I'll refrain from making some cruel joke. While the buyer will be called a fool, I actually think it's quite sad in a pathetic sort of way. Plus, the Rogue would have been outdated within a week of Lich King being released.
 

Also, if you buy the ultimate PG today.. for how long will it be the ultimate uber character on server?

For sure at next expansion it won't be an uber character anymore.
Let's say the buyer was going to spend about 1000$ for each month of tehorical fun. And with banning he had spend a lot more even.

Anyway I totally agree with you Tobold.
 

The character is about as useful as a gold statue, pretty but useless.

And yet affluent people buy gold statues and other expensive 'pretty but useless' items all the time.

banning the account ... kind of hurts the wrong guy. Buying something useless for $10,000 is stupid, but selling it is downright criminal.

Nonsense. No one put a gun to the buyer's head, and it could even be possible that the buyer approached the player and not that the seller was trying to sell his character. Besides, selling something 'useless' for a large sum of money happens all the time in RL auction houses. Maybe we should alert the police.

I suspect that selling the account is against the terms and conditions of WoW, so Blizzard bans the account. As the seller sold the character he must have sold the account and thus bought a new account to start again. In that case, what is there for Blizzard to do?

If the player put his character up for sale he was taking a risk, as that could have led to his account being banned and the character lost and the risk paid off. If the buyer approached the player to buy the rogue the seller was pretty smart to take the stupid amount of money for an ephemeral game character that could be recreated with time. Either way, the phrase 'caveat emptor' springs to mind.
 

You can gank some other people in PvP, but how long is that going to be fun if you can't even use the rewards?

For some people, that would be exactly the reason to buy the character. Get to the fun of ganking people in PvP NOW instead of taking the months of raiding with a guild building a character to gank people with.
 

> Blizzard should ban the seller's IP and credit card

Since Blizzard don't currently do that to known gold sellers who repeatedly open new accounts when they get an account banned, why should they do that to a one-time offender who almost certainly did not level his char with intent to sell it? Because he made a large amount of cash? The gold sellers make much more...
 

No one put a gun to the buyer's head, and it could even be possible that the buyer approached the player and not that the seller was trying to sell his character.

Exactly the same can be said about gold sellers. If the buyer didn't react to gold spam, but googled for WoW gold by himself (5 million hits on that search), approaching the gold seller, should the gold seller's account then not be banned?

Comparing that to real life auctions is silly. Real life doesn't have an EULA and TOS which explicitely forbids selling accounts. I'm not saying that the buyer didn't get what he deserved, but I find it rather unfair that the seller gets to keep the money, gets to keep playing WoW, and can pull of the same deal again as soon as his next character is ready to be sold.

Why you would condemn gold sellers and condone account sellers is a mystery to me.
 

Usually in an mmorpg you sort of develop a bond between yourself and the character you play / have created . Thats why i totally dont understand buying someone else's character.
 

Exactly the same can be said about gold sellers. If the buyer didn't react to gold spam, but googled for WoW gold by himself approaching the gold seller, should the gold seller's account then not be banned?

But the account was banned. Blizzard's reaction is consistent between the examples, as is my own stance. The only difference here is that the buyer was foolish enough to buy the account that would end up being banned, and got burnt because of it.

Comparing that to real life auctions is silly.

I am only making a comparison to show that there is plenty of precedent for people buying something 'useless and pretty' for a large sums of money, and that the selling of such items is far from 'criminal', for which I consider the comparison to be relevant. Sure, selling an account is not allowed from the terms and conditions of the game, but that still does not make it 'criminal', it just makes it against the terms and conditions of the game.

I'm not saying that the buyer didn't get what he deserved, but I find it rather unfair that the seller gets to keep the money, gets to keep playing WoW, and can pull of the same deal again as soon as his next character is ready to be sold.

