Does Virtual Reality Need a Sheriff?

I always like when virtual worlds are featured in the mainstream news and the Washington Post ran a story on the front page oyesterday questioning if virtual worlds need a form of police system. Although the article isn't ultra-informative for those in the industry, it's a good guide for how to present such concepts to the general public.

Link to Front Page Article

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Posted by Andrew on Thursday | 0 comments | Tags: Washington Post

Battle of the Kings!

We added two new vendor reviews today (spiders, charts and price data should be coming soon) GamerKing (Atlas Technology Group, megastore site) and MMOKings (one of the last mom-and-pop's). The two duke it out after the jump....

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Posted by Andrew on Aug 13 | 0 comments | Tags: MMOKings, GamerKing

Do the Laws of Economics Apply to MMO's?

The following is a guest article written by Christopher Armstrong who comments on virtual economics over at ChrisArmstrong.org. The article discusses the recent works of economist Ed Castronova to see if real world economic laws carry over into the virtual world.

Recently Ed Castronova and the folks over at Indiana University have released the results of their study on the law of demand in virtual worlds in a paper entitled A Test of the Law of Demand in a Virtual World: Exploring the Petri Dish Approach to Social Science. The paper can be downloaded in its entirety from the SSRN.

Before we delve into the findings and details of the experiment, we must understand why it’s important to verify that this economic principle applies in virtual worlds. The law of supply and demand is essential to any economy. It predicts that in every economy, there is a point at which supply and demand intersect (the equilibrium price). This price shows the ideal market price of a good – the intersection of the supply price, the price asked by the producers of a good, and the quantity demanded by the consumers. When the price of a good is high, consumers will demand less of a good and suppliers will tend to lower the price in order to sell enough of the good to be profitable. Conversely, when the price is low consumers will demand more of a good and producers will tend to raise the price.

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Posted by Christopher Armstrong on Aug 08 | 1 comments | Tags: Economics, Edward Castronova, Chris Armstrong

87 Page Academic Analysis of Gold Farming

Richard Heeks from the University of Manchester has just published an 87 page academic analysis of gold farming.

You can read the whole report here. Such a report is a goldmine for those of us who comment on the virtual currency market. We will be dissecting some of the interesting research findings of the report and commenting on them in further posts.

For now however here is a copy/paste of the conclusion of the report:

"In basic terms, gold-farming is a sizeable phenomenon. The rather wobbly-legged best guesses for 2008 are that 400,000 gold farmers earning an average US$145 per month produced a global market worth US$500m; but we could easily more than double the latter to over US$1bn. There are probably 5-10m consumers of gold farming services. The main uncertainty of estimation relates to the gold-farming market in East Asia, which appears much larger than that in the US/EU. That uncertainty in part arises because gold farming operates at four levels – local, national, regional and global. We should encompass all four but, to date, the focus has been almost entirely on the global trade.

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Posted by Andrew on Aug 02 | 2 comments

Debate Over the Justification and Legality of RMT

The following is a debate over the past five days I've had with Reddit user Blackhaz. The debate started with his response to my post of the Blizzard vs. MDY (Glider) Case and a defense of the RMT industry. The original comments can be found here. It's nice to know that there are still places where you can have civil reasoned discussions on the internet.

Blackhaz: Exchange 1

I would love to see an actual lawyer expand on this case and what it actually means. I can't really see how much has changed. This type of software has always been better off being developed outside of the USA. I guess developing software which only has the purpose of violating the terms of service every single user has agreed to is now off limits as well. Is it really negative that the government protects against software who's only commercial viability is based off of the disruption of the service of others? This is not about attacking users or restricting their rights, it's about stopping massive abuse of the system.

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Posted by Andrew on Jul 21 | 9 comments | Tags: Debate, RMT, Legal, Glider, Blizzard, Virtual Currency

Blizzard Wins Legal Case v. Bot Maker Glider

On July 14th the gavel of the Blizzard vs. MDY (Glider) fell in the 9th circuit court and since then it’s echo has reverberated across the blogosphere. But first a quick background summary:

Glider is a popular bot/macro program for World of Warcraft that essentially runs “glides” or small scripts that play World of Warcraft automatically. They have scripts to automatically level you up or to farm items/gold for you. You can setup a script to run while you sleep and wake up in the morning a few levels higher with backpacks full of items and some gold. It doesn’t perform any cheats or hacks that a normal player could not perform. It simply acts as if a human was playing the game (albeit a human with a low IQ, no job or outside responsibilities, and with a nasty cocaine habit).

Blizzard sued the creators of Glider for aiding in copyright infringement in an ongoing legal battle with the first decision just recently decided.

