surprising article:

Whilst America is suffering an economic downturn, gas prices rise day after day and the dollar weakens under pressure, one American is going against this trend; virtually. An avid Internet gamer from Chicago IL, known only as Jake, has made history by making the largest purchase of “virtual currency” ever reported. He did so through the game World of Warcraft, purchasing 1,000,000 Gold (the game’s currency) at a cost of just over $40,000.

The exchange of “real money” for its virtual gaming equivalent, whilst an insane concept to many, is nothing new. Real-Money Trading, or RMT companies as they are better known, have been around since the early days of Ultima Online but only became newsworthy with the release of World of Warcraft. The game’s population of almost 11 million subscribers makes it a lucrative marketplace for third-party companies, with no shortage of customers and suppliers (though the majority of the industry’s “product” is sourced through China). Industry analysts have predicted the RMT market to be worth around $2 billion in 2008, with a large proportion of that coming for World of Warcraft.

Though many gaming addicts will admit to purchasing virtual currencies and services, perhaps spending as much as a couple hundred dollars at a time, one wonders why someone would spend so much money on what is essentially pixels on a computer screen.

“My friends ask me, ‘You could have bought a car, a boat or put down a deposit on a house - why waste all that money on a game?’. I don’t like cars, I get sea-sick and I already own a couple of properties of my own.”, Jake contends. “I find less sense in blowing $40,000 on a BMW - at least WoW Gold retains its value.” You can almost understand his point - almost. After all, expendable income is all about enjoyment, whether it’s expensive holidays, a luxury sports car or the ability to own (literally) your friends at your favorite game. But still…

The lucky recipients of this record order were <censored>, <censored> provider of WoW Gold, based out of <censored>. “When we saw the order request come in, we just laughed; it’s not unusual to get joke requests”, said <censored>, the Customer Service Leader managing the shift the order came in on. “But the guy persisted and provided us with a phone number that matched up with his registered address. When we realized that this might be a serious order, we took the steps to further verify Jake’s identity and the validity of his request with his bank.” Within a few days the deal was done and Jake was on his way to being what must certainly be the only World of Warcraft millionaire on the planet… though he’ll have to spread the wealth over atleast 5 characters as the currency limit for a single player (only ever acheived twice before in the game’s history) is just over 210,000 Gold.

Jake plans to gear up his characters with the best of everything the game has to offer, but he’s not forgotten his fellow guild members either. His girlfriend, also a World of Warcraft player, was pleasantly surprised when she found a 50,000 Gold 21st birthday gift from Jake in her in-game mailbox. It’s no diamond ring, but it’s pretty close in WoW!

The Gold Farming War - Who's winning?

Zyuu — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 23:43:26 GMT

Ever wondered who's actually winning when it comes to The Gold Farming War? The developers or the actual farmers or perhaps the players of said MMOs?. Well, it can't be the players, unless you (yes you who's reading this right now!) condone buying virtual currency.

Read on..

MMO companies complain and battle gold farmers in their games, in the press, in their forums, and via their live support teams. The question is - how are they doing and who's winning?

A certain gold farming site provided me with some long term data on average currency prices across all of the server shards in several games. If anti-gold farming initiatives were effective, gold prices should go up as the cost of business increases for gold farmers. (NOTE: This assumes that demand is fairly constant. If game companies could actually convince their players not to buy gold, than prices would drop with a glut of gold on the market and no one to buy it. I've not been able to get volume data from any gold sellers, but my sense is that their customers are not going away.)

World of Warcraft has a lot of price volatility. Whether this is due to anti-gold farming activities or other effects is hard to determine without more information. If anything, it looks like the US gold farming market is getting increasingly competitive while the European market is simply volatile. Additional data on actual server populations as well as volume of gold transactions would be very helpful.

Could WoW be the world's biggest corporate?

pad8 — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 16:34:27 GMT

Just reading Yahoo News and this caught my attention as one of their headlines.

Ten million players. However you look at it, that's a lot. World of Warcraft not only dwarfs all other massively-multiplayer games, it dwarfs a good number of countries -- not silly countries like Monaco and Greenland, either, but perfectly sensible ones. Like Sweden, say, or Israel. But how do the holdings of this legion of players compare to the corporate giants of the world?

Determining what actually is the world's largest company is far from an exact science. Do you measure it by annual revenue, in which case it's ExxonMobil, which pulled in about $400 billion in 2007? Perhaps counting number of employees makes more sense, in which case it's Wal-Mart, which has 1.7 million blue-vested souls on its books. Maybe market capitalization, a measure of the public opinion of the value of a company, is what matters most, in which case it's probably ExxonMobil again.

Read the rest of the article over at Yahoo Gamers News.

Gold Selling: Effects and Consequences

Zyuu — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 10:34:24 GMT

Selling/buying/trading for gold and items in World of Warcraft is mainly frowned upon, yet, many still continue to do it. There's also quite a few people buying so-called powerleveling services.

