WoW Gold Facts

With Halloween just around the corner, my e-mail inbox is looking far more hopeless than those zombie apocalypse survivors on Walking Dead.

I mean, sure Rick and Co. have to contend with a planet of undead, but do they have to contend with the undying monstrosity that is Katrina Chan, the WoW Gold peddler?

No matter how many times I mark Katrina Chan as a WoW Gold spammer, she keeps on coming back, tearing past the filters and into my e-mail pile. She even managed to make the already creepy Halloween holiday even creepier with her most recent promo offer.

“Trick or treat, what it will be on Halloween? You never know what might happen then.”

Uh, was that a threat?

“Wait until dark for some spooky surprises!”

No, thank you.

“A surprised code!”

Oh, really!

“It will offer u much surprise once u put it in. lol”

Pleased by your wittiness, aren’t you, Katrina? But I’d rather get my face eaten by zombies!

Second-hand accounts tell me THIGE.com will get my account hacked, and by association, RAIDITEM.com shouldn’t be any better, so no kind of discount will convince me to punch in those stupid-long coupon codes. And it doesn’t help one bit to have sleazy, scary Katrina doing all the peddling.

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Blizzard posted another wordy defense of its controversial Guardian Cub, but instead of serving you this platter of tiresome arguments, let me decode it in layman’s. It’s more fun to hear what they really think.

Blizzard Paragraph 1: The Guardian Cub pet isn’t so bad. Here’s why.

EGF: Any WoW Gold buyer will know this eager beaver of a tradable pet won’t replace the quick convenience of a respectable third-party seller. The Guardian Cub is a fail substitute . But amuse us, Blizzard.

Blizzard Paragraph 2: Third-party gold sellers are evil because most hack your friends and family – tug, tug at the heartstrings! – to deliver your goods. But on top of the sad face we get for your hacking we get an even bigger sad face spending on account restoration support and *small whisper* not getting a chunk of the profit those sellers make.

EGF: Blizzard never gets tired of spinning the facts on how third-party sellers obtain Gold. They demonize third-party sellers because they think fans will blindly take their word for it. But haven’t we debunked this white lie before ?

Blizzard Paragraph 3: We claim that 99.99999% of the gold you buy is hacked, so that means we’re doing a crappy ass job of preventing hacks because millions of Gold get sold every day. Crap. But we try, oh so hard, in fact!

EGF: I for one can assure you that Blizzard security is topnotch. They do try so very hard with the authenticators, and reminders, and probably the longest what-to-do-to-prevent-hack guides ever written for an MMO. Which is why the argument that WoW Gold wares come from hacks holds no water for me.

Blizzard Paragraph 4: The Guardian Cub pet makes us money, and gives you a shortcut for Gold. Disclaimer: Don’t blame us if everything blows up in your face.

EGF: It’s funny that Blizzard doesn’t stress this possibility enough. There will be pitchfork mobs demanding their money back because the demand will crash fast. They keep on harping that it’s a safe way to sell Gold, but I can’t shake the feeling that paying $10 for a pet and getting a 1,000 Gold in return is like getting scammed by a Chinese seller.

Blizzard Paragraph 5: The Guardian Cub pet is just the beginning. More will come.

EGF: Look, I have no qualms about Blizzard wanting to make money off of their game. That’s their absolute right as the creators of the game we all love to play. But two things I ask – use that money to actually develop content for WoW and that they take this thing very slow. That’s the least they owe us, their low-hanging money trees.

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So you may have heard by now about how you won’t ever need to buy WoW Gold again… Well, you heard wrong.

The Guardian Cub isn’t the magical cure-all to your WoW Gold needs. Far from it. At best this tradable pet — which can be bought for $10 and re-sold for WoW Gold via the auction house — is a supplemental way to shore up your funds. Even, then it can be unreliable and pretty much a gamble for your cash. Consider these points:

1. The Guardian Cub has a fluctuating value

There is no fixed rate for the Guardian Cub. But as many are predicting now, there is a strong chance that there will be a fast saturating rate for this tradable pet. I expect to see hundreds of these to be put up for sale at any given time and, like any oversupplied commodity, will see its price plummet faster than a priest’s HP after a Backstab.

2. The Guardian Cub is a companion pet NOT a mount

Some special commodities, such as the upcoming epic gems in Patch 4.3, will retain much of their value despite an oversupply because they have a constant demand. But the Guardian Cub is a one-time-buy-and-forget item. Suppose if you make new alts, you’d think about snapping one up at the auction house, but it’s not likely.

It would have been a different matter altogether if the Guardian Cub was a mount, since we all become stupid crazy people with mounts, and some slippery-slopers predict that a mount will be the next “experimental case,” but let’s cross that controversial bridge when we get there.

3. The Guardian Cub is a re-sized Winged Guardian

Raise your hand if you bought the Winged Guardian mount. Now raise your other hand if you’re equally excited to buy the Guardian Cub, which is basically a miniaturized version of the lion-eagle ride. No deal, eh? Don’t worry, you’re not alone.

Thousands of Winged Guardian owners are going to snub the Guardian Cub precisely because there’s nothing cool about whipping out an identical pet and mount. It only makes you look like a money-wasting fanboy or a gotta-have-em-all geek. Choose your poison.

And with that snubbing comes less buyers, which drive down the price of the Guardian Cub even more. It makes me sad imagining all those unbought Guardian Cubs wasting away at the auction house, and the equally frustrated owners who wasted $10 for something they can’t sell for $1,000 Gold.

Call it a fearless forecast: I fully expect this companion pet to bomb as a Gold trade enabler. The economics behind it are just too wonky to work. WoW Gold buyers might feel a pinch, but give it a month, a couple of weeks even, and it’s going to be business as usual.

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A few weeks back, I began parsing through WoW-Gold-Team’s incompetence, which ranged from poorly worded copy to flat-out false advertising.

Now we get to the good stuff.

A click to their generic Chat4Support system – notably, the kind that most China-based WoW Gold sellers use en bloc – leads me into a chat with the droid-like agent CS-004. Let’s just say asking “Where’s c3p0?” took monumental restraint on my part.

CS-004 was friendly enough. He/she/it even made an attempt on a welcoming gesture by asking me if I was a first-time buyer. I appreciate that, because that small talk before the eventual price gouging at least provides some amusement.

But things go south quickly as the chat progresses. CS-004 proposed a WoW Gold meet-up method that is so risky I actually thought about abandoning this review to protect my account from a possible Blizzard warning or ban.

What’s this ridiculous delivery style? Let’s just say it involves meeting a virtual pimp euphemistically named as “the customer manager.”

Are you serious? The WoW-Gold-Team.com customer manager will contact me in-game – no doubt leaving all kinds of unnecessary traces of the transaction, like an inept dealer – and basically broker a deal for WoW Gold? Then why the hell am I even chatting with CS-004?

WoW-Gold-Team.com is begging to be banned, that’s for sure. Maybe they have a whole host of stolen accounts at the disposal of their customer manager, that’s why they’re so flippant about safety. Of course we the customers don’t have a similar luxury. So do yourself a favor and change teams; because WoW-Gold-Team.com seems to play only for itself.

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