Disclaimer, intro, whatever
Firstly: Lets just say all the personal statements and facts i provide regarding buying gold happened in a dream... or something, totally fictional... ofc!
Secondly: Havent seen this discussed in the months ive followed ej forums so why not.

Buying gold, aka ebaying, one of the biggest controversies in WOW. Either you love it or hate it, most seem to hate it, including blizzard. Have yet to see a blue forum post where they proclaim buying gold as illegal tho. Whether or not its mentioned in the EULA/TOS i dont know, tho i guess ill be told quite fast if it is.


The purchase +some history
During my first year in wow i had enough gold, i made a few thousand gold on buying first aid books in dustwallow and selling them on ah. After a while more people found out and the market kinda died unless you were the most hardcore ah-addict that could always maintain your books 1s below the other sellers.

So, this gave me enough for an epic mount and also 1000 extra. After i started raiding, these 1000g slowly diminished until i suddenly realized (a few months ago) that fuck, i have 200g left and Naxxramas IS EXPENSIVE. To reduce some of the expenses i got a hunter to 60, made him herb/alch and started farming my own pots. Farming sucked ass and it was never an alternative to spend time doing this crap and sell on ah, i do it as little as possible. (i've been known to say that farming is for slaves, minorities, poor and dirty people, not übermenschen like myself, halfway joking...)

Still my gold kept diminishing, i was raiding 5-6 days a week, farmed consumables 1-2 days a week and it was tough.

So, in the end, i caved in, ganged up with a guildie and bought 4k gold for like $120. There was no secret meeting, no secret trade, no giving away my visa to dubious sites and such. Paypal, enter info on the goldselling page, get gold in mail, done in 2 hours.

So, there i stood one day, 2k gold richer, cost me the same as a few beers irl(expensive beers where i come from, and i drink a lot:)... Did it feel different? Not really, but sure, i did check my ingame and outgame mail a bit more in the following days to see if i was contacted by blizz... Soon it all just became a distant memory, apart from the fact that i had a truckload of gold.


How buying gold affects raiding
Actually the change was immense... Winterfall firewater, juju power? Grinding time reduced from weekly hours to zero, buy the shit of AH for 1g a piece. Big and small nr pots? Buy mats on ah and forward to the guildie alch-monkey, takes 5 min compared to the hours of elemental earth farming.

This removed the hours i spent each week farminig, so actually i just prolonged my life, or at least took some boring parts of it and made it into free time, woho!

Wiping in Naxxramas?
Guildies screaming on eachother in vt, ppl borrowing money for repairs resulting in them having to stay up until 03.00 that night to farm cash so they can pay back (and yea, even if u have to get up for work at 06.30)(and no, when coming home at 17.00 and raid starts at 18.00, you dont have time to farm then).
OR, you could just sit back with your soda, see the raid wipe, and figure out what to do with your newly purchased spare time while raid resurrects, cus yea, thats how much wiping and repair costs bother you when you have gold for it.

And when you have to spend gold, you dont care, i mean its not like you worked hard for the gold, you dont care how its spent, it just more or less fell into your hands for a fraction of rl cash. The entire raiding experience becomes that much happyer, negative influences are removed, you enjoy it more, chat more, fuck around more... theres no shadow looming over you anymore, its gone.

So, do i feel bad about buying gold? Fuck no, it gives me more spare time, it improves my raiding experience and makes the game more fun, and it hardly costs anything. Does blizzard approve, maybe not, who gives a fuck, it bothers me as much as it bothers me to download series and music on the net, nothing. Ye i pay my dues, blizzard get their montly fee from me, i dont owe them anything.
And yea, ill probably support some poor chinaman family by buying gold too, so the husband(chinafarmer) can come home with food today too. (Hmm, can i deduct charity from my tax?)

When tbc comes, im gonna enjoy this fabulous game and in time get to lvl 70, if i need gold for raiding then, ill buy in a second. If i need gold for mount, ill prolly at least buy a large part of it.

Ending
Buying gold improved my experience of wow, it removed some of the aspects that can be considered "work" or "not fun part". Im very glad i did it.

Im not writing this to justify anything or myself, i dont care if ppl blame me, tho i apologize to ej if this post breaks any rules. Basically i was just so surprised on how buying gold affected me and felt like writing about it/starting a discussion.

http://blue.cardplace.com/newcache/en/84858937.htm

there's your blue post on the subject

there are far more serious RL legal posts elsewhere about this which you should be concerned about.

