GameRates Full Review

IGE is the juggernaut of the virtual currency industry. In 2001 they were started by Brock Pierce and Alan Debonneville (who in 2008 were involved in a fierce personal legal battle against each other). Brock Pierce was formally a child movie star and was involved with one of the largest failures of the Web 1.0 bubble, Digital Entertainment Network. IGE quickly grew to compete with the largest site at the time, Mysupersales, run by Jonathan Yantis. After a long battle between the two for market dominance in January of 2004, IGE bought out Mysupersales monopolizing the virtual currency market.

IGE is infamous for buying out not only competitors (Mysupersales, EZgaming, MMOShop, and Warcraft Gold among them) but also MMO fan sites (such as Thottbott, Allakhazam, WoWhead, and Ogaming). They have also been known in the past to use holding companies so that they could secretly purchase fan sites (and then promote their own agenda and editorial controls).

Recently IGE spun-off its MMO media empire into a separate company called Affinity Media quelling some lingering ethical questions about conflicts of interest that would be similar to Halliburton secretly owning the New York Times (or perhaps the actual conflict of interest of Murdoch owning the WSJ).

Between the merger in 2004 and 2007 they massively dropped the ball. Due to some select poor management personnel that often treated the company as a personal piggy bank combined with a corporate culture of outlandish arrogance, deep secrecy, and a lack of fiscal discipline the company started to fail its customers and fall into disarray. This allowed a new wave of competition to enter the market and undercut prices as customers fled away in droves due to poor service.

With debts piling up in 2007 IGE Inc. cleared house and restructured under the new name Atlas Technology Group incorporated in Vanuatu (for tax and legal purposes). Although it’s taken some time, they have drastically revamped their customer service and delivery departments. Like a fallen Greek hero, they have ditched their arrogance and learned the wisdom of quality customer service, business ethics, transparency, and fast delivery times.

Right now they are going through a transitional process and they aren’t there yet. The still don’t offer a phone number or an office location and the fact that they were incorporated in Vanuatu isn’t exactly a transparent way to start a company. The Atlas Technology Group is different from IGE of the past, but has not completely transformed.

It may be on the path to do so.

Purchasing

IGE's purchasing process is rather standard. The website is well laid out and after adding the proper amount of currency to your cart (which is sold in bulk amounts with price discounts for larger quantities) you check out and enter in your character information along with your real life contact information.

As a fraud prevention measure, if you are ordering a large amount of currency, they will call you to confirm your order which is a nice added touch (even if it’s intention is to protect them more than to assist you). You can select when you want the currency delivered to you and any special instructions along with it.

Customer Service

IGE's customer service has improved over the past few months. The average response time via live chat is less than a minute. It seems Atlas Technology Group has really invested in thier customer service department as it is much improved compared to only three months ago. The agents we talked to offered more legitimate responses and less canned copy and paste answers.

Once you are connected with a live chat agent the response time to your specific queries has improved indicating that the number of customers an agent is serving at once has decreased. Their English was excellent and the customer service agent was polite and answered almost all of my questions.

They let me know that they were based out of Hong Kong although when asked where their office was located I got the same canned response: “I apologize, I am not privy of that information.” This struck me as a bit odd.

One question they couldn’t answer was where they were located. The “old” IGE told me that they were located in Oklahoma, but refused to offer a street address (or happen to know a few common facts that anyone living in Oklahoma would know). The new IGE is more upfront and let me know that they were based out of Hong Kong although when asked where their office was located I got the same canned response: “I apologize, I am not privy of that information.”

This struck me as a bit odd. Another question they couldn’t answer was their phone number. Currently, they call customers for fraud prevention measures, but refuse to take chat requests by the phone. As more and more virtual currency sellers offer phone support this continues to hurt their customer service rating.

Despite the lack of a phone number IGE provides very quick e-mail and live chat responses.

Delivery

IGE claims that most orders are delivered within 24 hours, but sometimes it may take longer. This is especially true of larger orders as they are known at times of claiming to have a larger stock than they actually have.

They claim that the average order delivery time is 9 hours. The first time we ordered we used a cell phone number and paid through PayPal using a credit card. The order was completed and then refunded after 15 minutes due to “security reasons”.

We e-mailed about our order and received an e-mail response in eight minutes that indicated we had to provide a land line phone number that was tied to our address (they check every phone number to make sure it is tied to the credit card address). So we ordered again using a land-line phone number tied to our credit card. This time the order went through and we received a phone call confirming the order after about ten minutes.

However, the actual order was not processed for another five hours even though it was a small order size. If it was a larger order size, it could have taken even longer.

Conclusion

IGE is a safe and secure bet to purchase your virtual currency.

They provide 24/7 customer service with fast response times - although we would prefer they provided phone support and an address. They are the market leader and generally a professional company to deal with.

In late 2006 and early 2007 the company faced some internal management disputes causing quality to drop. However, with the restructuring in 2007 they addressed many of these problems and are back in top form as the market leader. Furthermore, the separation between their virtual currency sites and their MMO media empire cleared up a number of ethical concerns.

They seem to have settled down and matured a bit as profit margins have dropped and competition has increased. No longer are they quiet as arrogant and reckless as they were in their “virtual” teenage years.

Due to quality and consistent customer service, purchasing, delivery, we award the Editors Choice seal of approval.