>> ^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.

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!

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>> ^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!"

I've found a few dates online...mostly figs though.
>> ^UsesProzac:

I'd like to see all of those topics touched upon. Another that I'm personally curious about, meeting partners online. I met my current partner on World of Warcraft, hah. Who else has found dates off the internet?

I'd like to see all of those topics touched upon. Another that I'm personally curious about, meeting partners online. I met my current partner on World of Warcraft, hah. Who else has found dates off the internet?

>> ^jonny:

dead


Fixed and thanks.

I've never played WoW.. but somehow I feel Warcraft 3 was more fun.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'warcraft' to 'warcraft, f word' - edited by bareboards2

Oh wow (no pun),
I knew that WoW was altered to remove all skulls/bones from the Chinese version, but I was not aware of the Panda issue. Thanks!

>> ^Yogi:

>> ^MonkeySpank:
How did we go from Trolls and Undead to Pandas? I blame the Chinese market!
The sad part is that Alterac Valley came out 5 years ago, and it was more fun then (with shittier computers) than WoW will ever be. Vanilla AV is definite proof, to me at least, that more is not necessarily better.

Don't blame the Chinese market because they will probably BAN WoW because it now has Pandas. Apparently you cannot depict a panda dying in Chinese media or something, they don't like it. So it's going to be interesting to see what happens when this expansion launches in China.

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>> ^Yogi:

>> ^MonkeySpank:
How did we go from Trolls and Undead to Pandas? I blame the Chinese market!
The sad part is that Alterac Valley came out 5 years ago, and it was more fun then (with shittier computers) than WoW will ever be. Vanilla AV is definite proof, to me at least, that more is not necessarily better.

Don't blame the Chinese market because they will probably BAN WoW because it now has Pandas. Apparently you cannot depict a panda dying in Chinese media or something, they don't like it. So it's going to be interesting to see what happens when this expansion launches in China.

Heh. I remember something like that for the original Guild Wars. There was a Panda pet in the early beta of the game that had to be removed because the Chinese didn't like it. Or something.

>> ^MonkeySpank:

How did we go from Trolls and Undead to Pandas? I blame the Chinese market!
The sad part is that Alterac Valley came out 5 years ago, and it was more fun then (with shittier computers) than WoW will ever be. Vanilla AV is definite proof, to me at least, that more is not necessarily better.


Don't blame the Chinese market because they will probably BAN WoW because it now has Pandas. Apparently you cannot depict a panda dying in Chinese media or something, they don't like it. So it's going to be interesting to see what happens when this expansion launches in China.