Asheron's Call Bans eBay Housing, Account Sales

Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to an official Asheron's Call forum post mentioning that "Turbine has notified eBay to remove auction listings for the sale of Asheron's Call accounts/characters and in-game housing." This move, similar to Sony's ban on EverQuest item selling on eBay which debuted back in 2001, comes after Turbine's purchasing of Asheron's Call back from Microsoft, and it's explained: "Many housing auctions are run by brokers who deprive players from being able to acquire housing through legitimate in-game means; many account sales end up being recalled by the original player, causing grief to the buyer and creating a difficult situation for customer service."

Comments

Not likely

[Anonymous Coward]

As much as I find it stupid to pay real money for items in an MMORPG (or even full retail price for a disc that's useless without a monthly fee, but that's another rant), I don't see this stopping item auctions at all, just driving them to multiple lesser-known eBay knockoffs.

Bad move - makes the market less transparent

[MBraynard]

Houses and accounts will still be sold, they just won't be done in an open, accessible way. The economics of the market will be tremendously less efficient and more open to fraud (as Ebay at least makes it a little less likely with seller ratings, etc.)

Though maybe it won't be that bad. There are other venues (playerauctions, etc.) that will be publicly available.

GREAT Move - makes the market less transparent

[Gojira Shipi-Taro]

And if the transaction takes on a more caveat emptor flavor, LESS sales will be going on. Yes it will still happen, but there will be less of it. More of the people who are ruining housing for legitimate players will suffer, and less of the legitimate players will.

Sounds like a great idea to me.

Re:About time

[Cecil]

Sounds like a problem with the design of the house-buying system, not a problem with eBay sales. This is the kind of misguided band-aid solution that made me give up Asheron's Call in the first place. "Oh no, everyone is trying to get GSA instead of checking out the pointless new greaves we added in this update! There's only one way to fix this: Let's make GSA suck so they don't want it anymore!"