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PC Games (Games) Role Playing (Games) Entertainment Games

Asheron's Call Bans eBay Housing, Account Sales 42

Posted by simoniker from the homeless-homesellers dept.
Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to an official Asheron's Call forum post mentioning that "Turbine has notified eBay to remove auction listings for the sale of Asheron's Call accounts/characters and in-game housing." This move, similar to Sony's ban on EverQuest item selling on eBay which debuted back in 2001, comes after Turbine's purchasing of Asheron's Call back from Microsoft, and it's explained: "Many housing auctions are run by brokers who deprive players from being able to acquire housing through legitimate in-game means; many account sales end up being recalled by the original player, causing grief to the buyer and creating a difficult situation for customer service."
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Asheron's Call Bans eBay Housing, Account Sales More

Asheron's Call Bans eBay Housing, Account Sales

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  • Not likely (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 18, 2004 @08:28AM (#9182591)
    As much as I find it stupid to pay real money for items in an MMORPG (or even full retail price for a disc that's useless without a monthly fee, but that's another rant), I don't see this stopping item auctions at all, just driving them to multiple lesser-known eBay knockoffs.

    • Re:Not likely (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The more difficult it is for buyers to locate sellers, the smaller the problem.

      They send one form letter to eBay, and will likely get a 50% reduction in such troublesome customer support calls.

      Sue IGE/Yantis and who knows.
    • True, but I imagine all players will hear about this offical warning, and so anyone who rings up support and says "I bought X off player Y for $Z" will be told buying/selling irl isn't allowed and just ignored.
      • WhatI never understood is, if buying and selling are illegal, why don't they just delete players when they whine? If you admit that you got screwed then you admit you were buying/selling (probably buying) and people would stop doing it. It would make you lose customers but it would also cut down on the customer service costs. :)
    • ...I don't see this stopping item auctions at all, just driving them to multiple lesser-known eBay knockoffs.

      And less legit sites with no sure way of recourse if you do end up getting scammed.

      I've sold and bought many accounts through eBay for DAOC and by having the feedback sytem it helps to verify ppl's legitimacy or intention to follow through with the sale.

  • Bad move - makes the market less transparent (Score:4, Insightful)

    by MBraynard ( 653724 ) on Tuesday May 18, 2004 @08:34AM (#9182664) Journal
    Houses and accounts will still be sold, they just won't be done in an open, accessible way. The economics of the market will be tremendously less efficient and more open to fraud (as Ebay at least makes it a little less likely with seller ratings, etc.)

    Though maybe it won't be that bad. There are other venues (playerauctions, etc.) that will be publicly available.

    • And if the transaction takes on a more caveat emptor flavor, LESS sales will be going on. Yes it will still happen, but there will be less of it. More of the people who are ruining housing for legitimate players will suffer, and less of the legitimate players will.

      Sounds like a great idea to me.

      • No. If you have a house or an account and you want to sell it, you still can. So you wind up selling it to your friend or someone you trust already in your allegiance or something, and the person who does not have these kinds of connections is left out. At least with Ebay they could compete.
        • the person who does not have these kinds of connections is left out.

          These games are getting more and more realistic every day.
        • Here's the problem. When accounts are sold on Ebay they can later be "recalled" by the original owner. This has happened quite a few times. Basically even though the account information is given to the new owner and the new owner updates the subscription/billing information, the new owner can get the account back at any time. They simply call up MS/Turbine and tell them the cd-key and credit card information the account was originally created with. The password is then reset and the original owner has their
          • First, I know what I'm talking about here because I have sold and purchased multiple accounts of AC. I haven't played in over a year.

            In the case of Asheron's Call Turbine is now able to enforce the rules that have been in place since the game was released and Microsoft chose to ignore. This isn't/shouldn't be surprising for anyone that actually bothered to read the AuP or CoC when they signed up for the game.

            No, they aren't 'enforcing' anything. They are just telling Ebay that they can't make money off

            • First, I know what I'm talking about here because I have sold and purchased multiple accounts of AC. I haven't played in over a year.

              I played the game from release till some time in 2003 when I quit for about 15 months. I recently started playing again because all of the other MMOGs I tried sucked quite badly. I also know what I'm talking about, and with more recent experience.

              No, they aren't 'enforcing' anything. They are just telling Ebay that they can't make money off of it anymore. People can still
              • The harder it is to sell items the fewer people there are doing it.

