RMT - Caveat Emptor

[Cheddar]

Blizzard is now nailing buyers of RMT, FYI.  I found this out Friday.  Interesting tactic, and definitely works (at least in my case it will). 

No warning, no 24 ban.  Straight to final warning 72 hour ban.  Cannot even view your account until the time is up.  Wowzers!

Discuss (leave the judgement on my spending money out of it, I work long hours and have no time for the grind).

[Phred]

Blizzard is now nailing buyers of RMT, FYI.  I found this out Friday.  Interesting tactic, and definitely works (at least in my case it will). 

No warning, no 24 ban.  Straight to final warning 72 hour ban.  Cannot even view your account until the time is up.  Wowzers!

Discuss (leave the judgement on my spending money out of it, I work long hours and have no time for the grind).

Sucks to be you I guess. I'm glad to see Blizzard extending their enforcement into this side of it. My only question is, why did it take so long. :(

[Cheddar]

As draconian as it sounds it really does a good job enforcing their TOS.   

[Merusk]

And here I thought you were just that much better at auction house gaming than me.  I'm disillusioned.

[Selby]

Honestly, I have always thought that this is the way to control it.  Focus on the buyers as the sellers are a completely different ballgame.  When the buyers are gone that makes it that much harder as a seller.

[Cheddar]

And here I thought you were just that much better at auction house gaming than me.  I'm disillusioned.

I did not buy gold. :P

[Merusk]

Discuss (leave the judgement on my spending money out of it, I work long hours and have no time for the grind).

Lead me to believe otherwise.  Sounded like you were relating a personal story.  Phhhbhbhbt.

 Before I felt bad for you.  Now I just hate you for your leet AH farming skills again.

[Tale]

Blizzard is now nailing buyers of RMT

That's awesome.

Demand is where the problem lies. The suppliers are often bad guys, as in most illicit trades, but they only exist because of demand.

[Falwell]

You could kind of see it coming. They drastically lowered the demand for gold via dailies (and even more with 2.4) and by lowering the consumable needs for raiding. Now they can start dropping the ban hammer without remorse knowing that gold is readily available for anyone with even the shortest amounts of playtime available.

[Righ]

A week ago the spammed rate for 1000 gold was hovering around $45 or so every jackass with a trial account was repeating. A couple of days ago I started noticing that the people I was reporting for spam were advertising the same 1000 gold for $70 and up.

[Jayce]

And here I thought you were just that much better at auction house gaming than me.  I'm disillusioned.

I did not buy gold. :P

Why the mystery?  We're all pals here.  Spill it! 

[Cheddar]

And here I thought you were just that much better at auction house gaming than me.  I'm disillusioned.

I did not buy gold. :P

Why the mystery?  We're all pals here.  Spill it! 

I paid to have my guy levelled.  I already did the 1-60 grind, and can not keep up with the likes of the other Bat Country folk.  As noted before- money is way easy to accrue.   

[Jayce]

Interesting. So it seems they're busting the paid leveling services too.  I wonder how they figure that out for sure?

Also, you should change like every aspect of your account ASAP - passwords, special questions, email address, everything that you can.  There's a guy in my guild who did that and months later, out of the blue, his account was stolen. 

Interestingly, after a bunch of correspondence with CS, he got it back, but it was transferred to another server and apparently sold on eBay.  He had lots of new stuff, so apparently some poor sap was playing his character 

I wouldn't be surprised if Blizzard expends a lot of CS manpower in this area, which is probably why they're doing it.

[Phred]

And here I thought you were just that much better at auction house gaming than me.  I'm disillusioned.

I did not buy gold. :P

Why the mystery?  We're all pals here.  Spill it! 

I paid to have my guy levelled.  I already did the 1-60 grind, and can not keep up with the likes of the other Bat Country folk.  As noted before- money is way easy to accrue.   