Your tone suggests that you believe the selling of the character was a premeditated decision from the time of character creation, a decision that is to be repeated. I would find that hard to believe. This player ended up with the most powerful character on his server and then was offered silly money to sell it. He took the money, laughed all the way to the bank, and then created a new character that his guild is helping to get back to raid-readiness because he's a nice chap who took advantage of someone's foolishness with money.

If he really did intend to sell the character from the start, I would expect everyone in the guild to get a cut of the money, and that would hardly be worth the effort for what was on offer. If they didn't get a cut, what do you think their reaction would be to someone getting the best equipment from the raids only to sell it off? I'm sure they wouldn't be keen to help him get back in to raiding with them. If he just took advantage of an offer from a rich fool his guild probably laughed it off, congratulated him for his new cash, and then encouraged him to get a new character ready so that they could play together again. Besides, if the guild really were all in on this, why help a new character get ready to be sold when they must have plenty more epic-laden characters ready to sell now?

Why you would condemn gold sellers and condone account sellers is a mystery to me.

I haven't condoned account selling, there just doesn't seem to be a way to punish them beyond banning the account. Perhaps Blizzard could have banned his credit card, and maybe that's what has happened, but there are ways around that and he's circumventing it. Banning an IP address would not work either, as he could request a new static address, or change ISP, or whatever. So what is there for Blizzard to do?

I'm not condoning his actions, just pointing out that Blizzard's reaction is consistent, that there is little else that can be done, and that assuming the player will sell the new character is pure speculation.
 

Is this story really true? I can see someone buying another character as a shortcut to Lv 70 raiding, but at such a ridiculous cost?
I fully understand why the guy sold it: 7000 Euros for a some purple pixels.
Anyone want to make me an offer for my characters?
 

I haven't condoned account selling, there just doesn't seem to be a way to punish them beyond banning the account.

Practical thinking, I like that. But when I say that Blizzard can't do anything against gold sellers either, because they are back 5 minutes after being banned, all I get to hear is a howl of outrage. There is the practical side, where I totally agree with you that Blizzard can't do much against any form of secondary market unless they completely change the way their game works, and the moral side, where I'm saying that account selling is as bad as gold selling. Either accept both, or neither. Coming up with lame excuses of the gold selling being premeditated and the account selling being not originally intended is just splitting hairs. Both are selling virtual goods (acquired with time spent in the game) for real money. If even WoWInsider can find out what guild was involved, and that the seller is now playing again, I find it hard to believe that Blizzard has no way whatsoever to punish the seller.

If Blizzard can't do anything, then the buyer should be able to sue the seller for selling him damaged goods. Especially if it was the seller who was responsible for leaking the deal, thus causing the account to be banned. Legally the level 70 character didn't even belong to the seller, it belonged to Blizzard (which is why Blizzard can ban the account). Thus selling the character is like selling somebody the Statue of Liberty, which is clearly not legal.
 

Either accept both, or neither.

I currently accept neither. But what irritates me most about the practice is the way the services are advertised using in-game characters that break immersion and are disruptive for players. They could be selling accounts for all I know, but I don't care to read what they spam. And if there is now an influx of players /yelling for offers to buy their characters you can bet I'd report them as spam too.

If even WoWInsider can find out what guild was involved, and that the seller is now playing again, I find it hard to believe that Blizzard has no way whatsoever to punish the seller.

Let's assume you are Blizzard, and you find this seller. What would you do? Also assume that the seller has bought a new copy of the game, and accepted the terms and conditions of the new copy. Has he broken any terms and conditions that he has agreed to with the new copy? Do you actually have any legal recourse to ban him, or are you merely asserting your right as a company to deny service to any individual? How would you stop him from buying another copy of the game, using game cards to pay for time, and using a different IP address to keep playing, given that he and his guild would probably not let anyone know that he had come back the next time.

Thus selling the character is like selling somebody the Statue of Liberty, which is clearly not legal.

That's a great analogy, if only because it shows that the buyer also has no claim over the Statue of Liberty even if he thought the sale was legitimate. It's up to the buyer to get his money back if he wants it, although I have no idea how he would go about it or even if anything illegal happened.
 

