Twice I've been approached by gold sellers and have promptly reported them to gm's, but I started thinking about just how many people buy wow gold. A quick inquiry among my friends revealed that several of them had atleast bought gold once in their wow career.
Check out this thread from mmo-champion that I found on the subject of Blizzard and gold farmers.
I found the whole discussion rivetting and would like to continue it here.
There are tons of factors involved with gold sellers, and this forum post did an excellent job of covering all of them. For one, due to the large money sinks in WOTLK players are looking to buy gold to avoid having to spend in game time gathering it. To counter this, blizzard made it much easier to farm gold, yet players are obviously still opting to buy gold since the gold selling industry is estimated around one billion US dollars.
Has anyone here ever purchased gold? Did you regret it, like it, or even get banned from it?
Will gold sellers increase the price of gold as soon as players start to get bored with farming and want their gold for money instead of time?
Do you see gold sellers eventually being run out by Blizzard? Is this even feasible?
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19 comments: on "Has Blizzard Beat the Gold Sellers with WOTLK?"
Anonymous said... February 28, 2009 at 8:56 AM
There will always be those willing to pay for a service no matter how simplistic the goal is.
If it takes a week to grind out a million of something when a thousand is a lot in a market, someone will spend the money to be ahead of the curve or beyond.
I admit to buying gold a long time ago, but regret that it robbed me of the experience of learning how to make money myself.
Anonymous said... February 28, 2009 at 9:34 AM
Buying gold is pretty lame and noobish in my opinion, especially nowadays. It's cheating, no excuse.
If someone needs to buy gold today, he's doing someting wrong or is playing the wrong game.
Markco said... February 28, 2009 at 10:11 AM
What about brand new players who are behind in the learning curve? Is it ok for them to buy gold?
Anonymous said... February 28, 2009 at 10:21 AM
I'm gonna post as anonymous
I once bought WoW gold for 20 euro (just because a friend of mine wanted to buy)500 gold , i was level 40 and i had hear that the mount on 60 costs like 700g for warlocks , so i gave it a shot(my friend gave 350 euro to buy 10k .. -.-)
I would never give money again for gold..
P.S (the same guy that bought the 10k is asking me now to sell him 6k for 65 euro and i said why no?^^)
Anonymous said... February 28, 2009 at 10:55 AM
In hispanic servers I know you can pay everything with gold. Things like the game itself (expansions), mothly fees, and anything else, I am talking ventrilo, team speak servers, etc, etc, etc.
For example, a friend of mine paid 3K gold for WOTLK and many other ppl did the same thing. It could have been 5Kg I don't remember the exact number but you get the point.
It's just another perspective I guess. Farm gold in wow to pay real life expenses related to the game.
Anonymous said... February 28, 2009 at 12:14 PM
I've bought gold, multiple times, I've never regret it. Last time I did it was when I reached 77 with my new main, a druid. Bought 5000g for the epic flying skill.
I don't think I'd do it again, it's not that hard to make gold anymore, My 2c certainly makes it a lot easier too :)
Thumbs up for the blog Markco, keep up the good work! :)
Anonymous said... February 28, 2009 at 3:21 PM
I think buying gold with real money is just more efficient for some people. I would rather spend an hour at work and just buy the gold so I can spend the time I have to play on more enjoyable things.
Mr. V said... February 28, 2009 at 4:22 PM
Back when I used to play Guildwars I did purchase gol... er... platinum, and I was glad I did. That game made it tough to make money, in part because there was no auction house, so it was pure “WTS, WTT”.
In Wow however I have not paid for gold once, and I’m proud of that fact. I have made a lot of gold, particularly recently as I have started reading Gevlon’s and Jm2C’s blogs. I am by no means a power AH-er, but I’ve made enough to mount my main and my alts, and gear up my characters, so I can’t complain.
In short I think it is much more satisfying to MAKE your own gold, but I can understand situations where there is not much time to farm for gold. For the most part I say no way to gold buying, especially if you have bills to pay, there's better things you can spend your money on!
Anonymous said... February 28, 2009 at 4:33 PM
No, Blizzard is actually failing. Gold is harder to make for most players (the grinders who only make enough to get by) by removing grinding spots. That makes it hard for a lot of players who don't like doing dailies and would rather sit there and kill mobs. Coupled with the fact there's a lot of things players want that are expensive (again, expensive to players who don't know how to make gold the easy way) such as the Mechano-hog, the mammoths, mount training, ect. In my opinion this makes it even easier for gold sellers to jack up the prices and get away with it, and probably sell more as well.
Anonymous said... February 28, 2009 at 5:53 PM
Pathetic and pointless cheating. I make no serious attempts to make gold and I still end up with tons. Level up your character, do quests, vendor crap, and you have tons of gold. I read your blog but I pretty much never use any of your ideas, not because they aren't good, but because money flows so easily I don't really need secrets. I have even been levling up numerous professions while leveling, including buying mats when I didn't feel like farming them, and I still had no struggle getting to my money goals.
Anonymous said... February 28, 2009 at 6:39 PM
I have sold 20k gold to Chinises
Anonymous said... March 1, 2009 at 4:03 PM
It's nice to see some people come clean about their past, admitting they have bought gold. I got a feeling we all know the proportion of people who have bought gold vs. the proportion of people who willing to admit it is great.
And that is a huge, but unavoidable problem. We can't tell who has or hasn't bought gold, which has caused players to turn against each other. The comments in here are a perfect example of people vehemently denying buying or attacking others who did buy gold.