                No. You presume people are too stupid to know about alternatives; I do not. I sold one of Sony's game accounts on an alternative.

                The move is a net-negative. Just watch and see how much easier it is to get a house. (No easier). Btw - I was in early beta so nya nya na nya nya.

                • No. You presume people are too stupid to know about alternatives; I do not. I sold one of Sony's game accounts on an alternative.

                  I don't presume people are to stupid to know about alternatives. I said quite explicitely the determined will still be able to sell their stuff. Those that aren't aware of the alternatives or are afraid to use something other than ebay will no longer buy/sell their items/accounts.

                  The move is a net-negative. Just watch and see how much easier it is to get a house. (No easier).

  • About time (Score:5, Interesting)

    by cyberlync ( 450786 ) on Tuesday May 18, 2004 @08:55AM (#9182877)
    Its about time this happened. A very small minority of players where using bots and various other means to snap up housing before regular players could get to it. They would then sell these houses on ebay. Its gotten to the point that there is no way for a non-bot using player to compete with these 'brokers' . For the last several months at least the only way to get a house was to buy it from these jerks. Needless to say I do not have a house

    • Re:About time (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Cecil ( 37810 ) on Tuesday May 18, 2004 @10:37AM (#9184061) Homepage
      Sounds like a problem with the design of the house-buying system, not a problem with eBay sales. This is the kind of misguided band-aid solution that made me give up Asheron's Call in the first place. "Oh no, everyone is trying to get GSA instead of checking out the pointless new greaves we added in this update! There's only one way to fix this: Let's make GSA suck so they don't want it anymore!"
      • Actually eBay sales have ALWAYS been againce the Code of Conduct and acceptible use policy. Now that Turbine has control of AC they are actually enforcing those rules since Microsoft didn't care to. The reason they mention the housing bots is because while the method wasn't perfect for getting a house it certainly wasn't bad ... up until a few people starting having bots check for available housing every few seconds and then snatching it up any time one became available specifically for the purpose of resel
        • I know they have always been against the code of conduct. So it has been in every MMORPG. It's a legal CYA thing, and a moral objection on the part of the companies. It strikes me as similar to the way most companies approach opensource. They come into it already having made the decision that they want to retain exclusive control over their things, and they see nothing remotely attractive about the complete antithesis of that.

          You didn't, however, address my point. If scumbags are abusing their housing syst
          • You didn't, however, address my point. If scumbags are abusing their housing system, then some far more direct alternatives should've been the first things they considered. The obvious solution is to limit the number of houses that a single account can buy in a week/month/year. Another solution would be to discourage bots by making the starting price absolutely obscene, and lower it as time goes on if no one buys it. Brokers get much much poorer much much quicker if they still insist on snagging the house a
    • Actually, a better solution would be to make it harder to use bots to grab up all the housing. I don't play the game, so I don't know how it works now. But having you type a word embedded in an image like some web registrations do would make it harder for bots.

      Just my 2 cents

  • When will we see companies selling virtual items? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by JavaLord ( 680960 ) on Tuesday May 18, 2004 @09:58AM (#9183612) Journal
    Sale of MMORPG Items on Ebay is commonplace. The question is, will a company ever embrace the real world value of the items and sell them themselves? Sony could probably make a killing selling Jedi accouts for $1000 a piece to casual gamers who don't have 200 hours to waste on becoming a Jedi. The question is, would it put off gamers who don't have the money for a uber account, or would it attract more casual gamers to the game?
    • Sony has already announced they are going to offer the option to buy in game abilities, items or perks. Currently planned for some of their PS2 online titles.

    • How about right now?

      There.com sells ThereBucks at an exchange rate of ~1700 TB per US Dollar.

      You use the ThereBucks to buy stuff in the game. I don't know of any way to cash your ThereBucks out of the game but the company is definately selling them.
    • I happen to be of the school that paying for something that can also be attained through hard work makes one rather jealous. I don't have $100 to spend on making my account instantly powerful, I have to work for it. The people that can blow this kind of money on games sometimes irk me.
      • It's not just jealousy in this case. If it were a single player game, it would hardly matter if someone could buy a boost. But in a game where the competition revolves solely around the monsters available to fight, and the number of monsters available to fight does not scale with the level of the player base, then artifical boosts in player power will have a significant negative effect on the players who do not choose to pay extra.
    • "Sony could probably make a killing selling Jedi accouts for $1000 a piece to casual gamers..."

