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1 - MMORPG QUESTIONS
a - What is an MMORPG?
A massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) is a genre of computer role-playing games (CRPGs) in which a large number of players interact with one another in a virtual world.
As in all RPGs, players assume the role of a fictional character (often in a fantasy world), and take control over many of that character's actions. MMORPGs are distinguished from single-player or small multi-player CRPGs by the number of players, and by the game's persistent world, usually hosted by the game's publisher, which continues to exist and evolve while the player is away from the game. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMORPG)
These kind of games, also called “Avatar” games have their roots in India, 200 BC, with the game Moksha-Patamu, an ancient version of the more recent game named Snakes and Ladders, invented in the UK around 1892. That is the first game where the players embodies a single playing piece and then attempts to develop or build that piece into something better. The game was created to teach the Hindu children how to attain “moksha” (heaven, bliss, and release from the eternal cycle of of reincarnation) despite being tempted by various sins, the “Patamu”. Doing good deeds advance players on ladders, while doing bad deeds drop them to snakes (Edward Castronova, A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Real-Money Trade in the Products of Synthetic Economies, 2006).
Those game evolved from Dave Ameson and Gary Gigax’s first edition of Dungeons & Dragons in 1972. Inspired by the J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth, they developed a game where every player controlled exactly one character, and was allowed to build up his skills and equipment through good playing. Player used to immerse themselves into a fantasy world, and actively moved inside it meeting friends, enemies and going through many trials and choices, who’s consequences helped to determine the specificity of every character. All the achievements of the character were permanent and contributed to build up his history, expertise and equipment for the next missions or adventure, whose difficulty increases as well to fit the new powers of the toon.
With Computers, D&D evolved into MUD’s, Multi User Domains games. The first of its kind was Habitat, developed in 1985 by F. Randall Farmer and Chip Morningstar. Players could control 2D avatars roaming in 2D spaces populated by other player connects through the internet, in a third person perspective. The most innovative thing about MUD’s was that those virtual 2D world did not go away when the player stop playing. The virtual world and its assets persisted in time and player could go and visit them whenever they wanted.
In 1997 Electronic Arts released Ultima Online; the first 2D massively multiplayer game, that still have around 200.000 active subscribers. The first 3D perspective MMORPG game were Sony’s EverQuest and Microsoft Asheron’s Call, both released in 1999, followed by Dark Age of Camelot and Anarchy Online in 2001.
How many people play them?
As of today, there are many MMORPG games, with about 50 millions active players, where about 20 millions of them pays a monthly subscription (White P. ,2008, MMOGData: Charts, MMOGData http://mmogdata.voig.com/Charts.html). Data for march 2008 shows that the most played MMO (though not a real “game”) is Second Life (26.2% market share), followed by World of Warcraft (20.9%) and Guild Wars (9.4%). Regarding games with a monthly subscription, the leading one is Wow with about 10 million active subscribers (including myself, even if I do not play anymore I am still paying to have an active account in order to make trial purchases), followed by Runescape (1 million subscribers) and Final Fantasy XI (500.000 subscribers).
2 - RMT QUESTIONS
What is a “virtual currency”?
Many MMORPG’s feature living economies. Virtual items and currency have to be gained through play and have definite value for players. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMORPG#Economics).
Virtual Currency is the currency that is used in MMORPG games to perform trades and purchases inside the game. In most games this currency is named Gold (like World of Warcraft, Warhammer, Age of Conan).
Other less common names are Platinum (Everquest, Dungeons & Dragons Online, Dark Age of Camelot), Gil (Final Fantasy XI), Isk (Eve Online), Adena (LineAge), Credits (Anarchy Online, Star Wars: Galaxies). Those currency are vital for players to purchase in game assets, and they can be gathered by performing various actions, including, but not limited to: looting killed monsters, trading with other players or NPC’s, completing missions or quests, crafting rare items and then resell them.
