An article was passed to me yesterday about gold farming being banned in China and being that I work in this industry it would be a very bad thing to happen. Most of the farming in the world for gold sellers is done by China, so if it becomes illegal and there is no supply we are going to have issues until the farming offices are moved elsewhere. You can see the article in question over at InformationWeek authored by some fellow named Thomas Claburn that seems to want to bring attention to himself. If you check his source over at the China Ministry of Commerce website there is no actual reference to gold farmers and/or sellers.
This law is actually related to how QQ coins were used to gamble and purchase real world goods, not how they are farming gold on Online games and selling it for real world currency. The writer of this article seems to have taken the version from China and modified it for appeal instead of accuracy. While some companies have heard about this addition to China law and feared how it might affect their business, there really seems to be nothing to worry about at the moment. Not to mention the concept seems kind of silly considering the large amount of people in China that are employed to farm and how they would rather tax it heavily instead of killing the industry.
In any case the comments for the post were pretty amusing and one involved calling gold sellers scum, then suggested that buyer’s should be shunned. I think the large amount of military employees that play MMO’s and buy gold would disagree. If anything they could be the postermen & women of why gold selling works and how the game designs are flawed. Those who shun buyers need to understand that if you had 4 hours to play a week and you needed 5k gold for a mount, how are you going to enjoy the “GAME” when all you do is farm for weeks? Of course that’s a completely different topic and I won’t go into it now…
I’ve been asked this question so many times over the past four years that it makes me want to stab someone. However, I do understand that no one wants to lose their account and people who buy virtual goods are paranoid creatures. The answer is: No… In normal cases.. Now the reason I said “In normal cases” is because there are exceptions and while I’m mainly referring to WoW here, it really applies to every MMO.
One of the largest causes of people assuming their account is going to get banned is because of previous reports of it happening by uneducated buyers. These people will look for the lowest prices possible and end up ordering from a shady website, forum seller or listing site. And if they actually receive the delivery the account shortly ends up being closed for economy exploitation, no matter the gold amount. Why? There are groups of people dedicated to stealing account information and selling the gold off the account. When the owner of the account reports that the account was stolen and it looks pretty obvious, they are going to ban the account the gold was given to for association.
There are also companies that gain the gold by using in-game exploits, but this may just resort in a temp ban when they associate the buyer with them. To prevent these issues just search for the site name on Google and see if there are reviews for it anywhere. Established websites will have years of people commenting good & bad. Sites that sell hacked account gold won’t have repeat customers. If you can’t find any results then it just depends on if you are a person who loves a gamble.
These are the two main exceptions which could cause trouble for buyers. MMO companies have no intention to ban their paying subscribers unless they have to make an example of the player due to them talking about the purchase on in-game public chat channels(yes, there are people who do this.) However, they do love to ban sellers because it makes them more money. You ban a buyer and they quit, you ban a seller and they buy another copy of your game(possibly even a time card too.) That turns into quite a bit of $$$ if you ban these accounts repeatedly.
So recently I’ve gotten re-addicted to FFXI which is apparently no longer as painful to solo as it used to be in the early days. It seems to be a combination of a def/evasion increase vs auto atk target while fighting anything that isn’t tough or above, and a floating kill task book related to Fields of Valor. For groups there is also mentoring which has been basically ripped from EQ2, but honestly every damned MMO needs to rip that off. Unfortunately, it’s still a royal pain in the ass to make money on the game and has tempted me to order FFXI Gil.
This brings me to the point of this post..
I was going to order directly from where I work but I started to get curious about competitor delivery times and costs. I used to buy EQ plat off playerauctions.com so I went there and reviewed some of their sellers. In some cases the sellers have a website but these are many company names I’ve not seen before, and are likely all Chinese companies and freelancers. I’d pretty much assume you are purchasing from Chinese who have different degrees of English speaking skill when you go there, so don’t ever expect in depth customer support for a problem. When I asked questions to some of these sellers the answers were very very simplistic, even though spelled properly.
I finally found one company that looked reasonable and was selling the amount I wanted(500k) so I placed the order and started to wait. I also sent a message to the company with a phone number and times I could be contacted. This is the best thing to supply on order comments whenever you are ordering, especially if you can be called 24/7 on the order. Telling the company “plz deliver fast” or “i need this soon” isn’t going to do a thing; a company can only deliver as fast as it’s supply, and there is no way the company can speed up this supply just for you. To make a short story even shorter; the gil was delivered in about 17 hours from placing the order which is pretty good these days, but I plan to order more from a different company to compare further..
More often than not you will see a gold seller request a phone call or id when making a gold purchase. This may not be listed bluntly on the FAQ(or not at all) because the concept usually deters customers. However, the service should be able to tell you if this is required by contacting them by email or live chat.
Now you may scream “omg! identity theft!” if they request an id, but you need to keep in mind that Virtual Goods are a pain when it comes to preventing fraud and unwarranted chargebacks. There is no physical item to track, and screenshots of something in-game or of some text is hardly proof of anything received/delivered; not to mention PayPal accounts only need a username and password to make a purchase. Those of which are often stolen because people attempt to login to them from a fake link in an email by someone pretending to be PayPal(aka phishing.)
While it can be bad to freely toss around an image of your drivers license, companies normally understand this and will ask for an array of different items to prove you are the owner of the card/account. The most common and safest option would be some mail, and everyone should have this. Be it a bill, credit card offer or a playboy magazine, everyone age 15+ will get something with their name on it in the mail. This option provides the basics needed to confirm your identity and it’s nothing worse than what can be found in the public directory. If the company does not allow mail to be used then try to find the next safest option, but if an ID is required see if they will allow the id number and photo to be covered.
Here’s a couple additional tips as well:
1. Don’t say to the customer support: “But my PayPal is verified and I have a confirmed address”, it’s likely to just to irritate them. Seller’s protection does not cover virtual goods, so that’s about as useful as saying that some hooker in an alleyway can vouch that you are legit.
2. If for some reason you have no digital camera, camera phone or scanner to get an image on your computer then just go to Kinkos, Staples, etc and get it put on a disc.
Through the years of working in Virtual Sales I’ve come to the conclusion that most people buy the products blindly and are never educated as to who/what/where the product is coming from, or how things work in general. Then they start to bitch and complain when things don’t go the way they assumed. I’m here to shed a little light and perhaps make at least one less person aggravate me..
The first thing I’m going to tell you straight out is that whatever information you read on the FAQ of a gold seller’s website is wrong(or at least most of it.) Honestly, while I hate to tell people this because it does mean more work for me; there is no point in reading the FAQ. When it comes to Virtual Sales a company policy will be changed according to events/problems related to the games, gold suppliers, the shape of the clouds in the sky, or a pebble hitting the company owner’s car. Changes happen so often that no company will keep it 100% up to date; most just leave the original FAQ there until so many changes have been made that the entire document is incorrect.
This isn’t to say that you should buy the gold blindly, but to contact the service by email or live chat before purchasing from them for the current information. Don’t purchase until you receive a reply and save a record or print the information off; you may be able to use this later on for a bonus if there is a delay on your delivery. Do keep in mind that some time-frames will not apply until a certain part of the process(eg: if they require some kind of call or id before the delivery estimate comes into play.), so be sure to ask about that as well.