In the words of the creator of glider (Mercury):

“Well, the judge ruled today and it was not good for us. He found for Blizzard on the copyright and tortious claims. I must admit, I'm rather surprised at the scope of the decision, as it seems copyright holders can now pretty much declare anyone an infringer at the stroke of a pen.

But, hey, things will likely get more focused in the days ahead. For now, here's the judge's order. Be warned that it's pretty heavy on the legalese.”

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Posted by Andrew on Jul 15 | 3 comments | Tags: Industry, Blizzard, Gold Farmer, Legal Case, Glider

Covert Blizard Ban Causes Gold Prices to Skyrocket

Think oil prices are high? A massive covert banning by blizzard targeted at gold farmers has crippled their operations causing the price of World of Warcraft gold to skyrocket within the past week...

Every day crude oil seems to hit a new high. It is all over the media. Gas cost over $4/gallon throughout America and is even higher if you live in a major city. As such, this 4th of July weekend any traveling you do will obviously be kept to an economic minimum.

What’s one of the best ways to save gas money, limit your carbon emissions, and rescue the planet? Retreating into virtual reality and playing a healthy dose of World of Warcraft of course! 

However, the mainstream media in its attempt to cover the surging oil prices and the subsequent effects on the “real” world have missed an even greater crisis! The exchange rate of World of Warcraft US gold has doubled from $20 USD per 1,000 gold to $40 USD per 1,000 gold in a mere week! The mainstream media with its reality bias has completely ignored this story and once again it is up to the internet to restore justice to Azeroth.

Although it has taken a year for oil to double from $70 a barrel to $140



It has taken a mere five days for the price of gold to double from $20 per 1,000 gold to $40!

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Posted by Andrew on Jul 04 | 16 comments | Tags: WoW, Gold Prices, World of Warcraft, Ban, Blizzard, IGE

Account Bannings Cause Price of Gold to Double

A major round of account bannings by blizzard targeted at virtual currency sellers of World of Wacraft gold has causen the price of gold to rise from $20/1,000 gold to nearly $40/1,000 gold in a matter of days. Previously a series of price wars along with an increase in supply (due to lack of bannings) droped the price of gold down to a mere $20.

Although Blizzard has not announced any of the account bannings, prices are expected to continue to rise until supplies stabalize and blizza...   Read more

Posted by Andrew on Jul 03 | 1 comments | Tags: WoW, IGE, Account Banning, World of Warcraft

So where exactly is that gold coming from?

We came across some pictures through a chinese website that covers the virtual currency market over there that had some interesting pictures of some large virtual currency companies headquarters over in china.

We thought we'd share them with you just so you get a better idea of exactly who you are dealing with:

IGXE Pictures

The Reception Desk (notice IGXE.com logo)

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Posted by Andrew on Jul 03 | 2 comments | Tags: WoW, IGXE, Shop Pictures

WoWMine.com False Advertising

 

False advertising is prevalent throughout the virtual currency industry, but today I’d like to take the time to point out one particular outrageous example. The fairly popular virtual currency vendor wowmine.com bases its entire business on a single claim that they advertise everywhere.

“As Low As $5/1000 W0W Gold <5 Minute Delivery, US/EU On Sale”

They specialize in an automated vendor process where after placing an order you automatically receive a phone call and automatically confirm your order (fraud prevention). You can then log into your account on the website and click a button that says you are ready for your gold and they have a bot automatically log in and deliver the gold to you (note: you are told to be at a certain mailbox location before hand and have to be a certain distance from the bot, etc.). This is a really cool concept, although it only works when they have currency to delivery. It doesn’t matter how fast that automatic bot can log on or how few (costly) human resources it saves if they don’t have currency on stock to deliver to you. Here is wowmine’s big problem.

Wowmine is a Chinese company specializes in cheap currency. You can read our full review of them here. However, they are completely unable to keep an adequate stock of currency. As such the claim that they deliver in less than five minutes never happens. The surprising thing is on the website they tell you how much stock they have for every server (which they claim is updated hourly and 90% accurate). However in reality these numbers are 100% fictional and completely false. They mean nothing. They are intentionally engineered to deceive you. They also have a list of “average delivery times” that they allegedly update every 10 days. Simply looking at the data and our test results along with hundreds of customers claims quickly showed that this data was also doctored.

They went through a lot of trouble to be intentionally deceitful. Anyways, when I contacted wowmine’s live support about this matter after a bit of arguing I received the following response:

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Posted by Andrew on Jun 11 | 0 comments | Tags: wowmine, false advertising, deception