Those currency have an value even outside the game. This is because if the RMT market, where players trade their in game assets in exchange of real money. Virtual currencies have a determined value against real currencies. Economic studies show how virtual currency devalued against US Dollar by roughly 75% between 2005 and 2008. (R. Heeks, Current Analysis and Future Research Agenda on "Gold Farming": Real-World Production in Developing Countries for the Virtual Economies of Online Games, Development Informatics Group, 2008, p.21,82 http://www.sed.manchester.ac.uk/idpm/research/publications/wp/di/documents/di_wp32.pdf)
What is the RMT market? And how big is it?
RMT is an acronym for Real Money Trading (or Transfer), and it is the action of trading some in game assets in Exchange for real money. This market have its origins in the late 1990s with games like Ultima Online and Everquest. Castronova (2006) claim that the emergence of such market must have positive implications on welfare: “If some players are relatively well endowed with gold pieces while others are relatively well endowed with dollars, then the exchange of gold pieces for dollars raises well being for both. Some players have a lot of time and little dollars, others have a lot of dollars and little time. This is often what drives the market.”
The RMT market has grown enough to be called an “economic sub sector”, employing tens of thousands in developing countries, and with a global trade worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
It’s estimated that the total revenue for the RMT market to be about 200m dollars per year. The author himself claims this to be an underestimation, and he argue that the market value could very well be around 1 billion dollars per year and growing. (R. Heeks, Current Analysis and Future Research Agenda on "Gold Farming": Real-World Production in Developing Countries for the Virtual Economies of Online Games, Development Informatics Group, 2008,
http://www.sed.manchester.ac.uk/idpm/research/publications/wp/di/documents/di_wp32.pdf)
How many players are involved in RMT?
Yee (2005, Buying gold, Daedalus Project, 3(5), p15-16 http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/pdf/3-5.pdf) estimates show that 22% of mmorpg players had taken part in real money transactions, and spent an average of 135$ in total, and 45$ per year.
Data from Sony Station Exchange (the official RMT system introduced by Sony for two of its Everquest II servers) supports Yee that exactly 22% of players performs real money trading, but Sony’s data register an higher amount spent on average: 240$ per player in total and 46$ per year.
Are all RMT companies Chinese?
It is very frequent for this companies to use low-cost manpower from developing countries, especially China. That is actually a good thing because they are giving a job to thousands of people, and paying them a wage that is well over the region averages. (Heeks, 2008)
Most gold merchant are actually Chinese based businesses, and they are subject to the Chinese law only, while only a bunch of them are actually Americans, and conduct business practices under the U.S. federal laws. An american company will surely grant your purchase an higher level of safety. Even if many Chinese gold selling company can be considered reliable, I will still suggest to buy from companies that are 100% Americans (very few, if any), or at least with companies that have an office located inside the U.S. territory, with U.S. citizens employees providing the customer support.
What are the consequences of RMT on other players? Does it cause in-game inflation?
One of the main criticism of the RMT is that it causes in-game inflation. This is because if you increase the supply of an item (in this case, virtual currencies) and assume constant demand, the item’s value will drop. So it’ll require more currency to buy anything in-game, and there is inflation.
Anyway, this does not always fit the RMT market, and many studies has shown that game inflation is not an automatic consequence on the real money transfer. While inflation has undoubtedly been registered in many cases, there are some arguments that supports the concept that the linkage between gold farmers activities and in-game inflation is overestimated, and “receive a not proven verdict” (Heeks, 2008).
First, it is arguable that gold farmers actually increase the supply of in-game currency. If they merely reate goods that some other player would otherwise have created, they are not adding more currency into the game.
Second, the RMT can cause in-game inflation only if performed by a significant amount of players of the same game, or of the same game server. The effect of a single transaction is marginal if compared to the effect that the regular players community behavior can have on the economy.
Another reason is that virtual currency merchant do not only sell virtual currencies, they also farm and sell in-game items, so increasing their supply. This will cause those item’s price to drop, having a deflationary effect on the game economy, which will partly compensate for the inflation eventually caused by the currency increased supply.