Blizzard Europe have made a really clear statement about their thoughts and views surrounding this. It's no surprise that they are completely against it. As am I and the Curse staff as well. Cheating should always be frowned upon. It only ruin the overall gaming experience and make things feel cheap and less exciting and fun.

We would like to make a clear statement here about the negative impact of buying gold and using power-leveling services. Every day, we encounter players who have been negatively affected and targeted by companies offering these services. So, we hope to raise awareness about the practices they engage in and the detrimental effects they have on all players, including their own customers, as well as on the game environment as a whole.

What many people don't realize when buying gold is the large impact it has on the game economy, and also how the companies selling gold obtain it. Our developers, in-game support, and anti-hack teams work diligently to stop the exploits these companies use and help players who have become victims of their services. We regularly track the source of the gold these companies sell, and find that an alarmingly high amount comes from hacked accounts. These are the friends, relatives, and guildmates you may know who have gone through the experience of having characters, gold, and items stripped from them after visiting a website or opening a file containing a trojan virus. Our teams work to educate players and assist them in avoiding account compromise, but the fact remains that the players themselves are often these companies' largest target as a source for gold, which the companies then turn around and sell to other players.

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. We come across stories every week of the aftereffects of players using these services, and some players now have to deal with long-term repercussions -- In addition to consequences such as possible account suspension or closure, in many cases the companies they paid then use their personal information to perpetrate identity theft and credit card fraud. These are long-lasting effects on players' personal lives that can take years to recover from.

We also want players to recognize that these companies often employ people to do their work through the use of disruptive hacks in the game, which can cause realm performance and stability issues. The companies essentially take time away from our development and in-game support efforts as we work to stop their exploits and assist players who have become their victims in recovering characters and items. They spam advertisements, use bots that make it hard for players to find the resources they need, and raise the cost of items through inflation.

The negative effects these companies create depend directly on people using their services. Without them, the companies have no way to continue their unethical actions. Furthermore, it’s important to keep in mind that players are responsible for what happens with the account they play on. Selling gold for real money and having characters power-leveled are violations of our Terms of Use and End User License Agreement, and we regularly take corrective action when we find that these services have been used. We hope the information presented here is helpful to anyone considering buying gold or using a power-leveling service; these are just a few reasons that those services can negatively impact World of Warcraft and other games, and we strongly encourage players not to support the companies that offer them.

Hackers DoS Attack Gold Sellers

Kody — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 23:52:25 GMT

Texyt is reporting that there have been DoS attacks on some of the major Korean RMT websites, causing them to be difficult or impossible to access for the past four days. The industry in Korea is reportedly up to $1bn trade in gold, weapons and other items, which means these websites are losing a lot of money due to this outage.

There are also reports coming in that the DoS attacks originate from hackers in China - as part of a blackmail scheme to extort money out of the websites being attacked. This isn't the first time these websites have been hit; they also experienced intermittent outage over the last few days of September.

You can read more at the Texyt article.

New York Times Analyzes Gold Farming

Kody — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 22:00:11 GMT

In a recent article on the New York Times website, writer Julian Dibbell analyzes gold farming - more specifically in World of Warcraft - and even goes as far as researching and talking about some of the many, possibly over 100,000 people that work at these "gaming workshops" in China.

It was an hour before midnight, three hours into the night shift with nine more to go. At his workstation in a small, fluorescent-lighted office space in Nanjing, China, Li Qiwen sat shirtless and chain-smoking, gazing purposefully at the online computer game in front of him. The screen showed a lightly wooded mountain terrain, studded with castle ruins and grazing deer, in which warrior monks milled about. Li, or rather his staff-wielding wizard character, had been slaying the enemy monks since 8 p.m., mouse-clicking on one corpse after another, each time gathering a few dozen virtual coins — and maybe a magic weapon or two — into an increasingly laden backpack.

You can check out the article in full here, and head over to our forums to discuss the article; we have a thread started on the topic.

Peons4hire sued by Blizzard

DarksbaneKT — Sat, 26 May 2007 06:51:00 GMT

In addition to the new gold spam report feature introduced in patch 2.1.0, Blizzard has also decided to file a federal lawsuit against one of the largest gold selling companies, Peons4hire. The lawsuit required them to "immediately cease all in-game spamming efforts by all entities and websites under their control." It was also said that if they refuse to act accordingly, further legal action will be taken.

With this organization pretty much out of the way, hopefully Blizzard will take similar actions against the other companies that have been recently plaguing WoW.

World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade gone Gold

TIV73 — Sat, 30 Dec 2006 03:16:14 GMT

>Yeah. That'd be great. Y'know, having some evidence for the rumor being perpetuated. Call me a skeptic... > >The expansion has already gone gold. We see no reason why the game isn't going to be on the shelves at the planned date. > >January 16th, in case you forgot.

Yesterday, Tseric confirmed on the official forums that the addon to World of Warcraft has gone gold. Tthat said, there should be no problem with the planned release date mid January.