Bitcoin Forum

Would anyone be interested in purchasing online game currencies (WoW gold, EQ1 Plat, EQ2 Plat, Eve ISK, YPP PoE, etc.) for bitcoins? If so I can start working out (rough) exchange rates (If anyone knows a good place to FIND a community agreed upon exchange rate that would be even better.)

I think this would be interesting.  I myself play one of those games occasionally - I think there is probably a good crossover between geeks that play computer games and geeks that like bitcoin.

Well one response is one more than I was expecting! :) I'll see what I can work out Vs. how much RPGMoney I have available.

Cool! gold farming for bitcoin lol.

I hope you will have fair exchange rates, because there is hard competition in this business. Mainly because the gold sellers are running bots or chinese children lol!

That's going to be an interesting issue, considering I'm NOT a bot or a Chinese child :) Going to be hard to compete but I'll figure something out.

Uh Blizzard won't like that. wow.com did a feature on how gold selling is explicitly not allowed in WoW. (http://www.wow.com/2010/03/16/the-lawbringer-legal-gold-sales-not-a-blizzards-chance-in-hel/)  Such trades could be bannable offenses. You won't find a legit trading price because there is none.

The idea is interesting in general for game currencies that have a precedent of being traded. The only one that comes to me is Second Life's L$

All game currencies have a precedent of being traded, the trick is not getting banned for it.

Here's some math... 

Assume WOW gold on a RP server is selling for $6.99usd for 1,000GP.  (Feb. Prices, don't ask)

Assume generous exchange rate at 50BTC per 1usd. (Today's prices on bitcoinmarket.com)


1,000GP would sell for 350BTC, or about 2.85 gold for 1 bitcoin.

In fact, Blizzard makes a lot of money from this.
They hold mass bannings, ban accounts, not IP addresses, so the botters make new accounts and pay for their accounts, so Blizzard makes big bucks.
World of Warcraft does have a two (or three) week try out period.
I heard it's possible to get an account up to level 80 in that time, mining gold along the way and selling that, and finally selling the account for big bucks!

Anyhow, these are all rumors I heard, don't take 'em from me. I don't even play World of Warcraft!

I think the key would be to have a system like the Bitcoin Exchange where the website administrator isn't taking part in the trades, but rather just proving people a way to find good prices to trade amongst themselves. I don't think there has been a single trade using Moneybookers and I've recently read a lot of negative reviews, so perhaps you can figure out which one or two currencies would be the best suited to trade and then convince dwdollar to drop Moneybookers and add a game currency to his exchange. It helps if the currency has an easy way to prove to an outside party that a transaction occurred, but as I'm not much of a gamer, I'm not so sure whether game currencies would have such a feature. As far as I know, PayPal doesn't have such a feature and it really bothers me. Oh well. :-\

One big challenge for trading in WoW gold is that there are so many different servers.  Gold does not transfer between them, so you can only sell gold to someone who uses the server you are on.

I don't know about Blizzard, but Jagex (the makers of Runescape) had a whole bunch of banks gang up on them and demand that they take care of gold farming.... or they would lose the ability to use credit cards for payment of their services.  Essentially the charge-backs and fraud rates (from stolen credit cards and other schemes to defraud banks) were so high that a formal investigation as to if the video game company itself was a criminal organization had started.

Such a threat forced the company to take a hard line on the issue or face a very real possibility of bankruptcy.  There were several changes made to the game explicitly to get that gold farming put under control.

It turns out that the potential for money laundering and some other very real criminal organizations were involved with the gold farming too that made this more than simply fraud but something that encouraged other kinds of problems that got Scotland Yard involved with as well.  There have also been a couple of players that have died over the issue (and subsequent lawsuits against the video game maker from those deaths).  Basically it is a huge legal mess that their only protection was to do much more than pay lip service against gold farming.

I also know that other video game companies (MMORPG makers) have been contacted by banks about this issue and have demanded similar kinds of actions to be taken, and Blizzard is one of those who have at least made some efforts as a result of that happening too.  It certainly is a blatant falsehood that the MMORPG companies involved are making a profit off of this activity and in fact it turns out in the long run to be a substantial loss of income for them instead.

Some virtual environments like Second Life and There have openly embraced "real world money", but even they have some fraud problems.  If you are going to engage in trading game gold, I would strongly recommend that you stick with games that permit the activity.  There certainly are enough games that permit it to remove the need for now to engage in that kind of activity for those games that discourage this trade or prohibit it entirely.  It is possible to be involved with a criminal investigation if you directly engage in these kind of trades for games that prohibit trades.

Just saw the following entry from this past week:
  http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Notes_20backed_20by_20online_20currency_20(WoW_20gold_2c_20Maplestory_20Mesos_2c_20Etc)

The assumption made is that because Bitcoin is a digital currency, other digital currencies should be able to replicate the forward moves that Bitcoin appears to be making.  Obviously, the writer is overlooking that there are fundamental differences between bitcoins and gaming currencies, such as Linden Labs' Linden Dollars (L$) used in Second Life.

Users of those currencies are quite welcome to use Bitcoin as an intermediary currency however.

I said that awhile ago. You can buy virtual currency for bitcoin but cant really use bitcoin itself as the virtual currency.

wow gold is different to bitcoin imo.

BitCoin aids the anonymity required in order to get away with buying Gold in WoW or any online game. However the trick is to get the money to them anonymously, which becomes ALOT more harder.

Not quite sure how you would solve that, because then you'd just be ripe for the honey trap.

Entropia Universe money is tradeable, it is pegged to the dollar.

Paypal sent notices to those whose accounts were reported by Blizzard for selling WoW gold:
http://wow.joystiq.com/2011/01/28/blizzard-strikes-gold-sellers-with-paypal-notices/

The interesting part was that PayPal is recognizing WoW gold as intellectual property, and doesn't refer to it as an in-game currency or digital currency.

Apparently Blizzard's action is quite a hot button -- over a hundred comments were posted:

Some samples: