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Blizzard Cracks Down on World of Warcraft Ebaying

Posted by Zonk on Mon Dec 13, 2004 02:56 PM
from the other-developers-could-take-a-page-from-their-book dept.
Businesses Role Playing (Games)
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."
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  • So happy. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by eviltypeguy (521224) on Monday December 13 2004, @03:11PM (#11075151)
    I am so wonderfully happy to hear this. Like any game, people should have to earn their rank and position.

    I don't have any problem with someone using the in-game auction houses to get items, and I think this will help foster a much better sense of community.
    • >Like any game, people should have to earn their rank and position.

      No, the main point of games is that the player should have fun.

      After a certain point in the game, MMORPG are dependent on how lucky your drops are or how much time you can spend sitting in-front of a keyboard doing the same thing X times. For some people, that isn't fun.

      If a person is willing to pay to have more fun playing a game, what is wrong with that?
      • No, the main point of games is that the player should have fun.

        After a certain point in the game, MMORPG are dependent on how lucky your drops are or how much time you can spend sitting in-front of a keyboard doing the same thing X times. For some people, that isn't fun.

        But World of Warcraft doesn't suffer from those problems. At no point have I felt like I'm in a level grind, and I've spent more time playing other games in the past than I have World of Warcraft with far more results.

        Other MMORPGs may b

      • Re:So happy. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by lobsterGun (415085) on Monday December 13 2004, @03:50PM (#11075587)
        The problem is that the items that folks buy off of ebay have to come from somewhere. ...That means that when I (a casual player) enter the Tomb of Dread in search of the (Ultra Valuable) Short Sword of Uberness, there is already some clown standing ther waiting for it to drop. And when it does drop he'll log that character out and log in another character to wait for it to drop again.

        and that spoils my gaming experience.

        Hence I don't play MMOGS that support ebaying.

        • >is already some clown standing ther waiting for it to drop.

          There is only one place to get a powerful sword that people want and there is a line-up. Its a problem with the game, not with people selling stuff on ebay.

          Or is part of the gameplay "waiting in line"?
        • this is solved by judicious use of instancing [worldofwarcraft.com], 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:So happy. (Score:4, Informative)

          by Kaa (21510) on Monday December 13 2004, @05:02PM (#11076285) Homepage
          The problem is that the items that folks buy off of ebay have to come from somewhere. ...That means that when I (a casual player) enter the Tomb of Dread in search of the (Ultra Valuable) Short Sword of Uberness, there is already some clown standing ther waiting for it to drop. And when it does drop he'll log that character out and log in another character to wait for it to drop again.

          Of course, in WoW the major dungeons are instanced -- meaning you get your own private version of the Tomb of Dread, just as the ebay clown does, and both of you get your own uberloot without stepping on each other's toes.

          So, no, that argument does not fly at all.

    • Re:So happy. (Score:3, Informative)

      by Cecil (37810)
      people should have to earn their rank and position.

      The problem with this mindset is that it ensures that the *only* way of investing yourself in the game is by investing time. This gives a unique advantage to the kids who find the time to play the game 40 hours a week, and 18 hours a day during the summer. Which in and of itself isn't bad, except that it alienates the "older kids" among us, myself included, who have full-time jobs and many responsibilities beyond that, because we're lucky when we can fit

      • Re:So happy. (Score:5, Informative)

        by eviltypeguy (521224) on Monday December 13 2004, @03:41PM (#11075505)
        I have maybe an hour to play each day at most. And Blizzard has specifically designed this game to be played by people who don't have that much time to devote to it. For example, the more time your character spends logged out and resting at an inn, the longer the amount of time that character will receive 200% of the normal XP given by quests, discoveries, and monsters. So I'm going to have to disagree with your argument.

        Because of how they've balanced the game, I've managed to get to my 24th level already with as little as I've been playing. Sure, there are people that are already at level 40, but it's not a grind, and it's fun.

        Besides, I feel my opinion is just as legitimate as yours given that i'm no "kid" either at my age.

        And before you use the old fart argument, my guild leader is 55 years old. I'm only level 24, and he's level 41 even though we've both been playing since day one.

