but 'just' goes after 'actually' and you can't remove the verb 'bought' from the first sentence just because it's in the headline. I hate to be this guy, but that blurb was just about the most painful read I've experienced in recent memory.

Look everybody! It's another fucking Sony Shill. Look at the pattern.

1. Hawking an inferior product in an off-topic post. (Vanguard is on the verge of closing down, having merged servers already.)

2. Thinly veiled insults aimed at anyone who disagrees. (Yeah, yeah. 8 million Fisher Price kiddies must be wrong, right?)

Get back to your astroturf, you cunting whore!

WoW: World of Warcraft

Wow Database: A database which contains information useful to players of the game. This information includes items usually obtained by killing monsters in the game, recipes obtained from vendors and also from monsters, character classes, races, locations, quests, etc.

WowHead: Located at www.wowhead.com it has become the most popular WoW Database site since Thottbot, www.thottbot.com was sold to IGE. IGE is a site that sells in game gold for real world money. The virtual economics of doing this are beyond the scope of this post, but it generally ruins the complex virtual economies of the games. WoW is by far not the only MMORPG (Massively Multi-player Online Role Playing Game) to have virtual currency being sold by IGE and others for real world money.

Database Site: A web site which is primarily used as a database. This could be for an online game, an inventory checker, values for your collection Beanie Babies, anything. Just raw data that can be searched and compared with other data. In a gaming database such as WoWHead, this would allow you to see if your "Sword of Ultimate Doom" has an upgrade available, and which monster you'd need to kill or quest you'd need to complete in order to obtain this upgrade.

Rezzah
70 Priest of Radiant Dark
Windrunner Server - Alliance :)

He worked for them.
He bought thottbot for IGE.
He has more cred than you.

Just so you know, what your son is doing is against the Terms of Use [worldofwarcraft.com](Section 8) of the game. So you shouldn't be too surprised to encounter shady dealers in the process.

Somehow, I'm guessing the phrase "the person we sold our account to never paid up" did not occur during these Blizzard support calls.

I used to work for Allakhazam, and I was employed around the time of the Affinity Media/Allakhazam merger, and I can tell you, before the owners of Allakhazam.com signed any papers to sell the site, they wanted to make sure that the site was as far removed from the IGE portion of the company as possible. Their stance has always, and probably will always be that the selling of virtual currency degrades the experience for everyone. There was a huge uproar on the forums about this merger just for the possibility of there being gold selling ads on the site, and the site lost a few subscribers based on the fact the Affinity would be involved somehow. But it was always the stance of the admins and owners of the Allakhazam site that RMT ads were not tolerated in any way, and worked hard to stamp out those ads.

There's so much misinformation being spread, it's sickening.

Okay, listen carefully. Affinity Media owns ZAM, and once owned IGE. Semi-recently they have sold IGE to a private investor, since others were complaining and the company was hurting AM's image.

But, you ask, why aren't they announcing anything? There's two reasons:

1) The sale transaction between IGE, Affinity Media and the private investor that bought IGE is, well.. PRIVATE! IGE does NOT want to be known as a 'notorious company', and have very likely bartered for privacy. So if anyone asks a suit from IGE, it is an all likelihood that they will deny saying a word about it ON PURPOSE. Also, IGE is now solely based in Hong Kong, and doesn't have really have an outlet in North America or the United Kingdoms.

2) Affinity Media is undergoing reconstruction. Go to their website, AFFINITYMEDIA.COM, for more information.

Also, I'd like to point out something - if you go to any website affiliated with the ZAM.com network, you will not find a single RMT-based ad, at all. I DARE you to try and find one.

Source: http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?st ory=14235 [gamasutra.com]

Prove that the VICE PRESIDENT OF AFFINITY MEDIA is lying. (See my gamasutra.com snippet above.)

Seriously, do you all think that every company on the face of the earth is just one big corrupt entity? Lighten up, people. The marketplace is constantly, CONSTANTLY changing in order to adapt to the changing consumer. All of the websites on the ZAM.com network no longer have any RMT advertisements anymore. AT ALL. And this includes Wowhead.com.

I honestly don't see any reason - and I'm going to bold this now, again - for THE VICE PRESIDENT OF AFFINITY MEDIA to flat out lie to everyone, only to have people scrutinize his statement with a fine-tooth comb and then have someone explode it as controversy and bad business practices. That doesn't make money.

So, you know who has more cred than some junky blogger with a 'he said she said' news story? The vice president of a company. Shut your yaps and at least attempt to get your facts straight.

I'm getting redundant now.

The reason that quest item drop rates are particularly inaccurate is because it counts ALL kills of that mob - yet only people killing the mob WITH the quest have a shot at getting the item. Therefore the drop rates reported on thottbot are much lower than what they are in reality. How much lower depends on how popular that mob is to kill (while not having a quest to do so).

