Blizzard Hits WoW Gold Sellers in the Wallet

[Lunar Templar]

>.>
at best, BEST mind you, this will free from them >.> for a week as the figure something else out, if they're not already

but seriously you think YOU have it bad, play Vindictus, THEN ***** about gold sellers -.-
the fuckers are out in force there, though easier to avoid since they're bots and can't spam on ALL channels, since of the 200 or so you only auto log into a few

 

[Realitycrash]

Okey, since I actually pondered buying gold recently, I'll put my two cents in.

This is why people buy it; It's easy.
Let me use my situation as an example. I had racked up 30k of gold just before Cata (for you who don't play: It was a fairly decent sum in the recent expansion Wrath of the Lich King, you could get several nice items for it in the endgame). I picked up Cata around three weeks after launch (because I got hacked and couldn't be arsed to fix my account any sooner), and started leveling from 80-85.
When I hit 85, I once more wanted to raid. I did not WANT to grind the horrible heroics with the 40 min waiting time on average for DPS, I did not WANT to spend hours and hours grinding herbs or similar so that I could sell on the Auction House. But I had to do it, because I had failed to realize that when a new expansion hits, prices skyrocket. A single high-quality item easily sold for 25k gold.
My friends and sister had started playing three weeks earlier, were already raiding,b ut I lacked the gear to play with them. Blizzard pretty much told me "You wanna have fun with your friends? Sorry, gotta do the boring shit first before you get to play!"
So I glanced towards the goldspammers, and a part of me just thought "50E and I can save myself hours and hours of time wasted and go straight to the fun part!", but..I did not.

Partly because I know it's wrong, partly because I am afraid to get banned, but mostly because (and most people know this, deep inside) the ENTIRE WOW-EXPERIENCE IS A GRIND. Really. If you BUY your items with gold made from real money, it won't feel as awesome as when you finally have it in your hands, knowing that you have worked so hard for it. You're pretty much shooting yourself in the foot. Why do you think Blizzard makes old epics pointless with every expansion? Because if there's nothing to grind, to desire and wish for, then the game collapses.

Now, more on topic: Is this a good move by Blizzard? Geh. I doubt it. As it has been pointed out, you can easily just switch payment method. Still, nice to know that they care.

Seriously why do people even buy gold?

I can easily make 1-2k gold an hour and that is plenty for raid flasks and enchants.

1-2k an hour! What the hell am I doing wrong! I'll be lucky to make 400 in a day!

Pick up Herbing/Mining. A stack of your average ore/herb sell for 50-70g on my server, and I can make three stacks an hour easily.
Crafting epixxs is far more profitable, but you gotta run Heroics for the orbs.

Edit: Oh god, sorry for the dubblepost. My internet is really crap, and I wasn't aware it got posted up there when I tried to post it last time. Will remove if possible.

 

[Thaliur]

So you want WoW to become WarcraftVille?

It would completely ruin the game if nobody had to work for anything, and could just buy whatever they wanted.

The whole gold store stuff would still be controlled by Blizzard, and since the gold would be used to buy ingame stuff, mostly from other players (auction houses), I don't think it would hurt the economy much, since the gold would keep circulating the game world.
Of course, at first some player would have an advantage, but then he uses the gold to buy stuff, and some other player has it. The gold would gradually leave the game world again through NPC traders (repair, resurrection, spells, supplies and whatever they included by now).

 

[Actual]

anc[is]Why should paypal care if Blizzard is getting hurt? Doesn't doing this mean less paypal users? I don't get it

Because gold selling is illegal and PayPal can't be an accomplice by facilitating the purchase of in-game currency. If they don't comply with Blizzard's requests they are breaking the law and would rightfully be taken to court for it.

 

[Fr]anc[is]

anc[is]Why should paypal care if Blizzard is getting hurt? Doesn't doing this mean less paypal users? I don't get it

Because gold selling is illegal and PayPal can't be an accomplice by facilitating the purchase of in-game currency. If they don't comply with Blizzard's requests they are breaking the law and would rightfully be taken to court for it.

I'm not calling you a liar, but I doubt it's actually against real world law. I'm sure it's against that agreement thing nobody reads, but nobody would make a law saying "buying WoW gold is illegal", and any law that might encompass WoW gold would include other virtual items such as the TF2 store.