This is not really news then. Sorry. Blizzard has been banning and clamping down on people who pay for leveling for a while now, and are quite effective at it from what I've heard.

[Tale]

Interesting. So it seems they're busting the paid leveling services too.  I wonder how they figure that out for sure?

IP address in Indonesia starts playing your account 24/7.

[Merusk]

  There's a guy in my guild who did that and months later, out of the blue, his account was stolen. 

This is the one RMT service i would never, ever, EVER use even if I was into the whole RMT thing for this exact reason.  You've given up your account login name, all it takes them from there on out is time to get the account back.  They have your character name(s)as well, easy enough for them to monitor you on Armory and see if you're worth stealing.

 Hell, they could automate it and have a weekly pop-up of "time to hack this one bacK" for their hacking arm.   Its certainly something *I'd* do and I'm no criminal genius whose concern is only separating as many people from their money as possible. .

[Lum]

Interesting. So it seems they're busting the paid leveling services too.  I wonder how they figure that out for sure?

Because many levelling services use client-side exploits (levitating/teleporting/etc) to powerlevel (and harvest gold) that are trivially easy to detect (hey, look, that 15th level hunter is 500 feet in the air in an instance!)

[Ratman_tf]

Wait! Giving out my password and account name could be a bad idea? Why don't they put a warning on the login load screen?

[Jayce]

Interesting. So it seems they're busting the paid leveling services too.  I wonder how they figure that out for sure?

IP address in Indonesia starts playing your account 24/7.

Seems like this one would be easy to get around.  Spoof a US or Euro (or whatever) IP and suddenly you're not easy to distinguish from the teen who swaps off playing with his brother for a total of 24x7.

I'd buy the teleport exploit thing, but I thought they fixed most, if not all of those a while back.  At least I haven't seen any youtube vidoes lately like that Dire Maul king solo thing a while back.  The client still does a lot of prediction and has some authority on position, but I think the server does some z-axis sanity checking or something.

[Phred]

Interesting. So it seems they're busting the paid leveling services too.  I wonder how they figure that out for sure?

IP address in Indonesia starts playing your account 24/7.

Seems like this one would be easy to get around.  Spoof a US or Euro (or whatever) IP and suddenly you're not easy to distinguish from the teen who swaps off playing with his brother for a total of 24x7.

Unless the power leveling service has access to a server in north america somewhere, spoofing isn't as easy as you seem to think. Packets need to actually reach your machine, i.e. they need a valid ip address to return to, so unless you use a proxy server located somewhere in North America spoofing is right out. The only place real spoofing works is where you know exactly what the protocol expects in return for what it sends. I.E. a server sends a login: prompt when connected to.

[Calantus]

Here's the best way to get a character powerleveled:

- Find a regular catass player who wants some RL dough for playing WoW and get them to level it for you.
- Buy a completely new account for the powerleveling.
- Give them directions on how to login and what the character needs to look like, you want them to create the character.
- Never login. Never. Check up on the character via /who and talking out of game.
- When they're finished change the password, leave it alone for a week or so, then play for a couple weeks before xferring to your main account.

That's how I got a friend powerleveled, I just contacted someone I knew from PVPing in the old GM rankup group. It's seriously easier than you'd think, find a student who plays WoW too much and boom you've got yourself a powerleveler in the making. It costs more than a powerleveling service and will take longer but it's much safer.

[Miasma]

then play for a couple weeks before xferring to your main account.

WoW lets you transfer characters between accounts?

[ajax34i]

Yes, provided that the registered name (first, last) and emails etc. on both accounts matches, i.e. they're both your accounts and not someone else's.

[Ratman_tf]

I've been tempted to transfer one of my alts to a seperate account, and run it with my main to twink out some BOP items. But that seems to be my Rubicon for "too much effort spent on a video game".

[Xanthippe]

Discuss (leave the judgement on my spending money out of it, I work long hours and have no time for the grind).

