Account appraisal question

[Stophocles]

I want to sell something that is worth nothing LOL!

[DrScience]

selling accounts is against the Blizzard EULA and TOS. On these forums we abide by the rules set down by Blizzard and are therefore firmly against the selling of accounts. We will not assist in any way shape or form with this.

[Polaba]

What he said, and this is probably advertising so /reported.

[Stophocles]

Lololololol

[Polaba]

What's so funny? Something along the lines of

"ommg u gais r suhc nubs!!!11"

[Lothaer]

you account is actually worth zilch, nada, nothing. if you dont want to play anymore then cancel the account or give it away,

[DrScience]

technically you cant give it away either - but its not as bad as selling virtual property.

[Lazt]

It is a common mantality, that selling a virtual item (acct) is "stupid".

In reality, you are selling not an item, or lack there of... But you are selling the TIME it took to aquire such item, account, or gold.

For a person that wants to enjoy a game, but only has 30 minutes a day free time or an hour or whatever... It may be worth a few hundred dollars to have an account that is 70 with epic gear.

Time, is money. Poor people simply do not understand this. If they did, they would not be poor. If a sales person makes $30 an hour selling, for example purposes... and he takes an hour to go buy mc donalds for $5 bucks to save money... he has just spent $35.. where he is THINKING in his head oh well delivery cost $15, so I would rather save $10 by buying mc'd's.....

Anyways point is that spending money to save time, is not stupid by any means. If I was not worried that Blizz would ban my account...... I would gladly spend money for gold, because I can make money way faster than I can make gold.

AND NO..... Grinding gold is NOT fun.... so NO I am not taking away from the fun of the game........

Anyways... I am bipolar so I may agree that buying gold is bad again tomorrow :)

[Kalos]

It wasn't so much that he was selling the time he spent, or the digital stats he gathered; it was more the issue of it not being his property to sell, especially considering the characters are on Blizzard's servers and are made up of Blizzard's propriatory character templates and code. Digital character ownership is sketchy at best, and selling something that isn't rightfully and wholly yours to sell is illigal. One cannot truely say they 'own' a character, only that they have paid for access to a service to which they use.

[Kodonn]

It is a common mantality, that selling a virtual item (acct) is "stupid".

In reality, you are selling not an item, or lack there of... But you are selling the TIME it took to aquire such item, account, or gold.

lol...I know a guy (who will be up for his parole hearing in another 23 months) who tried that logic on the judge. He explained that he really wasn't trying to "sell" that TV, the jewelry and those DVDs to the pawnshop owner, but rather he was selling the "time" it took him to relocate those items from that apartment to the pawnbrokers shop. :grin:

Seriously...the only time I could see that arguement as even remotely legitimate, is if someone hired a person to come to his house, sit in front of his computer and play his WoW character for him after he logged in. And even THAT is pushing the limits of the EULA.

If your time is so valuable that you have to pick and choose which parts of a game you can "afford" to play and which parts you need to hire someone to do for you.....then you probably need to reassess your form of entertainment and whether you should be playing WoW at all.

[xDarkDrifterx]

For a person that wants to enjoy a game, but only has 30 minutes a day free time or an hour or whatever... It may be worth a few hundred dollars to have an account that is 70 with epic gear.

IMO - Then they are trying to enjoy the wrong game.


Time, is money. Poor people simply do not understand this. If they did, they would not be poor. )

A bit OT but just to comment on this:

If Joe Poorboy knows that time is money and he's only trained to work on a grill at McD's, how is he to charge more for his time? How is he to make more money? He's not a consultant, he's not a professional, he's not billing by the hour . . . knowing that time is money doesn't change his financial situation, so no he would not cease to be poor just by gaining this knowledge.

[RioteR]

I really don't see why selling accounts is against their ToS. If someone doesn't sell it to someone else, they will just have to buy their own, and they will make money off of that. But that means that the original account is going to die and they won't get money from it... so its just like one account replacing the other. Why not just keep one account alive under a different name.

[clevins]

Sigh...

Let's say that Blizzard DID allow account selling. What you're selling then isn't the time you spent, etc... it's the toon and ithe *difference* in its capabilities from the same toon in a level 1 version. My 70 rogue in all epics is capable of far more than a level 1 rogue... that's the value of a toon. It gives you access (if you can find the other people) to SSC and The Eye if you want.