As reported by Lehtiniemi, (How big is the RMT market anyway?, 2007, Virtual Economic Research Network, 2 Mar http://virtual-economy.org/blog/how_big_is_the_rmt_market_anyw) and Yee (2005, Buying gold, Daedalus Project, 3(5) http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/pdf/3-5.pdf) real game data do not show any long term inflationary effect. On the contrary, they show deflation: Eve Online Currency (Isk) devaluated in the period from October 2005 to June 2007, Runescape Gold devalued by 25% between September 2006 and July 2008, and the same goes for World of . Overall, virtual currency devalued against US Dollar by roughly 75% between 2005 and 2008. (R. Heeks, Current Analysis and Future Research Agenda on "Gold Farming": Real-World Production in Developing Countries for the Virtual Economies of Online Games, Development Informatics Group, 2008, p.21,82 http://www.sed.manchester.ac.uk/idpm/research/publications/wp/di/documents/di_wp32.pdf)
Edward Castronova (A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Real-Money Trade in the Products of Synthetic Economies, 2006, p.13-20) suggest that the RMT market produce a negative externality, reducing the game utility for the player and increasing the costs of providing the service for the game companies.
Aside from game inflation, RMT have further bad consequences on the players that do not perform it. The first one is definitively the advertising (in most of the case we shall call it spamming) on the RMT products on general channels used by players for communications. Being harassed by some spamming gold seller will significantly reduce the game experience, also by damaging crucial factors as the game immersion and the atmosphere, that get disrupted when the real world unwanted advertising jumps into our game play.
RMT also reduce the player’s possibility to effectively use areas and communication channels, when they are both occupied by farming activities. The presence of a professional farmer in a certain area will reduce other player’s entertainment from that area, and will also lower frame rates and increase memory usage.
5 - SECURE PURCHASE QUESTIONS
a - Are those companies reliable? Will I get scammed?
The net is filled with complaints of people that did not receive what they paid for, asked for a refund and did not receive that either. There are hundreds of virtual currency vendors, and some of them are fraudulent, and they will probably steal your money, or get your account banned by botting while powerleveling or, even worse, they will steal or attempt to steal your account, in order to resell it or to use it for botting or farming.
The best way to prevent this from happening to you is to stick with large and reputable companies, or small one but still reputable. You will need to read comments and gather some feedback about a merchant before you put your money at risk with the first site you found. This is why we are here, we have done the job for you!
Do not trust small companies with poor quality websites and no feedback. Especially if you are going to get a powerleveling service. We have already tried all the vendors that we are listing, and we have excluded the vendors that were considered fraudulent by a significant amount of people on forums and blogs. All the merchants that you will find on this site are not scamming sites.
Every company might fail an order or fail to process a refund, and this doesn’t mean the company is a scammer. There are always bad reports and complaints, but we have considered the overall reputation of a vendor, and we are sure that all our listed vendor are not scammers, and they will not attempt to steal your money or your accounts. Remember that the average quality of the trade and of the transaction is low in the market itself. Do not expect instant replies or deliveries and an overall perfect service because you will probably not getting it. The purpose of this site is just to minimize the troubles and get the knowledge to perform the smoothest transaction possible.
Is buying gold risky for my account? Can I get banned?
There is the risk, and whoever tells you the contrary is lying. Anyway, there is very few reporting of people that got their account closed because of gold buying. I have bought tons of currency for many games (mostly for review purposes, but also as a wow player) and I never had a single warning. And the same goes for my friends. But still, RMT is against the game agreements, and when you perform it you brake the agreement, and this alone put your account at stake, because if, for any reason they find out, they can ban it. Most of the accounts (if not all) that get banned every day belongs to farming companies, and the main reason why they get banned is for using bots or other third party programs for faster farming or powerleveling. Blizzard have closed more than 100.000 accounts and removed over 12 millions gold because of activities “such as using third-party programs that allow cheating, and farming gold and items” (http://www.wow-europe.com/en/news/archive-news2006.html).
