Selling/Buying Game accounts

[mystvearn]

Is it legal to buy/sell MMORPG accounts? Especially of accounts where the game is free in the first place. I can see lots of people making money out of this.

[pam123]

Originally Posted by mystvearn Is it legal to buy/sell MMORPG accounts? Especially of accounts where the game is free in the first place. I can see lots of people making money out of this.

For sale : Level 40 Paladin


In theory the "Right of first sale" should apply but you're going to end up fighting the EULA if you try it.
The guys who run the game aren't going to be any happier about this then they are about gold farmers and they'll probably just ban the account.
If you have the time and cash you could try taking this to court but that's hardly a money making enterprise.
Last but not least, there's a ready made scam factor here. You would be giving your account details to someone who is not entirely legit, that's just asking to be ripped off.

[Jester]

I actually know a guy that has made a little bit of money on the side selling EQ and WoW characters. I dont know how he keeps from getting scamed but he does it.

[Alaron]

Yup, selling characters is quite popular. Friend of mine made a few hundred on a WoW character.

[nocturnx]

I sold my WoW account for a large sum, atleast I made back all the money I paid in monthly fees. It worked out great, I put it on ebay and immediately got several emails about it. Someone bought it out and we made the transaction via paypal and then the next day I got an email from ebay saying the transaction was illegal, would be cancelled, and they would not charge me a seller fee, but by then the transaction had already been made. So I made out and didn't even have to pay an ebay seller fee. And this happened even though I had a EULA disclaimer in my auction.

I did have to contact the buyer more than once to remove my email from the account because I kept getting the monthly payment receipts and character transfer notices in my email.

[Stuey]

Murder b/c of sold virtual weapon.

Buying/selling of virtual goods isn't new and I too have heard about character sales.

There are companies in China which have players playing around the clock to level up characters for cash.

[Negeva]

Thought some auctions sites like Ebay were banning the sale of these game accounts?

I moderate a gaming site and we've had to ban the sale of gaming accounts and goods due to the amount of scammers out there; even though we had a disclaimer stating that our site wasn't responsible we still had to try and deal with the complaints. More hassle than it's worth.

The only questionable sale item was in-game gold - some emails from Nexon (Maple Story) informing us that allowing adverts for cheap ingame currency was illegal and prohibited according to their EULA. They never really had issues with account selling/trading.

[Jaggannath]

I've also heard of the character factories churning out lvl 60 WoW characters, and I've known of a few people who've sold their 2-3 characters (usually a lvl 60, about a lvl 48 and a low lvl character) because they get bored. They've got a way of working around it, but I haven't really delved into it at all

[tomster2300]

I believe in WoW the sale of in-game gold for real cash is supposed to be illegal, and vice versa. You get a ton of spammers in the game advertising for it though, but they typically get banned before too long.

There are sites where you can buy characters and gold for real money, but they all seem a little too sketchy for me. Blizzard doesn't condone it, and they ban the account if they figure it out.

I read a blog once where a guy tried out one of the sites and used his own character to follow the one that was being created around to see if they would really follow through or not. I don't remenber the final outcome, but he said it got leveled up relatively quickly and was close to 60 in a week or so. He could also tell the shift change when the day employee went home and the night guy took his place - the night one leveled up faster than the former.

[The_YongGrand]

Originally Posted by Stuey Murder b/c of sold virtual weapon. Buying/selling of virtual goods isn't new and I too have heard about character sales. There are companies in China which have players playing around the clock to level up characters for cash.

Not sure about selling those 'characters' and 'weapons' online, but the activities are surely illegal. I thought these are already fixed from the very start when the player registered his/her account?

And also, sitting at the computer around the clock to level-up the characters? Oh man... this will have very painful consequences. Remember that one person died after playing Warcraft 24h in a row?

[Jaggannath]

The concern is less about professionals levelling, and more about people at home who let kids die because both the mother and father are playing