I've never actually bought gold online, but after playing MMOs for 5 or 6 years, I've known several friends that have bought gold online, specifically for WoW and with the popularity of WoW, when I played, I was spammed to visit sites at least once a day for 2 years.
Clearly, Blizzard doesn't want gold farmers or sellers and tries to ban them whenever it can, but it's not something they can police or eliminate with any level of satisfaction.
So, why don't they, and all games, sell gold in microtransactions? People obviously want it since they do buy it. Farmers are making money off it and Blizzard can't stop them. Why fight it when you can profit off it? It would end the constant mail and bot spamming and reduce the amount of people required by Blizzard to try and police something they can't stop and give them a new source of revenue.
I know a lot of people hate the idea of buying gold, but if Blizzard came out and offered it in the same manner they make you pay for server transfers, I wouldn't really complain that much. Put level restrictions on amount of gold you can buy so you can't just start the game with 10k gold or something ridiculous, but can go out and buy a 100g for a mount at 40 if you want or 5k at 70 for epic flying, etc.
I'd love to see them do this just to stop the damn spam every day. Gold farmers / sellers are out there, everyone knows it, may as well make it official and put a stop the things non-gold buyers find detrimental (spam, etc).
Is there a reason no company has tried selling gold to customers or is it some taboo they don't want to even attempt for some reason?
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i wouldn't want it to happen in WoW.
http://www.dust514stats.com
They can just claim that the gold has no cash value, like a Chuck-E-Cheeze token.
Steam: pazython
By putting in numerous amounts of ways to easily make gold they are trying to devalue gold to discourage gold farmers. The best way to make gold is no longer to farm/bot for it because doing dailies trumps any farming (unless you are a protection paladin pulling half a zone).
In fact gear and items now cost badges/honor/arena points. It appears professions are the only aspect of the game that still require a large financial investment if you aren't willing to farm the ore/cloth/items/leather for your trade.
Plus it eats away at their reputation and quite frankly it isn't that hard to get gold through legitimate means anyway.
With daily quests in the game (particularly the new ones in 2.4), gold is so easy to come by that adding it for sale would just be superfluous at best, and harm server economies at worst.
Also, dailies are easy to do but it's not a guaranteed if you're on a pvp server.
Plus, it costs time and people are lazy.
Given everything else they sell, server transfers, name changes, etc, obviously they have some qualm about selling gold. They're doing everything they can to make money off WoW - if they could milk gold sales, I believe they would do it. Can you see their share holders, gathered around a gold-laden round table saying hey guys it wouldn't be morally right for us to sell gold.
Blizzard is prosecuting those who are selling gold and they are banning those who buy gold.
They clearly want to maintain a certain type of economy on their servers, and to do so means that gold is only obtainable through specific outlets.
If I can buy gold easily, instead of farming the mats for my shadow resist/enchants/gems I will buy it instead, which lowers the supply of primals/enchanting mats/gems and increases the price. The people who put up those primals to make their money will stop farming the primals which decreases the supply even more. Now the price of primals/enchanting mats has hit the roof so people have to buy even more gold.
But in a likewise fashion, aren't those who have the most time to devote considered the "rich" in WoW? An wealth can be obtained in real life in similiar fashion: Devoting a lot of your time to this goal, one way or another. I guess what your saying is you don't a person's standing in life to affect their prestige in WoW, but in reality parody is inevitable, because those who have the most time to devote (students, trust fund babies, housewives, etc.) to the game are the ones who excel.
Then again, if I were a trust fund baby, I'd probably be hosting sexy parties constantly rather than grinding quillboars in WoW.
While blizzard is a company in the business to make money, I believe they also want to keep some type of legitimacy. Blizzard really focuses on trying to keep the game interesting, challenging, and fun. They obviously care a little bit about the playerbase and the integrity of the game.
Case in point: If they didn't care about the integrity of the game everyone could teleport anywhere in the world, which would be a great addition in all accounts. But since blizzard wants distance to mean something, if you want to get to Tanaris from ironforge you have to fly, take that damn boat, and fly again.
edit: They have gone back on this a bit. With epic flying mounts, you CAN get from one side of outland to the other in less than five minutes, but it costs a large amount of gold to do so.
The reason Blizzard has a firm stance against farmers is because they upset the balance that Blizzard tries to maintain by creating money sinks. And, as everyone has already stated, inflation happens. The currency starts to get devalued, and then they end up with a situation where legitimate players don't need to farm anything or play the game to achieve top status in some ways. In WoW, at least money is still worth something. Having a lot of gold is a good thing and not useless.
Unless you're going to go crazy and try to buy every recipe you can for insane prices, once you have your 5,000 gold mount, maxed out whatever crafting professions you might want, and have enough cash and consumables on hand for raiding, pvp or whatever you do, further gold is essentially superfluous (or dedicated to alts, alt professions, whatever), so having 2,000,000,000 gold doesn't really do that much for an individual.
It would, however, drive prices up for everyone else, as you now have covered your expenses, and have all the cash to waste that you could want. Buy up the entire auction house? Sure thing! Dominate one segment of it? Have at 'er! Gold currently comes in at a reasonably predictable rate; most people (not all, but most) will only do so many dailies, or so much farming, or get so lucky with drops, allowing them (Blizzard) to set benchmarks. 5,000 gold in the current system, even with all the new dailies and the increased daily limit, is a lot. It's a significant sum that represents time and effort (and luck) on your behalf, or the behalf of those who have donated to your cause. If you could just buy gold, Blizzard would either have to make these challenges lengthier (lest they become utterly trivial), or just accept that those with excess finances to waste will simply have anything they offer as an incentive or reward immediately and without effort.
