WoW Gold Facts

As a Gold buyer myself, it made me wince to read a Guardian article about Chinese prisoners forced to farm Gold, and because you know I love to pick a fight, I immediately set about the task of getting more information about this.

Because I review Gold Sellers, I’m uniquely positioned to demand answers from these companies (they look bad if they don’t respond), so I’ve taken the liberty of sending off a few emails to notable gold sellers.

My personal take is that this is a case that can be traced back specifically to shady Chinese sellers, but I emailed several Gold sellers (Chinese and non-Chinese) to get their official response to the growing controversy.

I also wanted to get a better idea of where they source their Gold and find out their thoughts on the story.

In the coming days, I will be posting their official replies as they come in. Tune in to see who levels with me eye-to-eye, who lies through their teeth, and who keeps silent because they just don’t care.

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Gold seller e-mail spam never gets old for me, so I figured why not share my amusement with you on a regular basis?

Straight from the Spam Bag is my attempt at building the biggest repository of Internet funnies in the world. And you know what, it doesn’t seem so impossible when I constantly get hilarious trash like this sales pitch from TakeWoWGold.com.

No torturous English spiels here, but that’s only because there’s so little text to go by. They must have figured: Why waste time crafting kindergarten poetry when we can just let our ridiculously high prices and nonsense coupon codes do all the talking?

TAKE and PTFT — it’s like the creativity fairy saw TakeWoWGold.com and said: “Not even my pixie dust can save that.” I tracked down their five other recent coupon codes and all are equally gibberish:

- TTKP
- GTPK
- TNND
- WGRP
- THKF

Not like I expected much from the same great minds who named their Gold selling site Take(all your)WoWGold.com. But still, I’d take fumbling effort any day to this random generated coupon crap.

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This gem of a video from gold farmer “consultant” Jared Psigoda will educate you more about the realities behind the virtual currency industry than I could in a ten thousand word essay. For the tl;dw crowd, here are the takeaway lessons in convenient bullet form with timestamps.

The first half of the interview delves into a personal background of Jared plus a general overview of the virtual currency business, but the juiciest parts can be found in the second half where he gets into the specifics of who’s doing the real hacking and one simple step that he says will keep your account totally safe.

24:48 Why legitimate Gold sellers would avoid buying from hackers and would only sell you farmed Gold — so you can keep what you bought fair and square:

“In some games, they will take your Gold away but the reason they’re taking the Gold away is because of the RMT side, because they’re figuring out that that Gold wasn’t some guy farming Elementals for two hours who gave that Gold to you. It was somebody who stole another account, disenchanted or we like to call it ‘cleaned’ everything off the account and resold that to a company who then resold that to you.”

27:06 Jared makes clear the connection between spammers and account hackers. Spamming characters = characters made from hacked accounts.

According to our speaker’s retelling, which is basically what I also hear from my interview sources, hacked accounts first get “cleaned out” or stripped of their gear and Gold, then will be used to spam in-game.

So by buying from known spam companies like SusanExpress and their lot, you are basically encouraging them to continue hacking accounts.

33:21 Just for a bonus conspiracy theory, because I myself don’t know if this is true, but Jared claims that a 90% effectiveness to stop hacking accounts is to implement a monthly mandatory password change in accounts, because wait for it… a majority of stolen passwords are lifted from fan sites by Chinese hackers.

Whether this is true or not, it’s always safe to use a different e-mail, login and password when registering in fan sites. In general, keep your WoW e-mail, login and password unique and isolated to one account to prevent anyone from hacking it from some unprotected database.

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The fine — and now obviously fuming - folks at IGE.com just sent in a press release denouncing any involvement in the clever but bordering on criminal antics of Gamesker.com.

Last month, I exposed the website for its fake security certificates and non-existent customer support. All Gamesker.com customer support e-mails are redirected to IGE.com, which would logically infuriate the latter because it 1) clogs up their inboxes and 2) makes them look like an accomplice to grand deceit.

From the press release below, we learn that IGE.com has, in fact, been assisting the swindled Gamesker customers. The seller has also opened its Facebook and Twitter pages for any inquiries on the “authenticity of emails” using the name IGE.

More than clearing the name of IGE, I just hope the word gets out fast enough so uninformed Googlers stumbling upon Gamesker won’t fall for the trap.

###
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Contact:
Anthony Hilson
IGE
anthony.hilson@ige.com
www.ige.com

IGE.COM CONDEMNS GAMESKER.COM CUSTOMER SERVICE FRAUD

MAY 11, 2011 – Leading virtual currency seller IGE.com condemns the attempts of Gamersker.com to dupe their customers, and maliciously involve IGE.com in their fraudulent activities.

Trusted virtual currency provider, IGE.com has observed that Gamesker.com has been redirecting all customer service complaints addressed to them to IGE.com, making it impossible for unsuspecting Gamesker customers to check the status of their missing orders and tarnishing the reputation of IGE.com in the process.

“IGE condemns the actions of Gamesker. Our company is in no way associated with this duplicitous website, and we feel a great sympathy to all Gamesker customers who have been affected by this,” said Anthony Hilson, official spokesman for IGE.

“We’ve been receiving complaints from disgruntled Gamesker customers demanding virtual currency that we never sold. Upon further investigation, we found out that Gamersker.com tricks their customers into sending all customer service e-mails and communications to our inboxes by supplying our customer service details on their website’s customer service page. Frankly, this is the sort of thing that gives our industry a bad name, IGE has worked hard for eight years to forge a reputation for excellence, our customers trust us because we provide exceptional service.”

