This can't be legal can it? Seems like an easy way to get top gear. How the hell would someone be able to get that much gold to sell in the first place....this seems ridiculious.

Buying / selling gold for real cash is indeed against Blizzard's TOS, and anyone caught at it can get their account banned.

As for how they get it? Usually bots, exploits and extreme "efficiency"... they look for the easiest things to kill, that give the most cash.

Well i am glad its against the TOS. You should have to work hard for your money *cues old 80's song*

I agree you should have to work for your money, but I remember in Ultima Online after I like 7X GM'ed four of my characters I bought one through UO and bought some spending money and just splurgged (sp?) on rare items and cool looking trinkets for my house.
I guess what i'm saying is that it's ok if it's just for fun or to get an uber character without doing much work. After working up four characters I just wanted that fifth one for fun.

Hmmm, a lot of players would disagree with you there.

That aside, though, Origin provided official pre-leveled characters (and gold? I didn't play UO) within the system. Attempting to do so in WoW is against the TOS, and will at the very least have the items/gold you bought removed from your character when Blizzard catches you.

In FFXI 300 accounts were banned cause of the conflict with Sqaure-Enix's TOS. And good thing too, it defeats the prupose of the game totally =/ People who sell it just ruin the game for everyone else. =/

In FFXI 300 accounts were banned cause of the conflict with Sqaure-Enix's TOS. And good thing too, it defeats the prupose of the game totally =/ People who sell it just ruin the game for everyone else. =/


300? Blizzard is up to about 2000 people banned last I heard, and I don't follow it too carefully.

If you look around you can find the chineese labor. When a character goes from 1 - 60 in two weeks then only plays with the same group in high income areas it kind of tells. or when you have characters 20 levels below the zone in a party of lv 60's it might be a hint. I know of 3 characters that were leveled to 60 in less than two weeks and have my doubts about another couple. I even had one chineese tell me that this was his job and went on to level from lv 35 to 60 in the following 4 or 5 days. I am a lot slower but when you have 2 -3 people playing the same acct 24/7 it is pretty easy to do. This is why the casual players get left behind and cant affort to buy items due to the inflated market.

Buying gold is illegal and is against Blizzard's TOS. As for FFXI, the economy was already so screwed up by the players. Items selling on there for MILLIONS of gil at a time, and those weren't even items tailored for the higher levels.

Buying gold is against the TOS but is not actually illegal.

Breaking the TOS is not a criminal offense(no jailtime) but Blizzard can kick you if you get caught.

Not arguing for it, just wanted to clarify.

I am a law school student, and fascinated by this burgeoning field of virtual property law.

The question is what rights, if any do you have in your character and its equipment? Do you own your character? Consider a suit of armor that you quested for days to find a rare recipe, then hunted for a hours to track down the ingredients, not to mention the weeks you spent building up your avatar's skill in armoring, and finaaly create the product...Is it yours? It has value as the market forces will show you, but who does that value belong to. You spent the hours and hours that ultimately resulted in the value...shouldn't you be able to profit from it? Suppose instead of you selling it someone hacked the game and stole your equipment (or just deleted it or your characters). Did you suffer a loss? Are you entitled to compensation for the lost value, or did the value belong to Blizzard in the first place? The law is still developing and not yet clear, but very interesting.

(Every time someone bumps this thread, I keep thinking it's another gold seller to deal with. :P)

I agree, it's an interesting subject. The position of most of the MMOG companies is that since it's on their servers, and you agreed to the EULA / TOS, it's their property. Legally, however, it seems to be shaky ground... I haven't heard of any of them bringing IGE / etc to court, perhaps for fear they'll lose and be unable to stop gold / character sales.

Terra Nova (http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/) focuses on this type of thing quite a bit; it's an interesting site to read.

One interesting thing that Blizzard had on WoW main page recently was the announcement that they were going to start allowing character transfers between servers at a price. But also in that announcement was character transfers between ACCOUNTS. So, it sounds like Blizzard will allow people to sell thier characters to others, but Blizzard is going to get a piece of that action...

:behindcom
--
Fadė

Maybe, though I doubt it. It seems more likely that Blizzard is just encouraging two-boxing, ala EQ. (Have two PCs, transfer over your priest, run a warrior and a priest, or whatever.)

It also encourages more people to buy a copy of WoW. I know several people that share an account (only 1 can play at a time). Now that their level 60 can be transferred to a serarate account, they may buy one as the thought of starting from scratch was too much.

I've made several alts on my server and, having no real need for a mount with travel form, I was able to give a couple of them some gold. (Ok, I love twinking alts.) Off they went to the AH, only to find that there were few useable items (and they'd have been level 15 - 20 range). After starting with about 10gp, they both had fairly decent stuff and still had over half the gold left over. I got to thinking that Bliz did a pretty good job making gold selling unprofitable with the binding and level restrictions on items.