L2abuserestedn00b. :P
LOL.. i have a 70 hunter and warrior... lol no hard feelings was just amazed
You'll get used to Forar. He's certifiable.
Blizzard becoming a gold seller would definitely crash the economy. At least with farmers, they have to stock the AH (Discounting dailies) to earn gold. This keeps the economy moving and also puts downward pressure on prices. The AH works very well off of simple supply and demand economics. Farmers are helping provide supply which then minimizes the inflationary pressures of demand.
Since vendors don't really sell anything worthwhile at the end-game, if Blizzard started selling gold inflation would literally run out of control. It would very quickly push out any players unwilling to buy gold. Essentially, Blizzard would doom their game by doing this without completely overhauling the way the ingame economy is set up.
If they sold credits it would destroy the economy.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
I was just going to say this.
Blizzard asked Ebay nicely to take down those auctions. No "law" prevents Ebay from allowing people to sell virtual items, it's just that companies with valuable virtual items ask them not to permit it, and they follow suit.
Besides, they I would assume are making a good enough profit without needing to do things like selling gold. Once the game really loses large numbers of subscribers (if it does) and this profit is diminished perhaps they might change their mind.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
And yeah, banks and casinos are illegal in Second Life last I heard. WoW had the casino problem way back when at launch but that was cracked down on hard and disappeared completely. Second Life's different though because Second Life's currency is real currency so any in-game losses Linden Labs may be liable for in some way or another by not preventing it. Even if Bliz started selling gold they wouldn't have to worry about anything like that until they made a way to turn gold into cash.
Wow. Who fed you this nonsense?
Second Life's gambling got stamped out because the real exchange rate of LindenDollars meant that it violated a bunch of laws regulating gambling across state lines, and probably treaties/non-U.S. laws as well. Same reason there aren't as many online poker sites still operating.
In WoW's case, it's just Blizzard stopping something they don't want happening in their game, which they have the authority to do under the EULA. There's no civil penalty that I'm aware of for vicarious violation of EULA (in the same way that there is for vicarious copyright infringement), which is why Blizzard's current anti-goldfarmer lawsuit is being pursued on (imo) faulty copyright grounds. I'm quite sure Blizzard is looking to intimidate these people, much more than they are concerned with getting any sort of actual legal relief from a court.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Always remember that EULAs basically say that you have no rights, you own nothing, they have no obligations to you, and the company can do as it wishes (just like all software/shrink-wrap EULAs). EULAs are one-sided, non-negotiable contracts. You agree to them because it's a take-it-or-leave-it choice.
So virtual gold/items is only "their property" because they say it is in the EULA. There's a real, thus-far unchallenged issue regarding ownership of virtual property under these EULAs. What they state in the EULA may or may not be legal in terms of US law; no one knows for sure. And game companies want to keep it that way. As more people create more virtual wealth, and the connections to real-world wealth become more obvious, there's a greater likelihood of this being challenged. Until that aspect of an MMO EULA is successfully challenged, the licenses stand as written, and nothing in-game is your property. You don't even own your copy of game software itself.
Given how corporate-friendly contract law is in the US, I wouldn't hold your breath for a player-friendly interpretation anytime soon. However, as MMO economies become bigger and have more impact on the real world, questions about virtual wealth will be harder to avoid. Like the tax questions some people have mentioned.
> turn on light
Good start to the day. Pity it's going to be the worst one of your life. The light is now on.
That being the case, there's essentially no argument to be had by an end consumer about Blizzard's enforcement of the EULA. And anyone making any real money on an MMO (whether illicitly a la goldfarmers or more openly a la Second Life) will just declare it, or not, on their personal tax returns.
There's no distinction between wealth and virtual wealth, there's just wealth. Legally speaking you aren't accumulating any wealth in a game like WoW.
(edited to add a little explanation)
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Except that what characters possess in a game, and indeed the characters themselves, CAN be correlated to a real-world dollar value, because there are real-world secondary markets for those items. Even if they violate the EULA. So virtual items have a dollar value. There is trade going on both in-game and out-of-game for these items, and the MMO company isn't the one doing the trades, so do they really still own the items? What the EULA says could be irrelevant. I'm not saying that it will or should turn out that way. But it might. It's a massively complex issue, though.
> turn on light
Good start to the day. Pity it's going to be the worst one of your life. The light is now on.
Like I posted above, the way the government is going to address the people who are translating virtual possessions into real-world income is by taxing that income. If you say that WoW gold is just another form of currency with intrinsic real-world value just because it exists, can the government levy taxes on it? And if so, are they to be paid in... virtual gold? Are you going to give the fed review of Blizzard's practices so that they can control gold's inflation?
No, you'd never do that, because that would be retarded. The government only even really interacts with non-currency transactions (especially low level ones) in a few really specific places because of all the hassle it causes. It's much easier to just wait until that wealth gets transferred into regular currency (which it does, sooner or later) and extract their pound of flesh there.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
And as a side-note I don't think any EULA has yet to be tried in a court. So they may also just be pure bullshit.
I personally believe that Blizzard does not sell gold or items because they still have integrity and care about balance and game design. They know that their customers do as well; at least, enough of them that would be driven away by such practices.