It is ultimately Blizzards responsibility to work tirelessly to fix, avoid or lessen the problem and impact of gold sellers, not the responsibility of players to accuse or attack others.
However, a resource such as Marcko's blog has helped those, like myself, who enjoy trying to make gold and work the AH and wow economy in their favor. The blog itself is a gold-buying deterrent.
The problem however will continue to exist, but with the rise of accounts being compromised (myself once included) the risk of buying gold is higher than ever, the buyers are ultimately hurting their own business.
Unknown said... March 1, 2009 at 11:47 PM
i have bought gold several times in the past and i do not regret it at all. some people just dont have the time to farm for hours mindlessly and im not one to take a risk and make investments on the AH if im not sure i'm going to make a profit. i probably wouldn't buy anymore since its become much easier to make gold in WotLK. it might be a better alternative for some people. many new players would rather buy gold and level up their professions and get good leveling gear for it to go faster.
Anonymous said... March 2, 2009 at 3:44 AM
In classic I bought some gold and even bought some gold for my brother as a birthday present because he got sulfurons eye and wanted to craft the hammer (back in the time, when a legendary weapon was more than "loot it, equip it").
I do not regret it because the (real) money I payed for was much less than the money I earned while I was _not_ farming. By now I make ~2k a week (and spending most of it *G*) just with a few quests or a visit in the AH. No need for buying gold any more. But sometimes I get tempted by the travellers mammut *G*
Anonymous said... March 2, 2009 at 12:08 PM
I’m sorry but I have to say this. All of you who bought gold are not just cheaters, you are THEIVES.
Gold sellers are responsible for some of the most virulent and malicious worm, Trojan and keylogging viruses in the world. Buying gold contributes to the use of these programs to undermine security and STEAL from people.
You are responsible for account hacks. You have funded the destruction of carious peoples game experiences and possibly the destruction of portions of their data, and the loss of cash for computer repairs.
Helping the companies that farm gold and hack into accounts is reprehensible in the extreme. Do not fool yourself. Gold sellers are thieves, and you are giving them money to continue to hack and destroy. You should be ashamed of yourselves.
Anonymous said... March 3, 2009 at 6:21 AM
Hey this is the first time reading JM2C and really interesting. Ive been playing wow since its initial launch. I have always found aquring consistant amounts of gold a problem and normaly after farming sessions found I would have enough to fund raid matts, buffs, pots and then a little float for repairs etc. None of my characters had epic flying skill or such. Most of the gold I earnt would though get spent straight away on enchants for new gear etc. I never actually aquired a large sum of gold at any given time. I was tempted and considered buying gold a few times, though I never actually have, the thought crossed my mind many times, but ive gone back and farmed what ive needed in game. I have had my account hacked once also ( I belive this was due to the logger on wowmovies.com at the time ) and my toons stripped bare by the Gold Sellers, I felt violated and a victim of theft! I was not pleased. I also think the ingame gld farming bots spoiled or damaged the economy of the server, not so much now as vanilla wow, I mean how many hunters would we see with a /who diremaul, how many Compediums of Dragonslaying at auction? Now they generaly cluster areas and tag the mobs you may need for a quest.
Though after all this only recently I have actually found a niche in the market and started to use the AH to make ridiculous amounts of gold! I used to when go farming spend up to a few hours runing the same route around the basin mining, this would net enough to keep me going and take allot of time. Now I log on, pop to AH shuffle the items about and then go raid/quest/play alt and later check my post to find my gold, I can easily make aprox 2k a day at the moment, I did have to aqquire a float of gold of about 2k itself to enable me to do this to begin with but with the more gold you get it multiplies faster. Over the the last week ive made 10k gold... this is the most I have ever held at one time! This is what lead me to really enjoying playingthe econmy and as a result start looking up blogs like this for more ideas!
In short I guess I understend why the temptation is there to buy gold, but with some knowledge and a bit of education its not nessercery.
-Hunter/Deathknight - Frostmane EU
Kel Thuzad said... February 20, 2010 at 4:58 PM
I think that most of the people who buy gold are just impatient. We all know that one of WoW's secrets to success is that it is one of the easiest MMOs ever developed. Constant rewards and easy leveling have kept around even the most casual of players. Yet, despite the fact that the game moves fast and is geared towards casual players, there are still the players out there who want it to be faster and easier... for them. There's not a MMO player out there who hasn't wished that the game would, somehow, be easy for them and hard for everyone else. It is this mentality that sells gold.
Anonymous said... August 13, 2010 at 11:10 PM
I was hacked today, presumably by a gold seller. They deleted my main a geared lvl 80 druid. Sold all the gear on my death knight, and stole the valuable items i had stored on a guild bank i created on an alt. My mistake was using a non exclusive email account to access wow. I used my normal email account. I was not keylogged, neither did I have a virus, worm, or trojan. I just used a non exclusive to wow login email account. If you play wow you need to create an email account that you use ONLY for logging into the game. Do not use it to send emails to anyone other than blizzard. Also make sure you use a password with lots of random numbers and letters. Create one and write it down. It won't get hacked if no one knows it exists and has a strong random password. Now I have to wait for god knows how long to get my gear and characters restored. In the mean time I can't even level my alts because they had their gear sold off. If you do choose to buy gold, for the love of god, don't associate your wow login email with the transaction or you will eventually wake up to find your account has been raped by some scum bag who can't make an honest days wage.
Anonymous said... February 20, 2011 at 2:23 AM
i have boughten gold twice i do not regret it since i bought it from a friend
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