It's about time the MMO companies started banning/punishing the buyers. According to this Turbine and CCP are already doing just that:
http://razorwire.warcry.com/news/view/76997-CCP-and-Turbine-seem-to-be-the-only-MMO-companies-taking-illegal-RMT-seriously
 

Let's assume you are Blizzard, and you find this seller. What would you do?

Sue him in a court of law. According to Blizzard's lawyers, any character and item in the game belongs to them, not to the players. Thus the seller sold something belonging to Blizzard to the buyer for $10,000. If I sold your car to somebody for $10,000, you wouldn't just try to get your car back from the buyer, you would go after me as well.

I called the seller a criminal, and I'm sticking to it. $10,000 is a lot of money for selling something that doesn't belong to you. He shouldn't get away with it.
 

Except that he didn't really sell the character- it's impossible to do so! For $10,000 he gave the guy his username and password and promised not to use that account anymore. Against the ToS, sure, but calling it "criminal" is absurd and hysterical (which I use in the "hysterics" sense and not in the "hysterically funny" sense).
 

Slippery slope, Tobold. $10,000 would be a drop in the gold selling bucket and these companies are in no hurry to try to take them to court.

The other thing that nobody seems to be talking about much any more is that all of the game companies don't want these things coming up in court. It's not in their best interest in the slightest. If the government makes a ruling that says that these virtual items are worth real world money, then real world taxation won't be far behind. Once we get to that point you'll see a gutted player base. How happy would you be to get that epic drop you've been waiting for if the next month you received a bill for triple your monthly subscription fee in taxes?
 

I'm pretty sure that $10,000 is more than a single gold seller working in some third world sweat shop is earning per year. The sums only get big once you add up all the thousands and thousands of gold sellers. A single gold selling transaction is probably for less than $100, so even if it is a scam, the damage is minor.

But we are talking about a single guy here being $10,000 poorer. This is not a simple ToS issue between Blizzard and some customer. This is a big amount of money changing hands between two guys, in return for something the seller had no right to sell in the first place. Unless the buyer is a multi-millionaire, I wouldn't be surprised if he started some legal action to get his money back. And he'd probably win that in court. Just because the sold good is a virtual one doesn't remove the players from the sphere of law.

That this isn't in the best interest of Blizzard is a different story. I just don't like to see everybody congratulating the seller as if he had done something good.
 

Eula's, ToS's, Patents are all legalized ways to steal from people.
 

What I would like to know is how wowinsider got all their information. How did they know what the new character's name on the new server was? Did the buyer broadcast what he did (in which case he was clearly a fool), or did the SELLER broadcast what he did, and essentially setup the buyer to be banned. If the latter, I would call that pretty criminal. A real life example would be selling someone your car for $10,000, then calling the police and telling them the car was stolen.
 

If I sold your car to somebody for $10,000, you wouldn't just try to get your car back from the buyer, you would go after me as well.

Your strained physical analogy has been disproved so many other places with regard to intellectual property that I have no choice but to stop reading your blog if you don't retract it. Blizzard is deprived of nothing when a character, item, or even when gold is sold. Any time they want they can press a key and duplicate anything a player has taken months to "earn". So, no, I wouldn't try to go after you to get a copy of my car back.

$10,000 is a lot of money for selling something that doesn't belong to you.

That is a 2-year-old's mentality for looking at what is just a series of ones and zeroes. If the character doesn't belong to the player who paid for time to create it, then why should it belong to the game company simply because of an infantile claim of "Mine!"?

Consider an autograph of a sports star or even the recent auction of the record-breaking home run ball. Does a seller really "own" that signature? Doesn't MLB really "own" that baseball? Inasmuch as you try to make this a black and white issue, your stance is firmly in the black and you're just not seeing it. Either find your way back to the white, or start seeing the shades of gray. You are flat out wrong for trying to criminalize any of this, and I need you to realize that or I can no longer trust the basis of your other posts.
 