You sound somewhat biased towards the secondary market there, I'm curious to know if you have any (reliable) sources for the claims you are making? Specifically the "hired former Blizz execs." Anyone can make wild claims based on pure speculation and rumour, but you really need to be able to back them up when trying to dismiss an argument.

My understanding of the secondary market is that it encourages the exponential creation of game currency in order to have currency to spend. As the amount of game currency on each server increases, it's value decreases. When you lower the value of a currency, the only logical options to choose are to either replace it with something more valuable, or increase the cost of items in the various player trading areas (auctions, direct trades, etc.) The players of the game are then compelled to spend more time acquiring more gold to buy items that would otherwise have been less expensive, making the game become slightly tedious. When the game becomes tedious, people leave the game or complain excessively, damaging the reputation of the company that owns the game.

I do not and will likely never understand those who actually take the time to look into the effects of gold farming and still come out believing it's harmless. I haven't really seen an argument backed by examples of places where it hasn't negatively effected those that do not purchase gold, in terms of their progression through the game.

I'll use World of Warcraft as an example since it's the persistent entity game I am most familiar with, and point out that a lot of the best gear is actually crafted so you don't necessarily need to do 'work' yourself to acquire good items. What does said crafted gear require? Some items only you can collect, but mostly a bunch of items that anybody can collect and sell. An example of acquiring decent gear purely through buying items would be tailoring; you can acquire three of the arguably best pieces of gear available exclusively through buying items off the auction (Primal Mooncloth, Spellfire or Shadowweave), and another two if you pay another player to craft gear for you (Spellstrike/Battlecast/Whitemend). That's five out of nine slots filled with some of the better gear in the game purely through buying items off the auction, so in World of Warcraft at least your statement about having to do actual work on your character to get the best gear is somewhat flawed (if we exclude raiding, and even then only the latter dungeons provide upgrades for some items).

My point is, no matter which game you're playing you'll find the economy is negatively effected by those that add inordinate amounts of currency to it. If I printed sixteen trillion United States dollars tomorrow and used said money to purchase various goods, businesses, and property tomorrow would it negatively effect you? Do you think it might decrease the value of United States currency a little? I have not studied economics closely, but I understand that money is being printed constantly as it's required so that comparison hopefully isn't too much of a stretch.

If you can give me one scenario where having people pay money to acquire game currency that was generated via illegitimate means ("Gold Farmers" are on the fall a bit in some places, whereas using trojan viruses to steal accounts and sell the proceeds is on the rise) I'll be, well, surprised.

I don't personally oppose two people trading accounts, or one person selling theirs to another for some form of compensation. A gamer would want compensation for the time invested and if someone is prepared to pay for that then so be it. It really is the people that take simple trades to the extreme and focus solely on creating goods for said trades (high level characters via bots, gold via stealing accounts, etc.) that could potentially damage a game (and company's reputation) irreparably.

The Armory [worldofwarcraft.com] started off as simply a way to get character profiles, but in the latest major revision, they added a functional item database. Now you can click on an item in a profile (or directly search for it), and get info about where it comes from. If it is a drop, it will tell you what NPC drops it. If it is crafted, it will tell you what is required to craft it. If it is a quest reward, it will tell you what quest you need to complete to get it. It displays this in a fashion very similar to Wowhead, etc.

What is lacking from this (right now) is that you still can't search directly for an NPC or quest, or find out the location of an NPC. I wouldn't be surprised if these features are added in a future revision. (You can find the entire loot table for an NPC, but only after clicking on an item that drops from it.) There are also no direct comments for each item, but that may not be necessary with the WoW forums a few clicks away.

It makes sense for Blizzard to do this, even though these services are added by a 3rd. party. By keeping players directly on the WoW website, they won't see ads related to commercial gold farming, power leveling services, and so forth.

Why all the speculation? They've got a FAQ [wowhead.com] about the acquisition already up.

I've recently come across some important new info that has shaken my entire argument.

The Chairman and CEO of Affinity Media is actually Brock Pierce, a major shareholder of IGE (though the source is possibly not updated) [1]. In the past (at the age of 18) he has been closely linked with the trafficking of minors for use in child pornography [1 and 2], though has been excused from these charges for undisclosed reasons.

My opinion still stands about the company Affinity Media and that they're actually trying to make a good name for themselves, but so long as the CEO and Chairman remains to be Brock Pierce, I don't think I'm comfortable with the recent Wowhead transaction.

SOURCES:
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brock_Pierce [wikipedia.org] (Possibly Outdated and/or Biased)
2. http://www.itweek.co.uk/vnunet/news/2120349/dotcom -founders-spanish-jail [itweek.co.uk]
3. http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/1999/11/32 267 [wired.com]