I'm predicting a Kabuel signature "look at me I'm posting words on the inter-web" response to this thread very soon.

Buying gold is certainly against the ToS, and if you got caught Blizzard could ban your account.

I don't know what there is else to say, it is your account and you can break the rules all you want as long as you know the risks.

I can understand you. Basically if you have a job, take some extra hours once in a while. For just 6 hours of work I can get 1.000 gold on my server and faction. If I had to farm that amount of gold, that would take many times longer.

So it comes down to what you want to do with your life, since the risk of getting banned for buying gold is that small. I know people that have done it and they never heard anything from Blizzard. Spend 30+ hours grinding 1.000 gold or spend 6 hours extra at work for that 1.000 gold? That's a lot of time you could spend otherwise.

We all know that Blizzard doesn't want us to do it, but since it's a real possibility to do this it'd be stupid to ignore the option. It's the same with downloading whatever from the internet, it's a calculated risk you take.

Fine, there it is. Tho its probably the shortest and most lightweighing post ever written by a blizzard employee.

A more interesting point i heard was that it can be claimed that the goldbuyer does not buy the gold, he buys the work needed to farm the gold and is given the gold for free.

A comparison to real life could be those street-artists that paint your picture for a few bucks. The paper itself and the colors are hardly worth anything(lets say its worth so little that you round it down to 0), what you buy is the job that the artist does by paintin your ugly face on the paper, and you are given the picture for free(its value is zero remember).

Im sure this example will be torn to shreds by the forum goons, tho i still think there is a resemblance (lets be open-minded boys).

Also this is just a single example that i came up with after 20s of thinking and listening to the offspring. Im sure a lawyer or a wizard can come up with even stronger and more easily related examples.

I guess we are deviating from my OT but fuckit, i feel crazy today.

What's funny is, Blizzard probably read these forums somewhere, and you'll now probably get banned.

E: Personally I'm entirely against the fact of buying gold, if you don't like farming you're in the wrong game. If you don't have time to farm - That's a lie, you'll just take longer than others because you play the game less. All MMOs in some form involve farming. Buying Gold also destroys parts of the economy of WoW.

"chinaman family"? Ok.... (You realize the term "chinaman" is generally considered offensive, yes?)

Also, capitalization and punctuation are your friends. I know English isn't (hopefully, anyway) your first language, but your sentence structure is excellent -- the lack of consistent capitalization and such makes it harder to read.

Anyway, yeah, on the one hand, this should probably go right in the shit heap. On the other hand, it's obviously a relevant issue and I think you'd be hard-pressed to find many Naxx raiders who haven't given the idea some serious thought once in a while. Here is why what you're doing is harmful beyond the fact that it violates Blizzard's TOS (so does making your account available to guildmates to use when needed for raids, but I bet people wouldn't be up in arms over that idea):

You hit on it yourself. When you turn a quick Paypal click into 2000 gold, that gold doesn't really have much value to you. If you need consumables for a raid, you'll buy them, because, whatever, it's like fake money. Someone who is farming every night to restock isn't going to pay 20g for a stack of major manas, because every time he clicks Buy, he realizes that he's putting himself deeper in the hole in terms of re-earning that gold. You, on the other hand, if you're short on consumables for a raid, will go to the AH and buy out whatever you need unless it's truly ridiculously overpriced, I'd wager. That drives prices up for everyone else. Going back further, Molten Core t1 BoEs were never worth the 1500+ gold people would pay for them on Mal'Ganis. Basically no "legit" player ever bought them. But raid guilds made a killing selling solely to EBayers, and that defined the market. Now that bought gold is much harder to come by (the amount you quoted wouldn't even buy 1000 gold on Mal'Ganis US, let alone 4000), prices are dropping, but slower than you'd think. There's no reason for an alchemist to list his Magebloods or Major Manas or whatever at a lower price, because he knows someone who needs them for a raid that day and doesn't care about his gold will buy them out regardless. Same with GSPPs, and other in-demand raiding consumables. So that hurts all of us.

Next, for some people, spending $100+ like that simply is not a reasonable economic option. The more widespread the gold-selling market, the more disadvantaged people who are unable or unwilling to turn their real-life cash into gold become.

Personally, if I were running an MMO, I'd be draconian about cracking down on the practice. Have an employee who goes to a few different servers every day and orders $20 in gold from two or three of the highest-profile gold-sellers, and see where the gold comes from. Tie those accounts to other accounts with which they transact regularly or share IPs. Ban them all. Repeat often.