I understand people wanting to spend money on a high lv so they don't have to lv themselves but I don't agree with it. it is a game and they are just trying to get to the end for bragging rights. There are enough legitimate 70s that have no clue how to play in an organized group, let alone someone who buys their account.

Can you see the fool joining a random group with his blades. he would feel cool because everyone would tell him how "cool" he is, but shortly after he will feel he is waisting his time because there is no progression like you mentioned.

I myself sold my EQ account for $500, and my first wow account for about $300 a few years ago. I used that money to get a new graphics card and eventually I played wow again but on a new server. I sold them because I was done and wanted something for my time, even if it was pennies on the hour, it was better than nothing. neither char was maxed out either with gear and hopefully they played them well. But they were not known enough that the person would be found out by the community either. I'll never buy an account, but I can understand wanting some change for your time spent. And 7k, oh yea, would definately see for that. My current guy I wont sell though. I'm saving him for the expansion, no reason to play him now, wow is a waste of time with broken raids & arena system.

On one of my wow servers, the only high warlord sold his account and you would see the guy running around looking for grouops & such wiht his HWL weapons, looked pretty retarted.
 

Anonymous said: Your strained physical analogy has been disproved so many other places with regard to intellectual property that I have no choice but to stop reading your blog if you don't retract it.

Anonymous threatens to not read my blog, I'm shaking in my boots. :)

One of the reasons why I am using the name Tobold on the internet and not the name that is printed on my passport is that if you googled my real name, you'd come up with hits for a dozen patents. I'm making a living creating intellectual property, of the scientific kind, not the game kind. Somebody saying that copyright doesn't matter, that copying intellectual property is not theft because the original owner still has the original copy irks me. And, while the general opinion on the internet tends towards "we pirate music and warez and it's okay", in the real world stealing intellectual property is still regarded as a crime.

And now get the hell out of my blog, you thief!
 

i also think it is questionable to sell an account for such a high sum and then go public with it and thus getting it banned, from a morale standpoint.

I do see no law broken, as TOS and EULA are not LAW, but a contract between Blizzard and you. (in this case the Seller and Buyer)

Blizzard has the right to ban you for violating the terms of the contract.

But i am very doubtful if a court would agree with Blizzard, that the sale of "the time and skill invested in the Character" is illegal.
 

A real life example would be selling someone your car for $10,000, then calling the police and telling them the car was stolen.

No it isn't, that's nonsense.

A real-life example might be hiring a car from a company, selling it to someone for €7,000, and then the hire company taking the car back from the buyer, where the buyer probably knew this was a risk from the start and was hoping that the hire company wouldn't take the effort to find him.

And the fact is that we don't know who told Blizzard about the transaction, if anyone. It's possible Blizzard found out separately when the character was moved to a different server using a different credit card coming from a different IP address and with a different password on the account.

I'm not saying that what happened here was right, but it would be nice if people stopped treating the seller as if he deliberately set up the buyer in a sting before killing a puppy and drinking its blood, at least until we find out what actually happened.

And good luck suing him in a court of law, Tobold. He hasn't actually done anything illegal, which is why your calling him 'criminal' is so inflammatory. He broke Blizzard's ToS, but people don't go to gaol for that.
 

Anonymous threatens to not read my blog, I'm shaking in my boots. :)

It wasn't a threat; I'm just telling you what I'm planning on doing and why. It should have been treated as an opportunity for you to take a step back and try to come to a more objective conclusion, but instead you went further into the black.

One of the reasons why I am using the name Tobold on the internet and not the name that is printed on my passport is that if you googled my real name, you'd come up with hits for a dozen patents. I'm making a living creating intellectual property . . .

Strangely enough, I prefer to remain even more anonymous since I, too, work in the world of intellectual property. The difference between us seems to be that I know what should and shouldn't be protected and what is and isn't criminal.

. . . in the real world stealing intellectual property is still regarded as a crime.

