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

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.