That the property is virtual isn't important... money is just paper with ink on it and increasingly not even that. I can Paypal someone money - there's nothing physical transferred. It carries value because we all agree that it does and agree on a common currency that can be widely used.

The point that IS important is that we don't, in fact, own our toons. OUr accounts provide us access to the toons on the Blizzard servers but not ownership of the toons. So what people who do sell accounts are selling is access to a toon that has a lot of capabilities. The more rare the capabilities, the higher the price I'd bet... if it was legal and there was a market.

As to why Blizz doesn't allow this I don't know, but I can speculate - it violates the game. When I see a highly geared 70 tank (for example) I assume they know how to play reasonably well. Why do I assume this? Because I'm assuming that the person played that toon from level 1 until now. Of course even if they did they could be a poor player... but the odds are decent. If I suddenly played a 70 prot warrior I'd SUCK since I've never played a warrior or tanked at all. And I play WoW a bunch. Imagine someone who doesn't... that's why (I think). They *could* just like they could allow accont sharing... but the ingame issues it would raise would be a hassle.

[Kodonn]

I really don't see why selling accounts is against their ToS. If someone doesn't sell it to someone else, they will just have to buy their own, and they will make money off of that. But that means that the original account is going to die and they won't get money from it... so its just like one account replacing the other. Why not just keep one account alive under a different name.

If your question is serious and not just a trolling...because selling an account with leveled characters and gear and gold already ON it, would open the door to all sorts of problems.

First you would create a precedent for people to buy an account, get a high level character on it, then sell it for profit.

That leads to the question of who actually owns the character and the gear.
As intellectual property, or programming code, or pixals on Blizzard's servers, it would seem to be Blizzard's property. But then how can someone legally sell that and keep the profit? Either way, it looks like legal issues to deal with.

Then you also have the problem of liability. Who is going to be responsible for insuring that what the seller told you you are getting is actually what you end up with? As it is, Blizzard is constantly dealing with all sorts of patch bugs and game issues. Do you think they want to employ yet more personnel to deal with complaints from people who aren't satisfied with the account they bought and..."could Blizzard please add the epics and xx thousand gold so-and-so said was on this character I bought"? I doubt they want to do that, especially when they aren't getting any profit from it.

Now let's take it a step further. Suppose this person who buys new accounts and raises leveled characters on it for the purpose of selling...does so without any considerations for the other players on the server. After all, they aren't going to be keeping the character, so they ninja loot and rip-off other players whenever they can, just to get the account equipped ASAP. Now they sell it to some unknowing but well intentioned new player (who "just doesn't have the time to grind a character up to 70 because time is money"). The first thing this new player finds is that their account came with a ready made bad reputation and they can't get a raid invite for nothing. Hmmm...more complaints for Blizzard to deal with.

That's just a couple examples. Maybe they are extreme, but why should Blizzard take that risk? They don't need the extra hassles.

Blizzard does allow you 1 way to sell your game....NOT your account.
It's in the TOS. You can delete all your characters, uninstall all the software files from your computer, and you can sell the CDs, the game manual and the box it came in. That's it. That's the "line" they drew and that's as far as they are willing to deal with it. Anything else..it's simpler and cheaper for them to just ban. Problem solved.

[piscene]

I really don't see why selling accounts is against their ToS. If someone doesn't sell it to someone else, they will just have to buy their own, and they will make money off of that. But that means that the original account is going to die and they won't get money from it... so its just like one account replacing the other. Why not just keep one account alive under a different name.

Basically, it's because the account does not belong to you. Blizz owns the account, and you can't sell something that does not belong to you.

Why would Blizz want you to buy an account? They would rather have you start from lvl 1 and spend your monthly fee leveling. It's just good business.

[Eido]

I think the real reason Bliz dont allow selling accounts is because it would cause them a huge headache in policing who owns what.

If I sell you an account and then someone else claims it was stolen from them or taken under false pretenses, then Blizz, by their condoning of account selling, will have a responsibility to sort the mess out - time and money.

By banning account trading they avoid such problems - same with out-of-game item trading.