MMeOw is currently down for the count, but please visit the LOTRO Combo Blog. It aggregates content from some of the best LOTRO-related blogs and podcasts on the net.

Public Service Announcement: Gold Selling

Tony posted this on January 16th, 2010. It has 2 Comments »
Categorized as Editorials and Thoughts.
Tagged as , , .
Shorthand Link: http://mmeow.net/tw2562

Every day this site gets a good amount searches related to buy­ing gold in LOTRO. For those of you try­ing to find that infor­ma­tion, my main piece of advice is sim­ple: don’t do it.

No gold seller is rep­utable in the sense that they’re “OK” to use. Even if they do their ser­vices prop­erly, buy­ing gold is against the terms of ser­vice you agree to every time you play the game. Los­ing your account (and, essen­tially, the money you’ve invested into it so far) is not worth­while. Addi­tion­ally, other ser­vices (such as power lev­el­ing) require these places to log into and play your account … I don’t know how any­one can feel com­fort­able with that, espe­cially given recent warn­ings about accounts being hijacked in LOTRO.

Beyond all of the account con­cerns, it really only just does you, the player, a dis­ser­vice. In the long run, it’s not that hard to make money in Mid­dle Earth. This is par­tic­u­larly true in the later stretches of the game, in areas such as Moria. You can save even more by join­ing a kin­ship and shar­ing what you don’t need. There’s always some­one else out there who wants your cop­per, yet doesn’t need the sil­ver you use. Hell, some­times peo­ple are nice enough to donate you the money for that horse you’ve been des­per­ate for.

I real­ize a lot of peo­ple know this, but there seems to be a lot of peo­ple who don’t. I know new MMORPG play­ers, par­tic­u­larly, seem to not under­stand the reper­cus­sions. To me it’s as silly as pay­ing for cheat codes. Enjoy the game and let these gold sell­ers find some­thing else to do. Maybe those of you look­ing for this will stum­ble upon this post and recon­sider your situation.

MMeOw is currently down for the count, but please visit the LOTRO Combo Blog. It aggregates content from some of the best LOTRO-related blogs and podcasts on the net.

Gold Selling Outlawed in China

Tony posted this on June 30th, 2009. It has 3 Comments »
Categorized as News.
Tagged as , .
Shorthand Link: http://mmeow.net/tw1916

This news has got­ten a lot of atten­tion so far, and jus­ti­fi­ably so. China has been one of the coun­tries at the fore­front of gold sell­ing and their pres­ence has cer­tainly been felt within LotRO at one point or another. If this law adhered to and enforced, essen­tially all vir­tual “black mar­ket” sales for items, gold, etc. will be offi­cially against the law. I think this best sums it up:

“The vir­tual cur­rency, which is con­verted into real money at a cer­tain exchange rate, will only be allowed to trade in vir­tual goods and ser­vices pro­vided by its issuer, not real goods and ser­vices,” the Min­istries said.

I’ve noticed that obvi­ous gold spam­ming in LotRO has gone down a lot over the last sev­eral months. It used to be that any given day you’d run into sev­eral of these sell­ers within Bree, in par­tic­u­lar. It didn’t mat­ter what server you were on, Brandy­wine or oth­er­wise. Some­times you’d find farm­ers as well, who were gen­er­ally pretty obvi­ous because they all wore the same thing, ran in sus­pi­ciously tight groups and had sim­i­lar names (Xihu, Xiho and Xiha, for example).

I don’t know that it’s for lack of try­ing, though. Tur­bine has tools to report gold spam­mers (although those weren’t always in place), but I think the main dif­fi­culty for sell­ers has been what I per­ceive is a gen­eral lack of inter­est in these offer­ings from LotRO play­ers. I could be wrong, but the ben­e­fits of buy­ing gold in LotRO just don’t seem as strong as in some other MMORPGs. The game, over­all, doesn’t suit that mind set … par­tic­u­larly when many of the best things in the game (and thus, most desir­able) can’t be bought or traded in the first place.

Obvi­ously defeat­ing sell­ing in China also involves defeat­ing buy­ing as well. I don’t know that this can be under­stated, given how much of the pop­u­la­tion in the coun­try actively plays MMORPGs. It’s a huge mar­ket and this will be a major blow for these com­pa­nies. Richard Heeks at the Uni­ver­sity of Man­ches­ter esti­mates that around 80% to 85% of gold sell­ers are based within China.

This is actu­ally very well timed with LotRO’s upcom­ing launch in China. Hope­fully it will help things go a bit more smoothly.