  • Economic Inevitability (Score:4, Insightful)

    by DLWormwood (154934) <[moc.cam] [ta] [doowmrow]> on Monday December 13 2004, @03:15PM (#11075218) Homepage
    How does Blizzard expect to enforce this? eBay isn't the only auction house on the web, and even assuming that they hire a largish tech team to spy^H^H^Hwatch many sites, they can't see everything. Battle.net account termination can only occur if Blizzard discovers the trade in the first place.

    If nothing else, people will just turn to older, more obscure venues like USENET to engage in trades, or even do it over e-mail or in person. How can Blizzard expect to stop the black market trade if world governments can't do it in the real world?

    • The quick answer is they can't. But Blizzard can wave it's ban stick around and hope to scare it's subscriber base into submission.

    • Re:Economic Inevitability (Score:4, Insightful)

      by rogueMonkey (669464) on Monday December 13 2004, @03:23PM (#11075312)
      Answer: 80/20 rule. Stop the 20% sellers that sell 80% of the stuff and the problem becomes marginal and can probably be ignored. How can we live in society with murder and rape? We try to catch as many wrong-doers as we can and convince others that they have more to lose from breaking the rules than from obeying them. We can't eradicate crime, but we can try to control it.
      • I seriously hope you didn't just compare the sale of virtual items to rape and murder. One being an interesting copyright issue which may not even be illegal, the others being rape and murder.
        • it may not be illegal per the laws of the land, but it is in the WoW user agreement. don't like it, don't use the service. easy enough.

          because it's also not illegal for Blizzard to thwack your account, losing you the use of your precious $200 staff of mightyness.

        • Re:Economic Inevitability (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Schemat1c (464768) on Monday December 13 2004, @05:17PM (#11076408) Homepage
          I seriously hope you didn't just compare the sale of virtual items to rape and murder.

          I didn't see anywhere in that post where rape and murder were compared to anything . I read a very clear analogy comparing the technics of real world crime control to it's virtual world counterpart.

          Maybe you should read the post again.

    • Re:Economic Inevitability (Score:4, Insightful)

      by BrynM (217883) * on Monday December 13 2004, @03:29PM (#11075391) Homepage Journal
      eBay isn't the only auction house on the web, and even assuming that they hire a largish tech team to spy^H^H^Hwatch many sites, they can't see everything.
      It wouldn't take much to whip up some bot scripts that troll various auction sites for keywords and such. Sure, sellers could try the whole 1337 writing style stuff that spam has become so notorious for, but that will just make the items less likely to sell due to seeming fraudulent or at least unsavory. Yes the eBay alternatives would be harder to track than eBay, but the customers won't be as plentiful. eBay is sure to help them out citing copyright and trademark violations.

      I think Blizzard has a good chance of severly curbing auctioning or at least making a royal pain in the ass to do. If they manage to make it almost as hard as actually earning the item, then they have won. The final word being Blizzard's of course. They can can/ban you for anything they feel like and not care much about false positives if they so choose.

      • If they manage to make it almost as hard as actually earning the item, then they have won. The final word being Blizzard's of course. They can can/ban you for anything they feel like and not care much about false positives if they so choose.

        It is this kind of issue that keep me from playing MMORPGs in the first place. (The closest I've played is Diablo II.) Having these kinds of restrictions on ToS, level ranges, account balance ceilings, etc., reminds too much of the Real World that I play games to esca

        • It is this kind of issue that keep me from playing MMORPGs in the first place. (The closest I've played is Diablo II.)
          We have something in common then. :D I can't imagine paying maintenance costs... er... a subscription for a game just to have some sweeping rules change or other "technicality" screw up all of my planning. Saw that happen to too many folks on the old versions of EQ. I can get ripped off in the real world, thanks.
      • 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

        • Basically this means Blizzard and Sony would lose horribly if someone from these sites found out about a "spy" and they'd take a hit in the pocketbook that would make Bill Gates turn white.

