His limo story is even better.

If I spent like $60 on an account I probably would have said okay. But if I was one of the people who spent like $3,000 on an account? (which I would never do) I would have told him to go to hell

He talks as though his key mistake was personal ownership of the paypal account, but I think that really just focused the fallout on him rather than across multiple business entities. His key mistake was breaking the TOS/EULAs of the accounts that he was (re)selling, and rolling the dice that Blizzard would never catch on.

They did catch on. Personally, I think it is very difficult to prevent this sort of thing and that your best bet is to either just live with it, or change in-game things to make the motivation for it less enticing. Star Wars Galaxies had accounts for early jedi unlockers (being able to play as a jedi was originally a very rare thing) sell for multiple thousands of dollars also. Since jedi as a class was so attractive and so rare, you'd have to expect that such account sales would happen -- that is just bad design, assuming that you want to prevent such activities.

Still, it is hard to fault him too much since this was relatively uncharted territory. And, it makes for quite an interesting story!

>> ^MilkmanDan:

He talks as though his key mistake was personal ownership of the paypal account, but I think that really just focused the fallout on him rather than across multiple business entities. His key mistake was breaking the TOS/EULAs of the accounts that he was (re)selling, and rolling the dice that Blizzard would never catch on.
They did catch on. Personally, I think it is very difficult to prevent this sort of thing and that your best bet is to either just live with it, or change in-game things to make the motivation for it less enticing. Star Wars Galaxies had accounts for early jedi unlockers (being able to play as a jedi was originally a very rare thing) sell for multiple thousands of dollars also. Since jedi as a class was so attractive and so rare, you'd have to expect that such account sales would happen -- that is just bad design, assuming that you want to prevent such activities.
Still, it is hard to fault him too much since this was relatively uncharted territory. And, it makes for quite an interesting story!


I'm certainly not saying the guy is blameless, but his business existed because there was a need to be serviced. Buy an account, or gold, or use wowglider etc, the end user is risking their account. The whole industry is a grey market and the first rule is buyer beware.

I have no sympathy for people who pay for accounts and get them banned. They know (or should know) what they are getting in to and that they risk loss of the account. I guess it would be hard for a business to write in to it's legal stuff "Your account could be banned at any time due to your or our fault, so suck it and see!"

Honesty is a creative solution?!

I think his ownership of the paypal account was another key mistake. He should have his companies structured so that if one business goes down, his personal assets or his other businesses aren't threatened.

Looking at the other video about him losing $500k in a Limo business, he seems to make alot of really painful but rudimentary mistakes. It's disappointing because I was expecting him to have made the losses on some unique or unforeseen circumstance, not due to lack of basic hygiene.

$1000 in business night courses or a library card could have saved him nearly a million dollars of grief.

Edit: or $2000 for a basic consultation from a business lawyer and a CPA.

I may have picked this up wrong but I think HIS company was only dealing with the money side of things. So, though he was working with the people breaking the rules he wasn't the one breaking them. That said, due diligence would have discovered that THEY were breaking the rules. BUT if I were him I would have been cool with that cos, you know, Nietzsche et al. (joke). So if this was the case an he didn't have a moral objection then I agree that his mistake was the personally owning the account and not the participation in the first place.

And you should ALWAYS start sentences with conjunctions and CAPS LOCK something.>> ^MilkmanDan:

He talks as though his key mistake was personal ownership of the paypal account, but I think that really just focused the fallout on him rather than across multiple business entities. His key mistake was breaking the TOS/EULAs of the accounts that he was (re)selling, and rolling the dice that Blizzard would never catch on.
They did catch on. Personally, I think it is very difficult to prevent this sort of thing and that your best bet is to either just live with it, or change in-game things to make the motivation for it less enticing. Star Wars Galaxies had accounts for early jedi unlockers (being able to play as a jedi was originally a very rare thing) sell for multiple thousands of dollars also. Since jedi as a class was so attractive and so rare, you'd have to expect that such account sales would happen -- that is just bad design, assuming that you want to prevent such activities.
Still, it is hard to fault him too much since this was relatively uncharted territory. And, it makes for quite an interesting story!

I wouldn't have let him give me an account code or 10%. Because I guarantee those people were paying 150+ per account minimum. Back then it'd take you a month to hit max level and another month or two to get it geared. So you're looking at 50-60 box price + 10-15 per month x 3. So 80-105 just in pure cost for the account and add in time on top of that...people are going to want to be able to buy another account..so double it.

And I have no sympathy for someone who deals in areas where someone can flip a switch and you have no recourse in a court of law to even hope to defend yourself. TOS on electronic goods you don't control...you're just asking to get taken advantage of...even if he were the ones buying and selling accounts and controlled every aspect of it.