On the other hand, all I bought in the AH was green stuff. There was some outrageously priced blue stuff and, I suppose if RL$ was no object, one could look at buying gold - and lots of it - every few levels. If more stuff was BoP and BoE had more level restrictions, maybe that would reduce the gold buying.

Then there is the mounts. That one boggles me. If ever there was a situation that might tempt someone to buy gold, then I think that's the one. Mounts should be a totally BoP quest BoP reward.

A parting thought: Sometimes I think gold farmers have the best jobs, eh? I mean, getting payed to play and all. It would beat the heck out of flipping burgers at MacDonalds :)

Do the ToS address the power leveling services? Where you pay to have someone log on to your account and run your character up in xp.

From the EULA:

(ii) [You are not allowed to] exploit the Game or any of its parts, including, but not limited to, the Game Client, for any commercial purpose, including, but not limited to, use at a cyber café, computer gaming center or any other location-based site without the express written consent of Blizzard;

There are a couple other vaguely worded sections in there that could cover it too. I doubt they'd condone it in any case.

/who Maraudon

'nuff said

I don't have as much of a problem with gold buyers as others seem to. I can see why the urge is there. As a level 60 druid, I can solo MOST of the content in the game, and do it fairly quickly. I'm an alchemist/herbalist since about a month ago, and the cash is basically rolling in faster than I can spend it. However, earlier on, I can DEFINITELY see why people would want to. New gear, mount fees, leveling your professions. It all gets a little pricey, and it's difficult for some to make money pre-40 (or pre-60 for that matter). It's cheating, but I frown upon it less than I frown upon the other forms of cheating in the game, like exploiting and whatnot.

i also hate it when ppl pay powergrinders to lvl up their character

afaik you CANNOT transfer char between accounts

i bought new account thinking i could get my daughters character off of my account so that we dont have to compete for computer time ... but i was told on the wow forums that they dont do this

Personally, I believe that anyone who buys gold is just lazy... and in reality its not going boost your gameplay by that much.

I know some people can argue against that statement saying, "if you had all blues at lower levels you would be stronger..." That is true. But many of the stats are not that much different. My staff and the blue staff for my level offer a +4 intellect difference. Also, to me, the game is easy enough that I can kill mobs at my level without having to go out and buy new armor each level.

You still have to level up regardless of how much gold you have to reach higher levels to spend the gold on more training - equip - etc. I find that simply doing quests and grinding that I make enough gold to buy the skills for the next set of training as well as whatever I do with my professions. I haven't run into the problem of 'I am level 34 but still need to buy skills for level 30'.

I also think people need to be smart about the way they play. For example, if you are nearing your next training level and will be short on cash, it might be more adventageous to grind humanoids who drop cash as opposed to something else (unless you know you can get an item that will be worth more).

So far in this game I have found the money system along with the skills to be pretty balanced. When I need a certain level of cloth for first aid, my level of mobs that I can fight drop what I need. Blizzard did a good job - so please don't try to ruin the experience by buying gold. I know that my personal experience will not be ruined if you buy gold - but your experience will.

Then there is the mounts. That one boggles me. If ever there was a situation that might tempt someone to buy gold, then I think that's the one. Mounts should be a totally BoP quest BoP reward.
This is the first time I've ever been tempted to buy gold. With about 20 days /played at 60 I'm still 200g short of my mount. I really should just get back into the AH grind. That's how I got my first mount and levelled enchanting.

Yeah, I agree with that. In all the years of playing MMORPGs, this is the only time I was tempted. Since all I ever really do is BGs, not having the epic mount is a huge disadvantage. Luckily one of my firends in game loaned me enough to get my mount, still haven't been able to pay him back though.

My druid was my first WoW toon, and actually first MMORPG toon ever, and as such I didn't do a lot of things right - I didn't start gathering from the beginning, didnt play the AH right, etc. etc. Thus at 40 I was only at about 30g. (I posted here asking where to grind / farm gold). I was tempted to buy 100g online, but then thought "wtf. I've worked this far, I'm not gonna cheat now. weak". So I grinded about 30g out of SM, and was loaned 30g, and got my mount

My second toon, a priest, I started fishing and herb / alch from the beginning, played ah better, Auctioned EVERYTHING, made a killing off herbs, and bought a mount at 40, and all my spells and some kick @ss armor all the way up.

As far as epic mounts go, I have no idea how I am going to get to 900g! Thats ridiculous. I can see being tempted again, though I'll just grind grind grind I guess.