I’ve seen a lot of posts about the Celestial Steed on the blogosphere, from “Oooh shiny” to “Slippery slope” to “Just for morons”, but I haven’t seen any recognition of the fact that with the for-cash pets and now this mount, Blizzard has stealthily set up a way for players to trade their real world money for gold.
(Note, not condoning this in any way) This is how it would work:
Bob, a hardworking Hunter with a good real life job and not a lot of play time, wants gold. Maybe he’s going on a GDKP run, maybe he wants some pieces crafted. Whatever. So he asks around in trade and finds XXArthaaasX, a DK with 40k in the bank and his mom’s credit card paying for his account. XXArthaaasX really wants the shiny pony, or the Lil’KT pet, so they agree that Bob will buy a pony code and trade it to XXArthaasX for, say, 20k gold. They do; neither Bob nor XXArthaaasX tries to cheat the other. Now Bob has gold and XXArthaaasX has a pony.
This is basically the “EVE model” of RMT. In EVE players can trade game-time codes for ISK, the EVE equivalent of gold. It’s built into the game and so there’s no risk to players of losing either their ISK or their code. In WoW, you’d obviously have to trust both members of the transaction to live up to their side of the bargain.
Thing is, I’m not actually sure whether or not this is against Blizzard’s Terms of Use or not. I’m sure we’ll find that out soon enough. Personally I think they ought to support it. Unless XXArthaaasX sells his pony code on ebay for $20, he can’t make actual money from his WoW gold. All he gets is in-game loot. I think that means it stops short of what Blizzard really wants to avoid, a way to trade gold for cash and making WoW a way for people to make money.
The Terms of Use Agreement contains the following verbiage:
“Blizzard does not recognize any purported transfers of virtual property executed outside of the Game, or the purported sale, gift or trade in the “real world” of anything that appears or originates in the Game. Accordingly, you may not sell in-game items or currency for “real” money, or exchange those items or currency for value outside of the Game. ”
As the mount code is a real world item, trading it for in-game gold is against the Terms of Use Agreement.
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I strongly disagree with you on this one as it would legimitize gold selling.
If such transactions were supported, a gold seller with millions of gold could offer gold in exchange of pont codes and then turn around and then sell the codes for real money, a few dollars cheaper than Blizzard.
The code for dollars, although not supported by Blizzard, is not against the End User Legal Agreement, nor the Terms of Service Agreement.
Heck, I never sold gold but if such schemes were possible, I might ask Blizzard to recover my Suramar banker and its guild bank and see how much real cash I can make with the 600,000 gold I deleted. Solely out of curiosity of course 😉
The reason this might be workable, albeit small-time, is that you can only use one code per account. There are a limited number of people who want the shiny horses. I just don’t believe there’s enough of a market to be worth gold farmers’ time.
BTW your interpretation is how I read the TOS as well. But just because it is against the rules does not mean it will not happen. I have seen people trying to sell Spectral Tiger codes in trade for gold, or asking someone to trade them a time card for gold. On a small scale, it happens. I think it’s too cumbersome for much exploiting.