For me, the game isn't just being 70 and end-gaming, it's getting to 70 and playing the battlegrounds.  I'm not really all that anxious to get to 70 on my latest alt.  I've done Outlands twice already, and see 70 as being the start of the rep grind - whether in battlegrounds or all those other reps.

So for me, it'd be paying someone to play the enjoyable parts of the game for me.

What is it you want to do at 70?

[Cheddar]

Discuss (leave the judgement on my spending money out of it, I work long hours and have no time for the grind).

For me, the game isn't just being 70 and end-gaming, it's getting to 70 and playing the battlegrounds.  I'm not really all that anxious to get to 70 on my latest alt.  I've done Outlands twice already, and see 70 as being the start of the rep grind - whether in battlegrounds or all those other reps.

So for me, it'd be paying someone to play the enjoyable parts of the game for me.

What is it you want to do at 70?

OK, since people are so curious here is why I went the RMT route.  I have already levelled a rogue to 60; basically I was repeating everything I had done previously.  My goal was to RMT to 60, then enjoy the 60-70 levels.  Plus with the help of kekela I would reach 60 at a much faster rate then I have been levelling (1 week as opposed to a month or two).

It was a bad decision - I should be back in game this evening (you guys can /t me what a horrible person I am then). 

[Signe]

Don't be daft.  We love you to bits!    This sort of thing just makes us love you more.

[Jayce]

Yeah, I think you're being oversensitive.  No one really questioned it except Xanthippe who seemed to just be curious.

I certainly don't think less of someone who uses RMT.  It's just a curiosity to me. I'm mostly curious about the repercussions, both from Blizzard and from the shady dealers who then later try to steal your account.

[tazelbain]

I question why he needs to RMT with all that child labor he has at home.

[Threash]

If i had to guess your account got nailed for using an exploit or bot rather than for using RMT, i know several people who buy gold and they've never had any problems.

[Chenghiz]

I have a friend who used a leveling service for 1-60 and didn't get his account ganked or banned or anything. Unfortunately for him, he lost interest in the game soon after hitting 70 and we gave him shit about it for a while.

[Calantus]

Discuss (leave the judgement on my spending money out of it, I work long hours and have no time for the grind).

For me, the game isn't just being 70 and end-gaming, it's getting to 70 and playing the battlegrounds.  I'm not really all that anxious to get to 70 on my latest alt.  I've done Outlands twice already, and see 70 as being the start of the rep grind - whether in battlegrounds or all those other reps.

So for me, it'd be paying someone to play the enjoyable parts of the game for me.

What is it you want to do at 70?

If I came back to WoW and wanted another high level alt it'd be off the back of paying someone to get me to 70. I enjoyed the 1-70 leveling. Once. Twice even. But now I have 3 70s and 4 60s and a couple other 40+s. That shit just aint fun anymore.

I'd also be wanting the character purely for arena, which is basically a different game entirely to the leveling process and requires a 70.

[Dren]

I like running alts through 1-70, but of different classes.  I don't think I'd do it twice with the same class.  If I knew I could get away with doing exactly what and why Cheddar did it, I would.  Problem is I'll never know for sure, so I won't.  I'm both too chicken and cheap like that.

[Signe]

I don't work so I can do it for you.  You can trust me.  Now just give me your credit card number and I'll start right away.  Honest.

No, really.

[Montague]

I have a friend who used a leveling service for 1-60 and didn't get his account ganked or banned or anything. Unfortunately for him, he lost interest in the game soon after hitting 70 and we gave him shit about it for a while.

They don't do it right away. I've had several people I know get "hacked" months after they started playing level 70 alts that I didn't know they had, and of course they all denied doing RMT or anything of the sort, but when it took you months to level your last character to 60 and you hit 70 on a fresh alt in two weeks...

Change your password and check your comp thoroughly for malware. I would also have Blizzard change your account login as well if possible.

Edit - basically what Jayce said, heh.