Potential victims of Gamesker.com include players from World of Warcraft, Rift Online, EverQuest II, Second Life and numerous other popular massively multiplayer online games.

“We advise all Gamesker customers to refrain from purchasing currency at this website due to the high risk of fraud and lack of customer support. IGE.com wishes to reiterate that it has no affiliation with this website whatsoever. Should gamers have any questions about the authenticity of emails they receive, they may visit our Facebook and Twitter pages for round the clock assistance” added Mr. Hilson.

Mr. Hilson and the rest of the IGE team will be available for questions on the IGE Facebook page (www.facebook.com/trustige) and IGE Twitter page (www.twitter.com/ige).

###

Established in 2002, IGE is the world’s most trusted brand for World of Warcraft Gold, Rift Online Platinum and other virtual currency for massively multiplayer online games. IGE sets the gold standard by delivering WoW Gold orders fast, safe and guaranteed.

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Blizzard has steadily been ramping up its shame campaign against gold buyers, making us effectively the scapegoat for the stolen accounts epidemic.

It wasn’t always this way. Before there was a singular push to raise the security IQ of the general player population, a large portion of which sees nothing wrong with writing passwords on Post-it notes. But now the official stance seems to be to assign the entire blame of account theft on gold buyers.

While you’re at it Blizzard, why don’t you throw in PvP imbalances and the Dance Studio vaporware as part of our “sins”?

Stop Buying Gold to End All Account Shenanigans?
Customer support forums these days are crawling with Blizzard posters actively spreading the propaganda that buying Gold is the direct cause of all account shenanigans in Azeroth. Here’s a tasty nugget of unfounded generalization; try not to choke while reading:

“I’ve repeated this till readers here may be a bit sick of hearing it – but if no one purchased gold from these cretins, botting, scams, spam and compromises would all but disappear,” said support forum agent Orlyia, who fittingly sports a sleeping panda as his/her forum avatar. Must have dozed off in Logic 101 class.

This seems to be the official line of Blizzard HQ, a white lie they are unsuccessfully pushing down our throats. A great sound bite, but oh so dead wrong. Buying gold is not the root of all evil Blizzard makes it out to be, because if it is, then what do you call the developers who made the game impossibly grindy? The root of the root of all evil?

Grind in MMO Game Design – The Big Elephant in the Room
Blizzard would have us believe that our need to skip the grind comes at the expense of the entire community, but they fail to acknowledge the giant role game design plays in our decision to buy gold.

World of Warcraft is designed to be immersive to the point of addicting, and time-consuming to the point of subscribing whole years without reaching the end credits. There is no finality to an MMO – the whole genre is built on the idea of eternal progression, always chasing some new gear or achievement.

So Blizzard, before you ask players not to buy gold, why don’t you try asking your developers first to stop making the game so grindy? Yeah, just what I thought: That ain’t never happening.

Insidious hackers, phishers and botters will keep doing their criminal deeds as long as WoW is an MMO, so rather than trying to wage this illogical public relations battle over buying Gold, just hire more security experts. The budget of the entire PR department would more than cover that additional manpower, I’d think.

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Auction house monopolists are arguably the most legitimate suppliers of Gold sellers, but they’re getting fewer by the day because of self-righteous players like Reddit poster Godlessgamergirl.

Godlessgamergirl was so upset that she couldn’t beat an AH baron that she sent a threatening letter to the Blizzard legal department. She seemingly got her demands and the AH baron was snuffed out from her server.

Personally, I find nothing wrong with what the AH baron was doing. It was just a brat who didn’t get her way so she tattled to mommy Blizzard.

1. So what if he’s got time and has l33t selling skills?

Godlessgamergirl’s main complaint was that the AH baron was “online almost 24/7 and undercut competitors usually within minutes. He dabbled in every profitable crafting market – enchant scrolls, spellthread, leg armors, belt buckles, enchanting rods, glyphs, PvP crafted blues, to name a few.”

For all we know, the AH baron was just a jobless American with a lot of time in his hands. Unemployment is still rampant across all states, and all the reasons above are NOT against the rules of the game. If they were, then we should start banning all AH barons starting with all readers of Just My Two Copper and the WoW Insider blogger Basil Bernsten.

But we don’t, because it’s not criminal to want to get rich in an online game.

2. So what if he used auction house mules?

Godlessgamergirl became suspicious because the AH baron kept creating level 1 toons that served as posting mules. Did it ever occur to her that this is a valid strategy? Quoting eHow.com: “A mule basically removes the legwork your character would normally have to do to get to an auction house.”

And the constant deletes – it’s a known tactic to keep opponents from tracking your posts.

3. She’s just a brat who can’t get her way

Godlessgamergirl reasoned to Blizzard that “this player was seriously affecting server economy and the inconsistent enforcement of their EULA was unfair to people who played by the rules.” But the AH baron didn’t break any rules, at least as far as the game’s rules were concerned. Unless he was duping buyers with 10,000 Gold arrows and hacking the AH to rig postings, then there’s nothing wrong with how he was selling.

He was just super efficient. The fact that he might have been a gold supplier is tangential. She had no proof of that.

4. And if that AH baron was a gold supplier, gold buyers get screwed.

Yeah, this is personal. Just like how Godlessgamergirl made her failure in AH selling personal. I pity the gold buyers in that server because they would more likely be buying hacked gold instead of properly earned gold. Or prices would skyrocket for that server.

All because a girl can’t hack it at the AH. Good grief, indeed.

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