          Where do you get the information about lawsuits from? There wouldn't need to be any spying. All it would take is some eBay searching and a compaint to the eBay VeRO Program [ebay.com]. They don't have an "About Me" page on the VeRO information, but that doesn't mean that they aren't involved. eBay will bend over backwards to help

    • 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
    • I think you're overestimating the difficulty here. Blizzard is banning accounts, a rather large cost to being caught so their rate of catching people doesn't have to be very high. Imagine they employ a single clueful techie even half time to find any infringements. It won't stop all sales obviously, but it would stop most sales between people who didn't know each other already, reducing item sales by several orders of magnitude. Would you buy/sell something if there is a non-negligable chance you'll los

  • hmmm... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ack154 (591432) * on Monday December 13 2004, @03:19PM (#11075263)
    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:hmmm... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by MindStalker (22827) <jlarsen AT fsu DOT edu> on Monday December 13 2004, @03:37PM (#11075469) Journal
      Still not allowed by blizzards policy. Sugar coating the legal language isn't going to help you. If you want to trde, use the in-game trading system, which lets you trade virtual-items and virtual-money for other virtual-items and virtual-money. Blizzard can afford kick the players that are only there to make money off the system, so they will do it. The other MMORGS would do this too, but they are probably scared of turning away subsribers, when in reality, banning this activity could ulimatly bring in new subscribers.
  • From my brief time in beta, I was under the impression that most of the good items can't be used until a higher level anyway, so the only thing you could really get that would be useful is money, and a newbie probably wouldn't make much use of a few million gold anyway one would think?
  • Blizzard is just pissed cause the company is not able to capitalize on these items. If they WERE, they wouldn't be complaining.

    They should setup some kind of tax system where they get 20% of the profit when you buy from ebay etc. If you don't pay the tax, they'd send down a grim reaper to fuck your character up.

    • Oh, I'm sure they could capitalize if they want to. Other games have. Blizzard has made a concous decision that they want their game to be different. Why must you assume the worse?

    • Re:Blizzard Tax (Score:5, Insightful)

      by servognome (738846) on Monday December 13 2004, @05:05PM (#11076310)
      The problem is it sends them down a dark legal road where they admit items in game = real money.
      Server goes down and characters are reset - somebody then sues Blizzard because they lost their possessions worth $4000; they also become responsible for losses due to scams, bugs, nerfs (hey my $2000 ubersword got nerfed and is now only worth $5), etc. It also changes the dynamic of the game from entertainment to profit.

  • I hope it works (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Fr05t (69968) on Monday December 13 2004, @03:47PM (#11075567)
    ebay, IGE, etc have trashed other MMORPG economies. There isn't any way to get it all. Most (I'm speaking from my experience with FFXI) won't do anything or very little to stop it because they don't want to lose a paying customer.

    All Blizzard needs to do(and I hope they do):
    -Sue a couple people ebaying money/items/characters.
    -Kick about 200 or so accounts for trying to buy/sell to IGE.
    -Threaten IGE with legal action and ask for a list of their customers/dealers (ban those accounts too).

    This will put enough fear in your average player to being things to an acceptable level.

    Oh, before anyone tries to say this is what the RIAA is doing - it's not. It might be if RIAA suing people for downloading an MP3, selling it to a web company, then sold to someone else marked up by 80%.

    It might cost Blizzard some lawyer money and less in monthly reviews in the short term. In the long term they won't need to worry about players waiting for a new MMORPG with a fresh economy, and lack of high level ebay fuck-tards.
  • It seems to me that another thing they have done is to create Soulbound items. I could be wrong, but many of the nicer items are bound to you once you equip them. So, if they change that to automatically bound as soon as you receive an item, the only thing you can do with it is sell it to a vendor.

    So, the only really valuable thing worth selling would be the in-game money. Boring.

    • Soulbinding sometimes triggers just on pickup. This is a PITA. It means that if you find something cool while soloing that one of your friends' characters could use, you can't give it to them.
  • I'm interested in seeing how this plays out. I've been on the fence with Blizzard (didn't exactlly like their use of DMCA even through I could see the logic of their case against the B.net clone) but having played WoW this last week, I've been nothing but impressed by their product.

    For those of you who don't know, WoW comes with the ability to customize your UI, adding, changing and removing functionality through a combination of XML and Lua scripting. They've already said that if you can do it with what t

  • Intersection of reality and fantasy.. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by vhold (175219) on Monday December 13 2004, @05:15PM (#11076396)
    I can't say that I've stayed away MMORPGs strictly for such a simple reason, but getting rid of the ebay overtone to the game would definitely improve a game like this slightly.