Edit: Also, FFS, you can stop reporting this thread now. Yes, it's not the greatest OP in the world, but he's right in noting that it is a relevant issue that I can't recall discussing on these boards. And yes, it's against the EULA, but it'd be pretty naive to bar discussion of it solely on that basis. I'm pretty strongly against the idea of gold-buying, but I know at least two guildmates who have purchased gold at various points in the last two years, and I have no doubt that others have done so without my knowledge. I'd wager everyone posting here knows at least one person who has.

Althouhg it is clearly against the EULA and ToS, I know people who regularly buy gold and yet I know of no-one who has ever been banned for it.

Maybe Blizz understand that buying gold is the only way some people can play end game raids, so they turn a blind eye to it.

I have heard of accounts being banned for selling gold, which is a different matter.

Now if these two assumptions above are correct, then it leads to some interesting conclusions and some clearly very clever policy work inside Blizzard. By allowing a market to develop for in game commodoties like gold, they reduce the total serverload because farmers are far more efficient than players and gather much more gold/hour. So Blizz needs to spend less money on server power and overall server usage is reduced.
Blizz then banns accounts which are selling gold, this doesn't depleat the demand for the in game resource, but it does reduce the supply. The response from farmers is to purchase new accounts and carry on farming, which generates additional revenue for Blizz.

I clearly have too much time to think.

t3h w1n? Come on. Besides, business school doesn't really count.

Actually I just read the ToS on this the other day.

From what I recall Blizzard actually made it pretty clear that any STUFF found to have been BOUGHT would be removed from you, whereas any ACCOUNT found to have sold anything would be BANNED.

So:
SELLING = BANSTICK
BUYING = slap on the wrist and take your goodies

Sorta like prostitution stings (at least in my town) the girls and especially madame see court, the Johns sneak out the back door and never see any charges.

Fair? Not really. It could be said to be protecting the interests of the society by hitting the source of the vice, and just scaring the consumer (who is generally assumed to be a law abiding, productive citizen who fell prey to "victimless" temptation).

As noted above though neither illegal prostitution nor gold selling are truly victimless, as they fall into that category of actions that makes life worse for apparently unrelated 3rd parties.

(Increased STD exposure, and higher AH prices, respectively)

I wouldn't go this far. The "allowing a market to develop" bit seems a bit farfetched to say the least.

I don't think anyone will argue, however, that from a pure economical standpoint, it makes sense to ban sellers and give buyers a slap on the wrist. Ban a gold-seller and he'll surely purchase a new account and generate more revenue. (Indeed, most people who run farming operations build account-banning into their business model as an expected operating cost.) Ban a gold-buyer and he's far, far more likely not to resubscribe. If all you care about is maximizing profits, you will tolerate gold-farming, banning sellers, until such point as the number of subscription cancellations by legitimate players due to concerns related directly or indirectly to farming exceeds the number of subscriptions gained by permitting farmers to continue to operate to the extent they do. I'm not saying this is what they do, but from an economic bottom-line perspective, it's what would make sense.

I'm another player of this game that knows what most of the end game is about - Farming for the materials , gold, etc for your raids. I didn't tell you about what games you like I just said this game, and most MMOs are about farming at the end of it all.

And it's not an opinion, farming is fact within WoW

Alright, your thread can stay, but you can't.

Blizzard does only take away the gold, bans the seller, but not the buyer. They did it once with a person, he raised a big storm on the WoW-forum, called his lawyer and a day later he had his account back.
I'm thinking if Blizzard was so sure about having a watertight case they would sue the gold sellers at least.

I know a lot of hardcore dedicated raiders who've bought gold in the past just so they can keep raiding. I think it's really Blizzards fault, specifically with their design of Naxxramas. When you have your best, most dedicated customers (the hardcore raiders) even considering an activity that violates the TOS on a regular basis, there's a design problem somewhere. I understand that farming is a timesink that is part of the game, but the farming requirements for regular Naxx raiding are a bit excessive. Naxx was extremely well designed overall, but the excessive farming was always my one huge gripe.

They'll never directly sue one of the big gold companies -- much easier to handle enforcement in terms of the EULA and leave it at that. Too much at stake. What if they lose and a judge rules that players have a property interest of some type in their electronically-generated assets despite the fact that those assets are stored on a company's servers?