 

[guardian001]

Blizzard is absolutely full of crap on this one.

I'm going to believe that more than likely this will hurt their fanbase a lot more than they know. There were probably other ways to do this but by enforcing this on Paypal, it's going to have severe repercussions on them.

In what way would this hurt the fan base? Anybody who isn't buying or selling gold won't be affected...

 

[SinisterGehe]

If blizzard wants to kill all gold farming completely from everywhere then they simply need to under cut them by selling the gold/items themselves. It is win/win the players get cheaper gold and blizzard makes money.

And the server gets imbalanced by people buying gold, inflation kills crafting, crafted gears value, AH and value of goods. Whoo, what a joy! I am sure happy that spoiled kids can kill the server by beging mommy to gives her credit-card info. This is why many new F2P MMO's die, because you can buy power, long as oyu can craft gear that can be used for something, you are buying power, let alone for being able to buy gear itself.
I would go unsub so fast if this would happen, along with at least 8% of wow players I know. Think that as sub numbers that bring monthly revenue, how much would the loss be.

Here I got bulletproof idea to remove gold selling and item selling for real money. Lets make tranding item only possible my auction house, yes good old socialism, everything must go trough the system.
Long as players can freely trade goods in any amounts or of value, you can't stop gold selling. What if I trade my [Uber pwnage sword] to some kid for real physical money that he hands to me? How can blizzard stop that?

 

[Canid117]

Blizzard is absolutely full of crap on this one.

I'm going to believe that more than likely this will hurt their fanbase a lot more than they know. There were probably other ways to do this but by enforcing this on Paypal, it's going to have severe repercussions on them.

Please explain to me how exactly this is going to hurt legitimate customers as apposed to gold sellers?

 

[Actual]

anc[is]Why should paypal care if Blizzard is getting hurt? Doesn't doing this mean less paypal users? I don't get it

Because gold selling is illegal and PayPal can't be an accomplice by facilitating the purchase of in-game currency. If they don't comply with Blizzard's requests they are breaking the law and would rightfully be taken to court for it.

LOL! Illegal? Why, because an EULA that no one reads because it's unreadable to many without a law degree says it's against the rules?

Rules, laws, not the same thing.

anc[is]

anc[is]Why should paypal care if Blizzard is getting hurt? Doesn't doing this mean less paypal users? I don't get it

Because gold selling is illegal and PayPal can't be an accomplice by facilitating the purchase of in-game currency. If they don't comply with Blizzard's requests they are breaking the law and would rightfully be taken to court for it.

I'm not calling you a liar, but I doubt it's actually against real world law. I'm sure it's against that agreement thing nobody reads, but nobody would make a law saying "buying WoW gold is illegal", and any law that might encompass WoW gold would include other virtual items such as the TF2 store.

Admittedly it's not as clear-cut as I made out as there are very few example cases. However gold buying is against the rules and gold selling is illegal. Forming a company with the explicit purpose of selling a product you do not have a legal right to is against most countries laws, WoW gold is protected as Blizzard property by copyright law not the EULA. Although it is also mentioned in the EULA.

These companies almost exclusively use bots to mine their gold, this is a separate offence as it goes against the Digital Millennium Copyright Act which states that it is illegal to circumvent a programs built in protections. So as Blizzard programmed their game to make botting difficult making a bot that works is against the law.

 

[Broderick]

People could say that this is just creating a "whack a mole" situation, but really, it already was one. There already was a "report spam" button in WoW for spammers and gold sellers; taking paypal out of the equation just fills in one more hole, preventing anyone from "poping up" as easy. I also think people dont quite know exactly where the gold that the gold sellers came from, sometimes its made in a legit way, although most of the time it COMES FROM HACKED ACCOUNTS. So yeah...I would say this helps.

 

[sleeky01]

How in the hell can anyone prove that the money on their account is from selling WoW "gold"

BECAUSE OF THE WEBSITE THE PURCHASE WAS MADE FROM. Seriously there are thousands. and if the root of the purchase is "getyourwowgoldhere.com" or whatever its not hard to to tell. Aside from that, even digital products come with a receipt of what is being bought.

Unless you re-direct that WoW gold purchase to another website selling...I don't know...cheap electronic items, and THEN contact Paypal.