Nothing was stolen. There is no evidence that any law was broken, let alone a crime. The only intellectual property involved was the game, and Blizzard still seems to hold all the rights to it that it ever did. We're not even talking about a copy of WoW itself being sold here, so I don't see a reason to saddle up your high horse.

And now get the hell out of my blog, you thief!

Getting people to walk out on you doesn't make your position right. :-/
 

But what about the $10,000?

Everybody agrees that the buyer made a very, very bad deal, especially if the account got banned shortly afterwards. So how can the seller be completely innocent and not have broken any law? The seller sold *something* to the buyer, the buyer didn't get what he wanted. The seller was aware that he wasn't allowed to sell what he sold, and that the fact of selling it would probably make the sold good worthless, and yet he cashed in the money. In my eyes that is a scam, and although I am not a lawyer, I am sure that there is a law against that sort of thing. If not, I'm changing profession and start selling paper bags to ugly women for $10,000, promising them that wearing those bags over their head an hour per day will make them beautiful.

There isn't just the contract between the two players and Blizzard, there is some form of contract (possibly an unwritten one) between the buyer and the seller. And that contract is most probably invalid, because the seller didn't have the right to sell what he sold, and the buyer didn't receive what he bought. So there must be a way for the buyer to get his money back in a court of law.
 

its legal term is fraud :)
 

The seller sold *something* to the buyer,

The account information for the uber rogue.

the buyer didn't get what he wanted.

Rubbish. He most certainly did get it, as the articles note that he was playing the rogue on a different server.

The seller was aware that he wasn't allowed to sell what he sold, and that the fact of selling it would probably make the sold good worthless, and yet he cashed in the money. In my eyes that is a scam

Again, you are presupposing an awful lot about the seller, and absolutely nothing about the buyer. You are making the buyer appear to be pure victim here, without anything but speculation to back you up.

Everything you said the seller knew could equally apply to the buyer: that the account couldn't be transferred according to the terms of service, that the account could be suspended if this happened, and that the transaction could become worthless. And yet, knowing all this, the buyer still bought the account! Without further information, stop demonising the seller.

I'll give the benefit of the doubt to both parties. They both knew what they were doing, neither informed Blizzard of what they had done, and it was third parties, who witnessed an uber newbie rogue appear in PvP, or Blizzard noticing dramatic changes in account information and use, that triggered the banning. If they both knew and accepted the risks then nothing more needs to be done.

Maybe this will stop other people from trying to buy accounts, if they know they will end up paying for something they cannot use.
 

If they both knew and accepted the risks then nothing more needs to be done.

If they both knew they were doing something wrong, something needs to be done. I totally agree that the buyer is as guilty as the seller here. But the buyer is $10,000 poorer with nothing to show for it, and the seller is $10,000 richer. The only fair solution I see is some legal action which restores the $10,000 from the seller to the buyer. In that case both are equally punished, neither of them having the account now, and neither being any richer nor poorer from the proceeds.

We can't have a situation where account selling isn't punished, but gold selling is. Because if Blizzard ever gets highly effective in punishing gold sales, but doesn't do anything against the sellers of accounts, all the current gold farmers will turn into account farmers and start selling accounts instead of gold. In my eyes there is no difference between selling a character with equipment worth 10,000 gold and selling 10,000 gold. Whether the account was created with the intent to sell is irrelevant.
 

Except that they would not be equally punished. The buyer would be back in his initial state, and the seller would have no account and no money. The seller gets punished and the buyer gets away risk-free. That would only work if the seller instigated the whole affair and found a gullible and ignorant buyer, which we simply don't know to be the truth.

I can see your argument for having to punish the sellers, but I still don't see an effective means to do it. I still think that if the buyers' accounts are banned, and this is publicised enough, no one will want to buy an account, whoever is selling it, which will effectively curtail the practice. If no one buys, there is no market.
 

I don't want to argue about the "legality" or "morale" aspects of buying and selling virtual goods.