      Ok, am I the only one who sees the problem with this logic? What "casual gamer" would spend $1000 on such a thing? When I think casual gamer, I think of someone who debates whether spending $49 on a new game is worth it.
      • I thought the same thing. Serious but frustrated gamer maybe....

        You can look on ebay to gauge the market rate for a Jedi account. There is one listing over $1000 with bids, many at $1000 with no bids, a couple in the $700 range, and a few "almost a Jedi" with bids ranging $180-375ish. So clearly they're not quite going like hotcakes in the $1000 range. I could see the value going up a bit if it was an official product, but I doubt the market would be very large.

        • You can look on ebay to gauge the market rate for a Jedi account. There is one listing over $1000 with bids, many at $1000 with no bids, a couple in the $700 range, and a few "almost a Jedi" with bids ranging $180-375ish. So clearly they're not quite going like hotcakes in the $1000 range. I could see the value going up a bit if it was an official product, but I doubt the market would be very large.

          track one of the bids in your "my ebay" tracker and watch how much it shoots up in the last hour. Most of
      • "Ok, am I the only one who sees the problem with this logic? What "casual gamer" would spend $1000 on such a thing? When I think casual gamer, I think of someone who debates whether spending $49 on a new game is worth it."

        "Casual gamer" usually refers to someone that has a mild interest in gaming, but it can also refer to someone that doesn't have the time to devote 2-3 hours/day for gaming. It was much easier to find playing time before I worked full-time, and it took another hit after I got married. As

  • Move it in-game (Score:1, Redundant)

    by SandSpider ( 60727 )
    I'm not entirely sure why game studios don't just provide this as a service themselves. It's an instant revenue stream, and you'll have much more control over the process, as well as being able to track the value of items from an in-game perspective as well as real world.

    The only real niggle is putting safeguards in place that prevent employees from making unique or rare items and selling them, but really that's no different than if they made the items and sold them on eBay.

    =Brian
  • I think its hilarious that you can do things like this and I am totally against banning it. I just love the fact that people are so desperate to win the game that they will resort to paying for the priveledge of increased standing. Its great to see that there is a forum for these poor silly fools to come and waste their money. Thing of it this way, if they don't have the option to sell your characters then we may see armed robbery for theft of game characters. People really are that stupid. As Leary wo

    • Re:Bogus (Score:3, Insightful)

      by SuperMo0 ( 730560 )
      However, these privileges are things that you are supposed to work for months to get, and in turn paying the company who made the game multiple months' worth of fees to do so. By paying someone else for the privilege/house/item/whatever, you bypass the monthly fee and the work involved and, by doing so, rob indirectly the game maker of some of their money. This is their rationale behind it, and it's a damn good one. People doing things like this ruin the in-game economy, because instead of "How much gold
      • Undoubtedly there are moral issues surrounding it, but that is the benefit of being an impartial outsider. That and the fact that I think anybody who values winning so much that they will spend lots of money on it deserves to have that wish granted. I mean what type of pointless life must you be living if this is important so much that you are prepared to spend big money on winning? I say everybody deserves some happiness after all.

      • Re:Bogus (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Gio Angles ( 778876 )
        However, these privileges are things that you are supposed to work for months to get, and in turn paying the company who made the game multiple months' worth of fees to do so. By paying someone else for the privilege/house/item/whatever, you bypass the monthly fee and the work involved and, by doing so, rob indirectly the game maker of some of their money.

        The in-game work involved doesn't get avoided because the seller has to acquire it from the game before he can sell it.

        Right now, you can buy 1 million

  • I can fly (Score:3, Funny)

    by Moo Moo Cow of Death ( 778623 ) on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @08:03AM (#9194440) Journal
    Hi, I'm a poor game designer. To cover up the fact that I can't properly adjust game balance, figure out how to fairly set up housing, fix multiple problems since the games birth and a myriad of other problems I'm going to attack the end result of my incompetance instead of the root of the problem.

    Watch me ban eBay sales, because everyone knows when I do that, none of it will ever go on again, just look at Everquest, they stomped out eBay sales and look where it's got them (IGE [ige.com], Playerauctions [playerauctions.com], etc)! 500K players must be the end result of crushing a single output of a mini-game that some players prefer to play over the normal game (*cough* me).

    Me thinks the marketting execs, need a checkup from the neckup, this age old practice is archaic and outdated in comparision with the quite commonplace sub-market that exists now. Work with it or get out.

    P.S. I haven't played AC in years, just many other MMOGs.

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