Gold sellers steal accounts - Blizzard

By Oli Welsh Published 9 April, 2009

WOW operator explains hard-line stance.

Speaking to Nick Ryan for Eurogamer's Gold Trading Exposed feature series, a Blizzard spokesperson has explained the company's firm opposition to real money trading (RMT).

"Many people don't realise that the companies selling services for World of Warcraft often target the players they've sold their services to," said the spokesperson.

"Once these companies have access to an account, they will often turn around and sell the equipment and gold on the account or the actual account itself – if not immediately, then at some point down the line. In effect, players actually end up purchasing gold, items, or entire accounts stolen from other players."

Blizzard also argued that the negative effect of the gold trade could be seen in the drain on its own customer service and development resources which could otherwise be concentrated directly on the game.

"Beyond the direct impact that these companies can have on individual players, their actions end up affecting everyone who plays World of Warcraft in that the time and effort we have to put into assistance, education and our various countermeasures ends up taking time away from our normal development and customer service efforts," the spokesperson said.

Elsewhere in this week's final instalment of Gold Trading Exposed, it's revealed that RuneScape developer Jagex lost a considerable proportion of its membership when it chose to ban all accounts involved in gold selling.

"They lost 10 per cent of their membership, and still haven't recovered in terms of numbers since they did it two years ago," an anonymous ex-Jagex source told Ryan.

"Even though they have almost stopped gold selling in RuneScape, it has cost them two million active accounts; i.e. there were four million players, there are now two million players, of which less than one million actually subscribe," he said.

Ryan finds that companies like Jagex, CCP and Sony Online Entertainment are now seeking alternative ways to thwart gold selling - rather than the straightforward banning approach of Blizzard and Warhammer Online's Mythic.

Jagex has rebalanced RuneScape's economy and trading system, CCP has introduced an exchange of game time for currency in EVE Online, and SOE has tried authorised real money auction houses on some EverQuest II servers.

Previous chapters of Gold Trading Exposed have dealt with the players and the sellers themselves, as well as offering an overview of the trade.

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About Oli Welsh

Oli is Eurogamer's acting deputy editor and reviews editor and likes to take things one word at a time. He is among the best dressed people in South London.

Read more articles from Oli by visiting the Oli Welsh archive page.

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Comments (13) Latest comment 3 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • Benno #1 3 years ago

    Has absolutely nothing to do with Gold Selling.

    When you buy Gold, they get your char name and thats it.

    Granted, power leveling services know your account name and pass and that may come and bite you in the ass later on if you dont change up (like Avon Barksdale yo).

  • MBar #2 3 years ago

    The gold sellers are completely obvious about this too. They offer the "extra service" of logging in your character for you and transferring the gold you bought directly to the character, therefore saving you the effort. All you have to do is give them your username and password ...

    Anyone who does this is clearly asking for it. People who claim to have had their account "hacked" more than likely either done the above or installed a dodgy addon from a dodgy site. Both practices are pretty damn stupid and easily avoided.

  • LazyDan #3 3 years ago

    If you let them on your account to powerlevel, then you're really asking for this.

    Gold selling though, Benno's right - they just get your character name and any details used in the ordering process.

    That last part is the scary bit.

    I've bought gold twice in the last few months, and now not only does my character get a spam mail /in/ World of Warcraft every now and then banging on about discounts and special offers (which is incredibly strange,) but recently a mysterious person tried to add me on MSN messenger... I had no idea who so I dug round and found their profile - which mentioned that they were from one of the gold seller companies. I never actually gave them my e-mail address, so they'd have gotten my e-mail address from my Paypal details and decided to see what messengers I was using, presumably to spam me there.

    A bit weird... Knowing what these companies can be like I removed all my e-mails stored in that account and have changed the password to a very strong one.

    My advice to buyers is try and make it as anonymous as you can - don't even use a Paypal account linked to an e-mail address which would cause you a lot of grief if the account were hijacked. Make a new character to receive the gold if you don't want the in-game spam, only pay via Paypal, and send them as little information via that as possible (change your Paypal account to use a specific Paypal only e-mail address for example.)
    Edited by 1 at 09/04/09 @ 15:13

  • VicViper #4 3 years ago

    @LazyDan
    Or don't do at all would be safer, but then people always want the quick fix.

    On another note, this is just info pulled from nicks article, this seems to happen allot on eurogamer, is this normal? I mean you just quoted someone from your own webiste who quoted someone else. It seems a strange thing to do but then I don't run a professional enthusiasm website. Does it help break the article up into nice easy to find chuck packed with salient facts?

  • ianegg #5 3 years ago

    @VicViper

    I couldn't be arsed to read the main article, but these derivitave items nicely summarise the more interesting points and maybe pique my interest enough to read the whole thing.

    Some people always want the quick fix. :)

  • butler` #6 3 years ago

    Pretty sure it's just a method they employ to draw attention to articles they've paid hard cash to have produced. :)

  • scribe #7 3 years ago

    Ahh, you lot and "the internet is free, I'm not going to read long things or pay for them" types :p

    -- the author (of the main articles)

    w: [link url=http://www.nickryan.net< br /> ]http://www.nickryan.net< br /> [/link]
    e: http://www.ryansrants.com< /a>

  • VicViper #8 3 years ago

    @ianegg
    Hmm fair enough, never give much thought before but I kinda figured thats how it went.

    Slighly confused when you used derivative and interesting in the same sentence, derivative is used so negativly in games journalism I'd almost for got it wasn't a negative word :)
    Edited by 1 at 09/04/09 @ 17:32

  • Markusdragon #9 3 years ago

    Knew someone in my guild that got hacked like this. Keylogger links get left around on the official forums (of all places!) and then goldsellers loot everything they can off of the toons, then sell everything they can and transfer the gold to their accounts.

  • orcane #10 3 years ago

    "Has absolutely nothing to do with Gold Selling."

    It has absolutely everything to do with gold selling if these companies take shortcuts to "earn" ingame money to sell by hacking other players' accounts. Which they do...

  • Futaba #11 3 years ago

    People who spend real money for virtual money make me lol.

  • MightyMouse #12 3 years ago

    I'm pretty sure most of the time when people say their account was hacked it's a lie covering for some embarrassing action. You would have to be so monumentally stupid to give your password to someone or not run up-to-date antivirus software and so on that it just isn't credible to occur on the scale alleged.

  • SpeedyThing #13 3 years ago

    Blizzard need to stop being so precious. I don't play WOW anymore and have never bought gold, but as long as people want to do it they will.

    Blizzard should get off their high horse and instead try to facilitate it in the best way possible.