Hrm...

Can't really relate to gold destroying the server's economy.

Example: AQ War Effort.
I'm pretty sure a lot of people bought gold to speed up the process.
End result: rich low level characters.

I know this particular example for a fact because my very first character leveled to 60 was created about a week or two after the event started, and it was absurdly easy to gather gold from the AH, simply because people were much more willing to spend higher than average sums of money on mats largely farmed only by lowbies.

In theory, since most goldfarmers are gatherers, money does not tend to come back to them because the average gold buyer, a chap who cares not about researching the base mats for, say, a GFPP, will not research those mats, buy them and ship 'em to his alch friend, he'll just buy the GFPP, so, more money is directly injected in the economy, and while, yes, prices do go up, the average non-buyer player is also able to amass larger quantities, so everything stays largely the same, with natural inflation coming into play.

In theory, at least.

I do miss the cheap MMP's and MHP's, though >_>

Here you go, guys: http://www.blizzard.com/support/wowa...aDisplay02046p

Taken straight from Blizzard's webpage about how not to get banned ("How to Stay in the Game," as they call it): Selling gold results in bans. Purchasing gold can result in your gold being taken away, though I don't think it is enforced. Selling or buying accounts results in account closure. If you don't believe this, read the news briefs Blizzard puts out. They will always state that X number of accounts have been closed for SELLING gold, but there is never any mention of purchasing.

Personally, I don't have any qualms about gold buying. I think I would have when I was younger, and newer to MMOs. Ultimately, it makes the game more enjoyable for the people who are able to do it. It also has a positive effect in terms of real world economics.

As far as the market in-game, it may drive prices up on the AH, but that also means that players farming to pay off repair bills are able to sell items for more money, and thereby get their cash for repairs more easily. Repairs are also a fixed price, so more gold in the world helps people to afford them.

The only unfortunate thing is with all the accounts getting banned, gold prices have gone way up, so less people are able to participate.

Yes, I think we are talking about a lot of Blizzard's customers here. There are no numbers, but considering that IGE (or their mother company) reportedly paid several million dollars for allakhazam we can assume it is a pretty big business, fed by a big base of customers, and probably a whole cadre of lawyers of their own.

Some juicy details: http://wow.azzor.com/445/truth_about_IGE.php

Thats really an interesting insite that hand't occurred to me, course my guild hasn't progressed far into Naxx yet.

This is almost a question of economics. Should those with high buying power outside the game be capable of leveraging it inside the game. It seems Blizzard's answer has been a solid "no", but as the game progressing into more and more grinding, doesn't that push the 'casual' gamers out. Perhaps a change of policy allowing a Blizzard sponsored $$$->gold would help many people avoid the needless farming.

Lol.
Its off topic, but I've put 5x more work into my MBA than I did for my Engineering degree from a top 25 school.
/shrug

I've thought hard about buying gold, but I haven't done it yet. As my salary goes up and my tolerance for farming goes down (I think it's at zero now, which I believe is simply a component of getting older) I believe it's more and more likely to occur.

I don't really care much about the moral implications associated with buying/selling gold. No one's life is getting wrecked or family destroyed by it, it's simply making some folk's online lives easier or harder.

Buying gold supports farmers with real money and inflates the AH market value with gold. People who don't take part in either farming gold for real money or injecting real money into the system for gold get burned, right? Well, on the average I'm not sure that's true. It's true that prices for blues, purples, and consumables move upwards by the gold inflation, however active players benefit from that as well. Instead of selling that blue they found or consumable they created for X, they sell for 3X due to inflation. I recently leveled an alt with no money from my main to inject, and my alt had far more money at any given level than my main had when the game was new. Inflation affected my alt in its ability to sell stuff on the AH. Sure, the boss in RFK drops the same gold if you vendor it all, but those BoEs and consumables are worth far more today. I'm not sure it's a problem for the players.

As a MMO owner/operator, I'd crush it hard. Selling stuff in my world for real money is my domain as the owner, not the domain of farmers. Weapons and armor would be available for real money (paid to me, thx) as well as by raiding for them. It's a model used in non-mainstream games, and it works well enough for the players and for the owner. Regardless of Blizzard's desire to muddy the WoW economy with real money, they have to take steps to stop others from doing it so they can control their domain. I'm willing to take advantage of their inability to stop it because I see no moral/ethical complication and desire the ability to trade 1 hour at work for 20 in wow farming.