Hell with how ebay is now, you can have a legitimate product and still end up owing people money and being out your items....and you are SOL unless it's a big money item where the police might look into it.

I really hate gold and account sellers, they do more harm to games than you could even begin to guess at. Them "working around" the game system means that the flaws that keep people from actually playing and learning never get fixed because people skip around them with money....it's a cycle that never gets broken as long as account sales and gold sales are taking place. The games will never expand past it, because no one will admit to buying these things openly with fear of their account and stuff being taken away....so they look like happy customers.

>> ^Porksandwich:

I wouldn't have let him give me an account code or 10%. Because I guarantee those people were paying 150+ per account minimum. Back then it'd take you a month to hit max level and another month or two to get it geared. So you're looking at 50-60 box price + 10-15 per month x 3. So 80-105 just in pure cost for the account and add in time on top of that...people are going to want to be able to buy another account..so double it.
And I have no sympathy for someone who deals in areas where someone can flip a switch and you have no recourse in a court of law to even hope to defend yourself. TOS on electronic goods you don't control...you're just asking to get taken advantage of...even if he were the ones buying and selling accounts and controlled every aspect of it.
Hell with how ebay is now, you can have a legitimate product and still end up owing people money and being out your items....and you are SOL unless it's a big money item where the police might look into it.
I really hate gold and account sellers, they do more harm to games than you could even begin to guess at. Them "working around" the game system means that the flaws that keep people from actually playing and learning never get fixed because people skip around them with money....it's a cycle that never gets broken as long as account sales and gold sales are taking place. The games will never expand past it, because no one will admit to buying these things openly with fear of their account and stuff being taken away....so they look like happy customers.


Prices might be a bit high there, they don't buy these things from the biggest most costly store in america. You can buy digital copies of games, or you can even just ask a guy from <choose your loophole country> to buy you a bunch. If you want thousands, then you set up a nice little business deal with him. I only bought BF3 when i could find it electronically for 16 pounds; and thank god i did because it's another crappy EA money spinner that's only worth 15 pounds, any more would have been a ripoff.

Have you haven't considered the deals blizzard have done at least since lich king where you could sign up two new accounts, link them, and power level each other to max level in a matter of a few days. We got about 4 characters each to max level within a week and that was me and a friend doing it, mere amateurs.

Gear's a sticking point, but if someone wants GOOD gear, they'll pay good money because there's nothing for it but to sit through several resets to get all the gear you want.

In summary, i really don't have the patience to look up the prices. But the box prices can be smaller by quite a bit and you wouldn't even need to pay a month of subscription unless they wanted gear (and as i say, you'd charge loads more). I think for a virtually naked level 85 of any class, i'd be pleased to get 50 quid.

Once you start to charge any more, people are way more likely to say "... jeez dude i could do this for myself in a week" and fair point i say. But then again, i'm not a bastard - this could all be true and people might charge double that.

Edit:
I have taken into account exchange rate, don't worry. It adds up to cheaper i think.

Another way to avoid this kind of thing, at least now, is to not accept Paypal or other reversible means of payment. From what I hear from merchants, Paypal tends to be pretty inflexible in disputes, almost always siding with the buyer, whatever actually happened. The ability to reverse payments is a double-edged sword - On the other hand, it gives the buyer a lot of confidence, but on the other, the seller is exposed to a lot of risk if they're selling something they can't take back. In some markets, scammers are quite active.

>> ^dannym3141:

>> ^Porksandwich:
I wouldn't have let him give me an account code or 10%. Because I guarantee those people were paying 150+ per account minimum. Back then it'd take you a month to hit max level and another month or two to get it geared. So you're looking at 50-60 box price + 10-15 per month x 3. So 80-105 just in pure cost for the account and add in time on top of that...people are going to want to be able to buy another account..so double it.
And I have no sympathy for someone who deals in areas where someone can flip a switch and you have no recourse in a court of law to even hope to defend yourself. TOS on electronic goods you don't control...you're just asking to get taken advantage of...even if he were the ones buying and selling accounts and controlled every aspect of it.
Hell with how ebay is now, you can have a legitimate product and still end up owing people money and being out your items....and you are SOL unless it's a big money item where the police might look into it.
I really hate gold and account sellers, they do more harm to games than you could even begin to guess at. Them "working around" the game system means that the flaws that keep people from actually playing and learning never get fixed because people skip around them with money....it's a cycle that never gets broken as long as account sales and gold sales are taking place. The games will never expand past it, because no one will admit to buying these things openly with fear of their account and stuff being taken away....so they look like happy customers.

