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Archive for December, 2007

WoW Arena titles

Posted in Uncategorized on December 23rd, 2007

The Arena titles has finally surfaced - courtesy of Drysc.

There will be four rankings to be attained:

  • 0.0% - 0.5%: Gladiator (and Armored Nether Drake sent in mail)
  • 0.5% - 3%: Duelist
  • 3% - 10%: Rival
  • 10% - 35%: Challenger

The rankings are per Battlegroup.

11 million WoW gold disappear

Posted in Uncategorized on December 19th, 2007

I’ve probably seen hundreds of spam messages advertsing WoW gold as well as powerleveling services.

Blizzard has struck back recently - banning over 100,000 accounts and deleting 11 million gold (yes, that’s 11,000,000 of WoW gold). I imagine this means no more cheap wow gold for a month!

TechDirt are comparing this to the economy of Namibia:

There are also other problems with trying to count in-game economies — partly because they’re very much at the whim of the makers of various games. So, for example, when World of Warcraft makers Blizzard simply remove 11 million gold pieces from circulation, after shutting down accounts that made gold through fraud and cheats, how is that counted in the grand economic scheme?

What’s your take on this?

WoW Gold

Posted in Uncategorized on December 9th, 2007

World of Warcraft has been a million-dollar business for Blizzard but it’s a million-dollar business for companies who sell WoW gold, accounts, and more.

Game outsourcing has been here ever since Ultima Online came out more than a decade ago. Diablo 2 item trading was quite a big business but recently eBay banned the auctions of virtual goods.

BBC has an article on the implications of game outsourcing, here’s a few quotes:

Qin Shen, who works for a company called Ucdao.com, says: “Many white collar workers want to improve their character on their own, but they do not have much time. They need to go to work in the day and they don’t have the energy to improve at night, so they need someone else to play for them.”

But to say this is hugely controversial among the game’s community is putting it mildly. I posted a message on one website asking for people who buy gold to get in touch - and got a number of quite hostile responses.

Eventually, I did find someone who had bought gold.

“I have a life outside of the game that’s certainly much more important, so the few precious hours I do get to play on my game I don’t want to spend doing the same thing over and over again to get in-game money, when I could just buy that and do the stuff in-game that I actually enjoy,” he said.