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

Move it in-game

[SandSpider]

I'm not entirely sure why game studios don't just provide this as a service themselves. It's an instant revenue stream, and you'll have much more control over the process, as well as being able to track the value of items from an in-game perspective as well as real world.

The only real niggle is putting safeguards in place that prevent employees from making unique or rare items and selling them, but really that's no different than if they made the items and sold them on eBay.

=Brian