The game companies so far have fought the gold farmer-seller, not the gold buyer, that is still an active paying player. Normal players get their accounts closed because of their own bots usage or because of powerleveling, that is achieved by letting the RMT company play your character and access your accounts. But a simple currency transaction does not carry that risk and can be considered relatively safe for your account. This is just my personal opinion based on my experience and I will take no responsibility if your account get banned because of any RMT actions.
7 - ABOUT US
a – Why have you created this website?
As reported by scientific and economics studies, there is a big information failure in the real money trading market. It occurs in the three crucial steps of trading: prior to trading, during trading and after trading. The real problem resides in the virtuality of the trade and in the anonymity of both buyer and seller’s online activity.
Both the buyer and the sellers might be totally unaware of who they are doing business with. This is called “information absence”, and it occurs in most of the virtual currency purchases. A buyer, and especially as a first time buyer, have no clue about the merchant trustworthiness, their real location and their customer’s feedback. Most of all, a buyer may be uncertain whether the products will actually be delivered or the company will steal your money. The web is saturated with people reporting frauds and undelivered goods, as well as failed refund requests. There is also plenty of reporting about accounts being banned by game companies for bot usage during power leveling, lost goods deleted by game masters and warnings for exploitation of the game economy.
In his study, Heeks (2008) moves toward an interesting conclusion, “the level of trading it’s likely to be below that wich would occur if the various informational challenges were mitigated or removed”. He mentions the case of Sony Station Exchange selling platinum directly to Everquest II players. Players were able to buy currency directly from the game company. Sony is one of the biggest companies in the whole world, and no rational Everquest player would be scared about getting scammed of frauded when doing business with them. The system addressed most of the existing information failure, and leaded to a plus 78% of virtual currency purchases from players.
b – Why all the links on your site are affiliates links? What is the relationship between you and those companies?
All the links to currency merchants are affiliate links. This mean we are going to earn about 10% every time you click through one of those links and make a purchase on one of our listed merchants. Please note that you are not spending 10% more, we will get the 10% from the merchant, so he will only retain 90% of your money, and the rest will go to us.
This is necessary to keep providing this service for free to our users, and to keep the content fresh and updated, and also to cover the hosting costs, advertising costs and the enormous time investment. I am not going to kid you, I do not dislike to make a profit out of this website either. But the first priority is to provide complete, useful and truthful reviews, about all merchant we can find who have at least a bit of trustworthiness.
It is in our best interest to provide you with the best reviews and to help your purchases as much as possible, so if you find this site useful, do not get scared to click around, and to choose the vendor you trust the most and perform your purchase, you will not only help your character, you will help us as well!
In can ensure that there is absolutely no relationship between me and those companies other than the affiliate program. I do not know any of them, and I never spoke to any representative. All the reviews here are genuine, and as you can see yourself they show all unsatisfying aspects of our listed vendors. There are many more bad reports than good ones in my reviews. Nobody ever offered money for a good review nor I would ever accept such an offer.
c - What set of criteria will you be using in your reviews?
We are going to build a rating system that will assign an overall evaluation to every vendor included in our list. To acquire enough data, we rely on users votes and posted reviews or comments. We will also consider the comments and complaints we have acquired from other blogs, forum and review sites (and. whenever possible, we will show them). Most of all, we will conduct trial purchases with our listed vendor, and we will post a detailed report about how every single aspect of the transaction went.
The overall merchant rating will be a combination those elements. Anyway, not all factors have the same weight on our final vote. For example, we consider the order processing system, the safety of your personal informations and account, and the confidence that the items will actually be delivered more important than factors like the variety of products, the website appearance and the price, unless it’s really too high and unjustified.
I have defined a set of criteria that a virtual currency vendor website shall meet to earn a favorable review.