Not hard to get around.

 

[bushwhacker2k]

Blizzard is absolutely full of crap on this one.

I'm going to believe that more than likely this will hurt their fanbase a lot more than they know. There were probably other ways to do this but by enforcing this on Paypal, it's going to have severe repercussions on them.

I don't use PayPal myself, so I can't see what the exact repercussions are for this, but it DOES seem like this'll annoy some legitimate WoW players.

By that I mean some WoW players might use PayPal to buy actual WoW merchandise, and if all WoW things are off for PayPal then that would go as well, would it not? Maybe I'm just misreading this.

I can understand why they'd wanna off gold-sellers though >_>

 

[damse]

Theres a easy way to solve this, remove the auction hows for 1 month in wow as punishment for people buying gold suddenly market slows down gold sellers get butt hurt and people are forced to hagel prices like we used to in mmos.
Then re introduce it and tell people if volume of player that buys gold doesnt drop to from i dunno rough guess 50% too 30% then we will remove something else like player to player trading for a month and so on.
I mean just literally Punish people in some way that makes them think oh shit when i do stuff i have actions take against me :O *shocked face*

 

[Atheist.]

I generally agree with this idea, however... This will only make the gold sellers use less trustworthy methods of transactions, possibly creating security risks for the people making the purchases, such as identity theft or unauthorized charges.

 

[Baneat]

Blizzard is absolutely full of crap on this one.

I'm going to believe that more than likely this will hurt their fanbase a lot more than they know. There were probably other ways to do this but by enforcing this on Paypal, it's going to have severe repercussions on them.

What?

Everyone hates gold farmers/sellers exept 10 year olds who make their parents buy gold for them because they can't play the game.

It's mostly people with money who would rather spend 2 hours working, and earn enough to purchase the same gold you would have spent 20 hours to obtain in-game. I never bought it, cause it's outside the spirit of the game, but it seems like a fairly legitimate reason, unless you mean to imply that everyone should be mindlessly grinding equally as hard to actually play the game.

 

[Iskenator67]

Here's an idea, why doesn't Blizzard just sell money & items from there website? They would receive full profit & it would snuff out the gold sellers. Sure it takes all challenge out of the game, but some people like that.

 

[Silva]

Blizzard might not be able to stop the flow of virtual currency and items from gold sellers to World of Warcraft players, but it can stop the flow of real currency from players to gold sellers.

Sorry, but that bolded part (my emphasis) is an exaggeration. The flow of such currency can't be stopped, that's nonsense. A few lines through which that currency flows can be, but that doesn't mean it's possible to block them all. At the end of the day, a backyard dollars-for-gold deal with real cash is still completely out of Blizzard's reach to stop.

But I applaud them for trying in the name of improving their game's experience, I guess.

 

[Fr]anc[is]

Long quote

That actually makes a lot of sense, thanks for explaining

 

[Blights]

In the time that I played World of Warcraft, I never considered buying gold or items. It wasn't a part of the game I wanted to play. However, I don't see how they are "a bane and a parasite" in any way. A gold farmer that actively sits at the machine, playing the game and making gold to sell for effort is simply looking for a way to convert effort into cash, and likewise with an item farmer. Please note that this hypothetical individual is -actively playing- and not botting (which is an entirely different can of worms).

That selling gold or items is "violating Blizzard's intellectual property" is an outlandish claim as well. The sellers are making a trade of realworld currency for in-game equipment that took time (and maybe effort) to acquire. At no point (to my understanding) are people claiming that they made, own, or have any intellectual claim to the gold or items.

What Blizzard should be doing here to combat gold sellers and item sellers is to get into the business. Offer, at the WoW store, the ability to buy 10000 gold for some amount of money, or directly sell the marks required to get the top tier of gear. If necessary, offer gold sales that undercut whatever the underground market can provide. In this scenario, Blizzard -is- the mint - they don't need to worry about sitting around for hours to grind to 85 to fight the profitable monsters. They could, quite easily, cash in on this basic need for better stuff and kill the gold farmer market in the process - their prices don't have to pay anyone's salaries.

Many, MANY Goldfarmers use other player's characters to use. They simply find one and hack it.
Basically, every high level goldfarmer you see? That's maybe a year of someone's life wasted into a bot.