The Playing Impact of Gold Seller Marketing on World of Warcraft

When I started on World of Warcraft, there were “buy WoW gold” sites, but the reality of its impact was nowhere near clear.

When the chat spammers started logging in and whisper-spamming their huge blocks of ad text about their services, the impact of Gold Sellers started to become a little more clear to the general playing public who otherwise wouldn’t have purposely come into contact with Gold Sellers in any form. Addons to block tells from level 1 players became a lot more popular until Blizzard did something about it from their side.

Nowadays instead of the whisper spam, players in the cities and the low-level zones are regularly “ninja invited” into parties (meaning there’s no conversation beforehand, the player wasn’t listed in LFG as looking for a party, and the invite was out of the blue) where the Gold Sellers and Bot Makers use the raid line or party line to pump out their scripted sales line if the player accepts the party invite. It’s annoying to everyone but especially confusing to new players.

I have guildmates who say they get over 20 invites per hour now, and I’ve had to recommend the addon AutoDecline a few times, as well as installing it myself for when I play my low-level toons or am in the city with my bank toon.


Other Effects Of Gold Sellers

I, and none of the people I know on the game, have ever bought Warcraft gold.

A few of us are good at earning it ourselves on the game, and we’ve always been free with giving tips to guildmates and friends who expressed financial frustration.

But, I’m quite sure that the reason why I find it so easy to get rich on the game is because OTHER people buy Warcraft Gold, and then use it to buy some of the things I have to offer. Why else would they pay so much for things that are so easy to get, except by lack of knowledge and money to burn?

At any rate, while there are definite economic impacts, I’ll be covering that in a future entry. In the mean time, here’s some more of the Playing Impacts I’ve personally noticed with the growing problem of Gold Sellers on online games such as World of Warcraft:


Playing Impact: Trial Accounts

When I started World of Warcraft, it was on a 10-day trial account that came from my nephew’s Christmas gift of the original release of WoW. The trial account was exactly like the official, registered version, with the following exceptions:

• I could only advance to level 20
• I could have a maximum of ten (10) gold
• Trade skills cap at 100
• I could see I had mail (mail icon around minimap), but the mailbox was empty
• Unable to conduct a trade with another player, or use the AH
• Realms with login queues will give priority to customers with retail accounts.

Now, players on trial accounts have additional communications restrictions that weren’t in place when I went through, in an attempt to thwart the growing problem of Gold Seller Marketers using trial accounts to advertise their wares to players in-game:

• Trial account users cannot whisper players on the game, unless whispered to first.
• A limit on the number of tells that can be sent without someone whispering back.
• Public chat channels will be unavailable.

What’s The Big Deal?

The communications restrictions don’t sound like much when put simplistically like above, but consider two scenarios which may strongly affect a new player’s impression of the game and whether they stick around or not:

• Your friend joins WoW on a Trial account. She knows your name, but you don’t know hers. Now she can’t whisper you or mail when she comes online, she has to contact you out-of-game to communicate her (oh-so-easy-to-spell-and-remember) name to you.
• Someone completely new joins the game on a Trial and is confused and has questions, but doesn’t know anyone and isn’t in a guild. No longer can they ask questions on the General line, and while I haven’t tested it, if they also cannot SEE the General line during the Trial period, they may not even realize there IS such a public chat line around that can offer them assistance when they become a full member.

Considering World of Warcraft, like any other Online Game, has a certain percentage of people disabling their accounts each month, it’s got me wondering how the changes have affected their ability to change over Trial users into Registered users.

What Do You Think?

Is the game that awesome that without any ability to properly communicate during the first tenuous days of figuring out basic skills, Trial users are still converting to Registered users at the same rate?

Or, has the abuse of the Gold Selling Marketers skewed the Trial account data so badly that it could never really be examined?

(Originally written by WoWGrrl)