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.

About time

[cyberlync]

Its about time this happened. A very small minority of players where using bots and various other means to snap up housing before regular players could get to it. They would then sell these houses on ebay. Its gotten to the point that there is no way for a non-bot using player to compete with these 'brokers' . For the last several months at least the only way to get a house was to buy it from these jerks. Needless to say I do not have a house

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!"

When will we see companies selling virtual items?

[JavaLord]

Sale of MMORPG Items on Ebay is commonplace. The question is, will a company ever embrace the real world value of the items and sell them themselves? Sony could probably make a killing selling Jedi accouts for $1000 a piece to casual gamers who don't have 200 hours to waste on becoming a Jedi. The question is, would it put off gamers who don't have the money for a uber account, or would it attract more casual gamers to the game?

I can fly

[Moo Moo Cow of Death]

Hi, I'm a poor game designer. To cover up the fact that I can't properly adjust game balance, figure out how to fairly set up housing, fix multiple problems since the games birth and a myriad of other problems I'm going to attack the end result of my incompetance instead of the root of the problem.

Watch me ban eBay sales, because everyone knows when I do that, none of it will ever go on again, just look at Everquest, they stomped out eBay sales and look where it's got them (IGE, Playerauctions, etc)! 500K players must be the end result of crushing a single output of a mini-game that some players prefer to play over the normal game (*cough* me).

Me thinks the marketting execs, need a checkup from the neckup, this age old practice is archaic and outdated in comparision with the quite commonplace sub-market that exists now. Work with it or get out.

P.S. I haven't played AC in years, just many other MMOGs.