Prices might be a bit high there, they don't buy these things from the biggest most costly store in america. You can buy digital copies of games, or you can even just ask a guy from <choose your loophole country> to buy you a bunch. If you want thousands, then you set up a nice little business deal with him. I only bought BF3 when i could find it electronically for 16 pounds; and thank god i did because it's another crappy EA money spinner that's only worth 15 pounds, any more would have been a ripoff.
Have you haven't considered the deals blizzard have done at least since lich king where you could sign up two new accounts, link them, and power level each other to max level in a matter of a few days. We got about 4 characters each to max level within a week and that was me and a friend doing it, mere amateurs.
Gear's a sticking point, but if someone wants GOOD gear, they'll pay good money because there's nothing for it but to sit through several resets to get all the gear you want.
In summary, i really don't have the patience to look up the prices. But the box prices can be smaller by quite a bit and you wouldn't even need to pay a month of subscription unless they wanted gear (and as i say, you'd charge loads more). I think for a virtually naked level 85 of any class, i'd be pleased to get 50 quid.
Once you start to charge any more, people are way more likely to say "... jeez dude i could do this for myself in a week" and fair point i say. But then again, i'm not a bastard - this could all be true and people might charge double that.
Edit:
I have taken into account exchange rate, don't worry. It adds up to cheaper i think.


He said in the video it was the first year of WoW...considering the pricing of blizz games holding value for multiple years..I doubt it was much lower than 50 bucks for the game. And the monthly only goes down if you pay in year lumps, so I think you'd charge for that if you had extra time on the account.

So, deals since Lich King don't matter...and first expansion to the game didn't come out until 2007. WoW was released in 2004. So end of first year would have made it 2005/2006. It was also slower to level pre-BC because there were less levels and the game was competing against EQ so it was a little rougher than it is now. And they are entirely different games, WoW when it was first released versus WoW now.

And only a year or two prior to WoW being released people were paying 5-10 grand for Everquest accounts. So 2-3 grand for a WoW account in it's first year is not absurd in the slightest considering it was half of the EQ prices in a new game that people were signing up to quite frequently. Was a guy in EQ who used to keep a group of 5 accounts subscribed so he could power level one single account to 50. Minimum he got for an account for the longest time was 1 grand, and he could do it in a couple weeks to a month with those 5 accounts buffing and what not to make sure to maximum XP by only grouping the minimum amount of people it needed to make a kill and use the rest to heal outside of group or pull outside of group. 1 grand account got you a minimal amount of money and any equipment he needed to level it, nothing fancy. The high level equipped guys went for 5 grand and up depending on the class, clerics/enchanters/warriors went for a lot. Druids went for the least because there was too many of them in the game, and the rest were somewhere in the middle. Bards were probably the most expensive due to the leveling penalties.

As for the week stuff.....you couldn't do that in WoW pre BC and doubtful you could have did it in BC before they added bonuses to referrals and re-signups...well not without a lot of extra accounts maximizing time. Which would just make pumping out accounts even more expensive since you've have to count all the other subscription prices into your pricing.

*quality

Boosting this quality contribution up in the Hot Listing - declared quality by Hybrid.

@Porksandwich ah, fair enough. I'm afraid i don't have 12 minutes to spare for the video, but i think you might be overestimating still; i was doing a lot of wow during vanilla, ran the second best guild on my server (hardcore raidng - what a nerd!), even sold several accounts.

The very first character i ever created was max level in 2 weeks - i was an everquest player you see, so grinding was nothing to me. Suited me even, and quests were a lot less rewarding then than they are now. I think i could have done it faster with better knowledge of the game as i was brand new to it and only found a few decent grinding spots. All solo, which i suspect these guys wouldn't be.

However, max level characters WERE more valuable then because not many people could grind levels faster than i (except a professional), so i think the asking price is spot on; I wouldn't take less than 100 quid (~150 dollars) for the work i put into that priest to get him to max level.

@dannym3141 Yeah, I had an account there after BC. I played in WoW beta and had my fill of the game in it's state then...so didn't sub up till first expansion. Someone offered me 150-250 and I laughed at him, I had a decently equipped max level druid, but I also had a bunch of level 40 something guys on the account plus a whole lot of money and a small personal guild I used to vault stuff. I told him I'd want 500 bucks offered before I'd even think about it, because while I could recreate the character the rest of the stuff would have taken me a long long time to redo. It's sitting around idle for however many years now...4 maybe 5.

But still doesn't change my opinion on account and gold selling ruining the games...gold screws with the markets where people with bots playing 24 hours a day are driving prices up creating the need to buy gold if you don't want to grind continuously. And sold accounts make it so they never have to solve the boring levels...like I thought 1-25 were crazy boring and around 40 it got really slow, but max level was fun until you played everything to death and 20-40 were fun due to the skills and maps becoming available.