For one, I don't have any problem with it. I have sold several thousand dollars worth of virtual goods (between Earth and Beyond, SWG and WoW). I've also bought at times too.

Anyhoo, the person in all of this that is really screwed is the SELLER, not the buyer. The buyer paid for the account and the seller got the money. When the account is banned, all the buyer has to do is reverse the charges on his Credit Card and say he never got anything. He gets his money back, he had a good time playing for a bit, and the seller has nothing.

That's one of the biggest scams out there now with selling accounts.
 

But what about the $10,000?

What about it? Did you see that video of the woman who bought the first space in line for the iPhone for something like $800, convinced she could buy a ton of them to sell on eBay? Same sort of thing, really. The seller is under no obligation to know or inform the buyer of the ToS (not criminal law!) that applies to both parties. The saying "caveat emptor" has been around for too long to claim ignorance.

So how can the seller be completely innocent and not have broken any law?

Who told you life was fair? You're acting just like those free energy (or whatever) nutjobs that demand you prove it can't be done. Science doesn't work that way; the burden of supplying evidence lies solely on the person making the extraordinary claim. I have seen nothing that indicated the seller in this case did anything to defraud the buyer. Hell, I haven't even seen the buyer moan about the deal half as much as you have, and they're the one out $10K!

If not, I'm changing profession and start selling paper bags to ugly women for $10,000, promising them that wearing those bags over their head an hour per day will make them beautiful.

You'll do better if you call that bag a purse and tell them to wear it on their arm. Or are you now going to start claiming that Louis Vuitton is some kind of scam outfit? You may not see the value of the transaction, but that doesn't make it a crime. I'm still waiting for your retraction.

We can't have a situation where account selling isn't punished, but gold selling is.

This is the first reasonable direction you've taken, unless you're going to focus on sending someone to jail over the matter. Of course, I happen to be of the opinion that neither should be punished and game companies should focus on setting up a legitimate market so that they can get a cut of the money. There is clearly a demand by all kinds of players for all kinds of games to sink mostly money instead of mostly time, and I have no idea why so many are against having that option.
 

Most of you seem very one way or the other and I also see a fair share of flaming. What Tobold is trying to present is a scenario or real life example of why the opinion he stated stands that way.
I tend to agree with what Tobold has said. The TOS and EULA of the game are a binding contract between the player and company. Blizz claims to own those virtual goods (The character in question) and this player has "Sold" those goods to the buyer. The purchase of this character was obviously at a risk and that is up to the discrepancy of the buyer but surely the seller should be held accountable for his actions too.

The best way I can put is that the person who sold the character took a large amount of money from another person after signing his EULA knowingly acknowledging that the character was the property of Blizzard. Therefore he WILLINGLY participated in a sale of someone else's goods. This does relate to the analogy of selling a rent-a-car BUT if someone did attempt to do that then the seller would be accountable in that circumstance so why not this one?

PS i havnt checked the above for typo's or n00b comments.
 

Of course, I happen to be of the opinion that neither should be punished and game companies should focus on setting up a legitimate market so that they can get a cut of the money.

Now here we are getting onto common ground. I agree with you. What most players are complaining about is not the gold selling, but the scamming, spamming, botting, and killstealing which is connected to it. A legitimate market would go a long way to solve those problems.

I so hate the "gold selling is forbidden, but we don't do anything against it except for some publicity stunt bannings" attitude of Blizzard. It is hypocritical. Blizzard claims all virtual property belongs to them, but doesn't sue the gold sellers. Don't tell me they are unable to find them, their websites are all over the place. The only gold seller Blizzard ever sued wasn't even accused of gold selling, but just of spamming.

The question who is the owner of virtual property is an important one for all players, even without gold selling. Blizzard deliberately avoids getting that question into court, because they know that their legal position is untenable. The "we can't do anything against the account seller" idiocy is a direct result of this.
 

Wow, preach on Tobold....preach on....

10/10