Blizzard Cracks Down on World of Warcraft Ebaying

Last Friday Blizzard put up a message on the World of Warcraft site stating that Ebaying of in-game items would not be tolerated. This is the first time a MMOG developer has come out of the gate with so strong a policy, and combined with their tough policy on hacking is a heartening sign that community infractions will be taken seriously. TerraNova has commentary on the development as well. From the article: "If they do [succeed], we might have to start thinking of World of Warcraft as the first of a new generation of virtual worlds. It may not seem all that different in terms of some design aspects, but if its war against eBayers succeeds, it will end up being very different in terms of atmosphere."

Comments

hmmm...

[ack154]

I just did a quick search and most of the things I saw were a couple gold pieces or something and the people were strictly claiming in the auction that the "item" is property of Blizzard and that the person is paying for the time to gather it and process the transaction...

I wonder what Blizzard thinks of that? Still bad, I assume?

Re:Why is this so bad?

[TheRealMindChild]

Uh... when you are PAYING for a game, it is pretty important that the game be "fair"

The easy way is to encourage the vigilantes

[Fo0eY]

First of all, Blizzard will never be able to keep up if they try to catch and ban each party in a transaction.

What they need to do, is go after the major sellers/sites which are selling ingame goods. And from the wording on their site, it appears that they're going to start doing just that.

I don't think Blizzard will have any problem just outright suing/prosecuting anyone they catch selling ingame items. When you think about it, sellers are really committing fraud by selling something that's not theirs to start with.

They'd only have to bankrupt a few people before it'd stop real fast, or at least go far enough underground to make it a non-issue.

The real difficulty is finding the people doing the selling, and that's where the vigilantes come in. There are always TONS of people that get a mean hardon snitching out other gamers, so all Blizzard has to do is ask the "fans" for help in protecting their game, and they'll probably get more tips than they can deal with.

Re:That's Sony's policy as well...

[MMaestro]

Generally, game companies such as Blizzard have to do this sort of tracking down themselves beyond sending eBay an e-mail telling them to bring the auction down. From selling to buying you'll go through no less than 4 step.

1. Auction site/Trading site/College bulletin board (take your pick)
2. Adverisement/Referal (its underground now, so expect to do some research to find it)
3. Paypal/bank/credit card (or equal, gotta have the money trail or its all hot air)
4. Connecting the auctioner's information with the buyer's and seller's WoW accounts. (Gotta know who to ban)

Take all this, web proxys, fake e-mail addresses, companies that are usually outside of the U.S., very little information, and the fact that you can't monitor this stuff in game (is XYZ players trading legit or did they buy it with real money?) makes this a very complicated business. Chances are the only reason why Blizzard is so successful right now is because its early, its fairly obvious and its learning from the mistakes of other games. Give it a few months and Blizzard is gonna start missing a lot of these guys or hitting the wrong people.

Re:That's Sony's policy as well...

[MuNansen]

As soon as any alternate route for sales like these becomes popular, though, it's easy to stop it. If they get a method where the seller is completely anonymous until the in-game transaction, they can just bait sellers with GMs disguised as buyers. They'll never STOP the sales, but they can sure put a very large dent in them. I just think that WoW is the first MMORPG popular enough, and popular because of the quality of the game and not the size of the community, where Blizzard can just say "screw the re-sellers, we don't care if we lose their accounts because we've got plenty others, including ones that choose to play WoW BECAUSE we are so vigilant with the re-sellers/botters." Although on the other side, I don't actually mind the re-selling much, and it really is an interesting economical phenomenon. Especially considering the gold in Ultima Online was at one time worth more than the Mexican peso.

Brilliant! They Need an In-Game Vice Squad

[Anonymous Coward]

People working for Blizzard can go undercover with different characters and act like buyers. When they find someone who's dealing in contraband weapons/armor/gold, they bust them. I'd sign up to be part of this squad if they waived my monthly fee.

Re:So happy.

[fireduck]

this is solved by judicious use of instancing, which WoW obviously incorporates. Simply make Tomb of Dread an instanced dungeon, and you won't have a single camper waiting for the Uber sword, as they'll all be in their own dungeons waiting for it.

Re:Economic Inevitability

[Kaa]

I think Blizzard has a good chance of severly curbing auctioning or at least making a royal pain in the ass to do.

I very much doubt it.

First, Blizzard has no legal basis to prevent anyone from posting things like "Selling blue 1H sword +20 Str +30 Sta". Sure, the EULA might prohibit it, but the EULA isn't binding on, say, a website which hosts a board.

Second, it's trivially easy to arrange sales over boards, IRC channels, etc. etc. Paypal works without Ebay perfectly well. And it's not like it's hard to create one-off email addresses.

So in this case I think Blizzard is all bark and no bite.