No idea what the game is like now given they revamped everything with cataclysm....sometimes I'm curious to find out..then I remember how pissed I was with WoW toward the end of my time there...doubt I'd even get 2 weeks out of it before I was pissed again.

Everquest was a whole other beast, it was really cool because it was mysterious. But I know if I had the option to play it now for free I wouldn't, I tried to go back after they released more expansions and found it too confusing/cumbersome after WoW interface and stuff. Plus I really disliked EQs alternate advancement system, it was like leveling your character over again and gaining very abysmal gains for your efforts......would have rather they added multiclassing or something instead of that.

Fuckin leech loses his shirt. Yay! I couldn't be happier, personally.

What the hell kind of people pay other people to play games for them? I can't help but think to myself, do I know any of these people? What do they look like?

Consider this. Blizzard has designed their next HUGE game, Diablo 3, to specifically take on gold/account sellers by offering the service themselves through a real money auction house (where any player, such as myself, can buy and sell my items and I believe even char's for real money). It really doesn't matter what kind of people they are, what matters is that there is a S**T ton of them. Blizzard themselves knows how much money can be made through this, and they want a cut so why not offer a way to do it legally and take a decent cut.

>> ^Ryjkyj:

What the hell kind of people pay other people to play games for them? I can't help but think to myself, do I know any of these people? What do they look like?

Only items, not characters. Yet, anyway.
>> ^Tingles:

Consider this. Blizzard has designed their next HUGE game, Diablo 3, to specifically take on gold/account sellers by offering the service themselves through a real money auction house (where any player, such as myself, can buy and sell my items and I believe even char's for real money). It really doesn't matter what kind of people they are, what matters is that there is a S T ton of them. Blizzard themselves knows how much money can be made through this, and they want a cut so why not offer a way to do it legally and take a decent cut.
>> ^Ryjkyj:
What the hell kind of people pay other people to play games for them? I can't help but think to myself, do I know any of these people? What do they look like?

The entire concept of selling you a product with a verbiage that your personal copy/account can become obsolete any time Blizzard feels like you have broken the EULA seems draconian to me. I am surprised there hasn't been a class action against these MMO firms. If I want to sell my WOW account, I don't see why Blizzard needs to be involved. Last time I sold my car, I didn't recall the manufacturer canceling the warranty or reprocessing the car. Activision/Blizzard and EA have some sordid lawyers, and they'll keep on pushing micro-transactions while barring the rightful owners of the purchased product from doing the same. Assholes!

>> ^MonkeySpank:

The entire concept of selling you a product with a verbiage that your personal copy/account can become obsolete any time Blizzard feels like you have broken the EULA seems draconian to me. I am surprised there hasn't been a class action against these MMO firms. If I want to sell my WOW account, I don't see why Blizzard needs to be involved. Last time I sold my car, I didn't recall the manufacturer canceling the warranty or reprocessing the car. Activision/Blizzard and EA have some sordid lawyers, and they'll keep on pushing micro-transactions while barring the rightful owners of the purchased product from doing the same. Assholes!


I don't know. Look at it like this. You go to Chuck E. Cheese and buy 50 bucks worth of tokens. First thing you do is go over to the skeet shoot and climb up the ramp and start dropping the balls in by hand so you always get max points.

Chuck E Cheese has obvious rules you have to play by, like "don't climb on stuff that shouldn't be climbed on" and the general way to play a game. They can kick you out and tell you to never come back and now you have a handful of tickets and tokens that are only good there at Chuck E Cheese.


Blizzard is on the hook for storing and preserving the integrity of their game. Versus with a car, the manufacturers have no obligation to your vehicle....you have to maintain it, register it, etc. Blizzard does all of that because by the very nature of the MMO, without it you wouldn't have a game worth playing. Everyone would be cheating, modifying their characters, creating new ones from scrap and generally making any mechanics of the game worthless beyond maximum damage, maximum run speed, and GM locked commands. You could do anything if they didn't preserve the character content and reign in abuse. Plus your stuff only has value because they do this. And they do this because without it, the game would be shit.

I mean I guess if you setup your own blizzard server and maintained the game integrity, you could make an argument that you should be able to sell things without their stopping you. Since you are on the hook for whatever trouble it causes on your server....but otherwise you are making them responsible for the person you sell it to, plus you both hold them responsible for making access to these characters possible. And you hold them responsible for making sure their fraud system doesn't detect someone across the world now logging into your accounts.....etc etc. All for free. Hell they don't even move a character to another server for free..they charge stupid money for that kind of stuff.