Saw a thread on stratics in which someone said Markeedragon had posted that they were banning the sale of Virtual items in games and removing existing auctions

So I decided to chat with a live rep at Ebay

man thats gonna make a few people mad, but then i guess their are still website you can buy from.

wow!

that's a big one folks.

especially for the people that rely on that way of making money.

wonder what effect this will have on the economy?

Sounds to me like you guys need to buy stuff while you can!

Oh no! I've sold a few accounts on ebay.

If I decide to quit I want some cash!!

This does stink!

I sold a few accounts on Ebay when I quit for awhile. There are still possibilities of selling the accounts to Online game brokers, who then later sell the account for more money to someone else...but I would assume you would not get as much money as you would have on Ebay...

you can always sell on tradespot though...

some people are going to be rather upset about this. i dont really mind people selling accounts, but when u go to ebay and people are selling minor things like ingots....... it kinda puts a bad taste in my mouth.

I think this will help the ingame economy big time. People wont be out buying mass amounts of gold, to buy the items ingame for inflated prices anymore. I feel sorry though for the people wanting to sell their accounts for money that is equal to their time invested. It's a good step in the right direction towards fixing the economy though!

wow, guess we didn't even have to wait for uo to ban the sale of it's own items.

This is a huge step towards fixing the game's economy, which has always been an issue since the first bulk resource auction appeared on Ebay. Sure, I'll pay $10 for 80k of each reg...but what is the point? What is the point in playing UO to begin with if a person is THAT lazy?

However...I am a little upset over this including player accounts and/or houses.

On the flip-side, I can see Ebay's view on this. Maybe there were a lot of dishonest auctions going on and people got screwed out of 100's of dollars over pixel crack.

Anyone have info on the reasoning behind this (from ebay's perspective.... I hardly think it's ebay's responsibility to police the in-game economy of online RPG's, and if the game developers themselves don't care to regulate the sale of virtual goods, I highly doubt that's ebay's motivation for this)?

Interesting, but pointless for UO.

Pointless, because EA does nothing about it, and so all the trading will just be done through non-Ebay sites, like Tradespot, etc.

BTW if anyone wants to read MD's post...

http://www.markeedragon.com/u/ubbthr...&Number=331951

No confirmation in writing from ebay yet. This does not appear to be influenced by the game developers (like the ban on EQ item sales was), but an internal move on ebay's part.

Independent websites will pop up, but this is great! The IRS needs to tax the hell outta these people who are making income without penalty, it's not fair to the rest of us honest hard working people. You should not be allowed to have income without taxes. Anyway, that aside, there's always a way around this type of stuff.

Just like ticket scalping. I'll sell you this potato for 200 bucks and then give you these free tickets to the game!

Anyway, I wonder why they're doing this finally... for a company to ban the sale of goods that are well known to bring in a lot of money, it surprises me they'd cut their own profits.


edit: ah, nevermind I found the answer on stratics in this thread. The OP basically explains why ebay did this.

http://boards.stratics.com/php-bin/u...5&o=31&fpart=1