Location and transparency of the company structure.
Some firms do not include their contact informations in their websites. And frequently they refuse to answer such questions or they lie, claiming to reside in a country they are not. Most of those firms have their office in China or Philippians and they try to hide it, pretending they are US companies.
We are going to ask questions, and investigate whois data to discover the real location of every vendor, selecting real US based companies from those that aren’t.
Navigability of the website
The site must be easy to navigate, fast to load and understandable. I shall be able to checkout within 4-5 clicks. There shall be no spelling errors, broken links, or broken sections. I also want the website to be readable, with no keyword stuffing for seo purposes.
Number of services offered to customers
Some website are very small and only provide currencies for few games, while other are very big and offer currencies, powerleveling, prepaid game cards, items and accounts for every game under the sun. We do not rate big website higher just because they have more products. We only care about the quality of those products. If a merchant include in his site every single mmorpg, I expect it to have all currencies in stock for all servers, and to deliver them in a reasonable time, or else I will surely give a better rating to a small site that only sell currency for a few games, but who have the currency actually in stock for all servers at all times, that delivers it fast and provide quality customer support.
Number of positive-negative feedback acquired from user’s comments.
This is the most important factor. Some vendors, the most used ones, have a lot of comments, reviews, complaints all around the web. This is a priceless resource for anyone that is buying gold or currencies for the first time and need to evaluate the merchant’s reputation. We have gathered all the comments that were available on the web (yes, that was a very hard job and took a long time). One of the reasons why we will be adding one mmorpg game at time on our site is because there are a huge amount of comments for every merchant and for every game it features, and since we pretend to be complete, we have to start small and then grow up every day.
Prices
Prices are important, but you shall not do the mistake of giving it too much importance, or you could very well end up buying from a scammer site that uses low prices as a bait. I strongly prefer to give 30$ to a reputable company, having a smooth transaction and keep my account safe, than spending 15$ on some questionable website with poor customer support, unsafe order processing and so putting my account as well as my money at risk. We will give prices the right weight in our evaluation, and when they are higher than the average we are going to search for some justifications. If I have to pay more, I also want more.
Payment methods accepted
We prefer to see that several payment methods are accepts, having only Paypal sounds fishy.
Deliveries
I expect to receive my gold within 24 hours. If it takes more, the vendor will get a lower rating. We are also going to consider the delivery method (mail, face to face trade, auction house) and its inner safety. We will conduct trial purchases from every vendor, and we will describe the speed of the delivery, the way it was performed and any trouble we encountered.
Order processing
Here we are going to rate the overall safety of the order. We will investigate the common business practices about order processing and refunds. Some company will ask for your personal informations if it is the first time you buy from them. The privacy of those infos are critical. It’s really not a good idea to send your I.D. infos to the identity theft paradise land. This is why you need to do business with reputable firms only.
We will check the company’s privacy statements, terms and conditions, and we will inform you of the results of our trial purchases. We will also ask refunds and gather comments from people who did in the past, so that we can also inform you about their refund policy and usual practices.
Another important field is the safety of the credit card processing, and of course the minimal requirement here is a https secure connection, because you really don’t want to send your credit card numbers via unsecure connections to the land of internet frauds.
Customer Support Quality
The vendor’s live chat is used by most of the people that buys from them. This happens for the reasons that we have mentioned already: lack of informations, bad business practices, and the presence of a large number of fraudulent websites. The use of the merchant’s customer support shall be the least possible, and to be honest, when I buy gold I like to expect that I won’t even need it. We will try to reduce the live chat usage to the minimum possible. How? By selecting the best vendors to trade with, so that you shall receive a quality service that will not require you to ask for any help.
But since this is very hard to achieve, it’s still important to rate the vendor’s customer service because unfortunately many of you will need it. We will take into consideration:
the average waiting time
their basic English skills
their training to communicate with customers
their politeness, patience, and honesty.
their knowledge
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