    The idea of people spending $$$ to get ahead isn't what intrinsically bothers me, it's just the fact that the suspension of disbelief is dispelled when what should be a fully contained alternative universe intersects at the most fundamental level with the real one.

    Also, I'm willing to admit that the kind of people that are willing to farm in one way or another all day in order to make a buck I'd really rather see move on to another game. They have a vested interest to make all kinds of forum arguments that everything should be more scarce, time consuming and difficult, along with having the time and persistence to be a very vocal minority.
    • Speaking of which, does eBay assisst in shutting down illegal sales? It seems like Blizzard would need their cooperation in shutting down the trading of currency. Otherwise Blizzard would have to track the currency dealers themselves - namely characters that have a tendency to in-game-email gold to many other players, or characters that tend to buy trash at the auction-house for strangely large sums of money.
      • Why would they need to shutdown the eBay sale. Let the sale progress, then delete the item that just got sold. Suddenly noone is buying WoW items on ebay anymore.
        • How would they know which item to delete? The buyer and seller exchange money, and only then do they let each other know their in-game character names. Then, inside the game, the seller's character gives the item to the buyer's character. With no way to link the in-game transaction to the real-life transaction.
          • Yes, there is no obvious way to track these things. But they are threatening to delete items at the very least, and ban accounts if they have to. Personally they may not be able to prove many of them, but when they start seeing single individuals who are "giving" away many very expensive items, it won't take much investigation to prove something is up. Then when they take the items away from the buyers, people will talk, and not be willing to take the risk of loosing hundreds of dollars on something that Bl
          • First, Blizzard can have eBay give them the real name of the seller, and then shut down that person's accounts. Second, Blizzard can pose as the buyer, win the auction, and then shut down the account.

      • Re:That's Sony's policy as well... (Score:4, Interesting)

        by MMaestro (585010) on Monday December 13 2004, @03:46PM (#11075551)
        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.

        • 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
    • Uh... when you are PAYING for a game, it is pretty important that the game be "fair"
      • How does somebody else paying for items hurt your enjoyment of the game beyond jealousy?
        There are things you can do in game to prevent spawn pharmers or 'boters, why do you need to have it translate to real world crackdown on item sales?

    • Re:Why is this so bad? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by radimvice (762083) on Monday December 13 2004, @05:30PM (#11076545) Homepage
      What's so bad about this?
      Other than "It's not fair"

      What's bad about this basically stems from what it means to be a "game" and not an extension of the real life economic market, and how the uncontrolled influence of real-world money into the picture destroys this separation.

      For those of you who can't seem to follow the logical link from "it's not fair" to "it's wrong," think about the reasons why purchasing services from game players using real-world money leads inevitably to corruption [chicagohs.org] and is not tolerated and strictly regulated in any game.

      I strongly support Blizzard's attempt to keep World of Warcraft a place where people can continue to play and have fun without competing with sweatshop workers trying to make a living.
      • That's not a good enough reason though... if the items had "real world value" then Blizzard would be legally compelled to allow the "trading" much like Wizards with Magic cards or Ty with Beanies...Collectible companies have to be very careful to keep their fingers strictly off the "secondary" market.

        The argument that DOES work however is that Blizzard has set certian rules to "play in their sandbox". Much like Champion tennis player can't give me their Wimbelton trophy and I expect to just walk into the

      • The most recent patch (1.10, almost a year after the previous patch) doesn't automagically log you onto the chat rooms anymore. When you go to B.net, you're at a screen with the options to join/create a game, quit b.net, and join public chatroom. It's really nice.
    • You've got it mixed up. If Blizzard lost the case, and the items were then sellable, they would have monetary value. If something is illegal to sell, it has no monetary value, so nobody can sue Blizzard for damaging it. Even more, a ruling in Blizzard's favor would probably state that Blizzard owned all of the items. Nobody is going to be able to sue Blizzard for ruining their own stuff through a nerf.
      • First, go price a kilo of your recreational non-tobacco, non-alcohol drug of choice, and then rethink the value of things that are illegal to sell. Second, if this were to go to court the issue wouldn't be ownership of virtual items (which is a ridiculous concept, if you think about it), it would be breach of Blizzard's license agreement. Blizzard argues that the breach of license devalues their product. I can't come up with a good counterargument, but I'd be interested to see what someone came up with s

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