The Shrine

It got me thinking, let's say I spend $500 to buy some stuff, found some exploit and with the gear I bought farmed $5000 worth of stuff and sold it. Later I get banned for exploiting, so I get my money back? Now it'd be easy to say 'nope' but the $5000 worth of stuff I sold is can be to legitmate buyers so Blizzard gets $5000 from banning me and that money indirectly comes from legitmate users who might not otherwise have bought this stuff if I didn't exploit the game to generate the extra items. In fact that it's basically like a casino having a proposition player, i.e. they could just hire someone and give him a ton of stuff to sell and then ban him when it gets suspicous. I'm sure a lot of people have no problem if they receive some $ upfront to play/sell stuff supplied by the game maker. Okay some Blizzard is big and probably won't do that, but if what's stopping anyone else from doing that?

So let's say I do get my money back, then obviously the moral of the story is that you should exploit early and exploit often. That's not a good thing either.

In theory the best thing to do would be to reroll the stuff I obtained illegally and then refund the guys who bought this stuff from me but obviously that takes effort and that means it costs them money, so it probably won't be done. Yet it's only a matter of time before something like this happens. I've a feeling Blizzard is going to go with the 'we ban you and keep all your money too in your balance too' approach first, but I see no way that'll hold in court. Blizzard is not an entity that have financial powers and they should not be able to freeze what's equivalent of a money account. They can ban your game account sure but I don't see how it can hold up in court if they're going to take the money in your account too, because if they can then less reputable companies can simply wait until you put in a ton of money in your account and then ban you with no repercussions. After all if you look at the reason people get banned it's always rather arbitary and it's not like you can prove you never hacked if the company claim you hacked.

Already made $500, maybe I'll get a GeForce 680.

Wow, $500 in a day? This is going to be nuts... They didnt implement RMAH in HC and i dont have a SC character, but i am curious how the prices look. Can you get good stuff for $1? $20?? Also, i assume blizz is taking 15% just like the gold auctions?

Unfortunately for me, due to the fact I have a life, I will be unable to generate any real money from the auction house. Sure I can make a couple bucks here and there but may not be worth my efforts, especially since they steal 30% from you

Zeus wrote:Unfortunately for me, due to the fact I have a life, I will be unable to generate any real money from the auction house. Sure I can make a couple bucks here and there but may not be worth my efforts, especially since they steal 30% from you

The transaction fee they charge seems to be pretty outrageous.

Yeah even a white collar criminal wouldn't take fucking 30%

It's $1 if you put up an item, then 15% if you cash out.

If you're selling like gold or supplies, it's 15% of that, then another 15% when you cash out.

Let's say you get lucky and sell a good Legendary item for $100.
- Cost on sale = $1. Battle.net balance: $99
- Transfer Battle.net balance to Paypal costs $14.85, leaving $84.15 Paypal cash
Total Blizzard fees: 15.85%

Sell a worse item for $10:
- Cost on sale = $1. Battle.net balance: $9
- Transfer Battle.net balance to Paypal costs $1.49, leaving $7.51 Paypal cash
Total Blizzard fees: 24.9%

Sell a stack of rare materials for $100:
- Cost on sale = $15. Battle.net balance: $85
- Transfer Battle.net balance to Paypal costs $12.75=(15% of $85), leaving $72.25 Paypal cash
Total Blizzard fees: 27.75%

Sell another stack of materials for $10:
- Cost on sale = $1.50. Battle.net balance: $8.50
- Transfer Battle.net balance to Paypal costs $1.28=(15% of $85), leaving $7.22 Paypal cash
Total Blizzard fees: 27.8% (because I'm rounding up cents)

It's pretty obvious that most item sales won't be going anywhere once stuff settle down. It's pretty dumb to pay a listing fee of $1 when you sell something that's worth $5 and that's probably what most stuff will settle toward barring you get some super awesome drop.

So unless you only deal with big ticket sales it's effectively 30%.

Note that if you deal with big sales, since there's a cap of $250 per sale and some of the big ticket items might be worth more than that, you'd be better off selling the stuff for gold and then sell the gold back to $, provided the item is worth more than around $300 since you take an extra 15% for going item -> gold.

Let's say I duped 1 trillion gold and sold it for $1 million (this seems to be below the going rate actually). BNet automatically seems divy up commodity sales into multiple sales, so this could be spread between thousand of buyers.

Eventually I'm caught so maybe they ban my account and take the $1 million back, except my duped gold generated $150,000 for Blizzard in AH fees. Is Blizard going to give those money back to the owner? If not, by banning me they just made $150,000 since that's transaction money they'd never have happend if I didn't exploit. Yet to trace all the transactions back is going to cost them a lot of time/effort, if it's even possible. It's certainly easy to imagine something exchange hands multiple times if it's an item and then you'd basically have to roll back the entire server if a particular questionable item trade handed say 5 times.

I don't actually care if Blizzard is greedy, but I think they'll get burned when someone else find a way to beat the system. It's only a matter of time before something happens that wipes out or creates millions of dollars of real money, and they're not going to get away with the 'everything here has totally no value, seriously' argument. Heck, what if you bought $2500 of stuff for a particular build and then that build gets nerfed? When you got real $ involved, you can't just say 'we own everything and owe you nothing'. Even credit card companies have to at least pretend they care about you, because you got money.

Unrelated to this but saw this spin on a Blizzard quote:

"Our internal testing policy required our game testers to play through the game without the use of the Auction House - gearing up and beating content through only dropped gear. Why do you think it took 10 years to release? Game was done 9 1/2 yeas ago."

Maybe they traded with each other internally, which by the English of the quote would still work with the statement.

Or maybe they drastically changed level 1 minions to drop level 60 sets with pertinent stats and nerfed it later :D

Eric wrote:It's $1 if you put up an item, then 15% if you cash out.

If you're selling like gold or supplies, it's 15% of that, then another 15% when you cash out.

Let's say you get lucky and sell a good Legendary item for $100.
- Cost on sale = $1. Battle.net balance: $99
- Transfer Battle.net balance to Paypal costs $14.85, leaving $84.15 Paypal cash
Total Blizzard fees: 15.85%

Sell a worse item for $10:
- Cost on sale = $1. Battle.net balance: $9
- Transfer Battle.net balance to Paypal costs $1.49, leaving $7.51 Paypal cash
Total Blizzard fees: 24.9%

Sell a stack of rare materials for $100:
- Cost on sale = $15. Battle.net balance: $85
- Transfer Battle.net balance to Paypal costs $12.75=(15% of $85), leaving $72.25 Paypal cash
Total Blizzard fees: 27.75%

Sell another stack of materials for $10:
- Cost on sale = $1.50. Battle.net balance: $8.50
- Transfer Battle.net balance to Paypal costs $1.28=(15% of $85), leaving $7.22 Paypal cash
Total Blizzard fees: 27.8% (because I'm rounding up cents)

Translation: if you don't have a life, they reward you by not taking a much smaller proportion. Otherwise, they make Ebay/Paypal fees seem like a steal by fucking you from behind without even the courtesy of a reach-around

Eric wrote:Already made $500, maybe I'll get a GeForce 680.

Really? Crazy.

Right now it seems like a lot of people are buying stuff with the intention of just flipping around like you'd do with a house during the housing bubble, i.e. they don't really think your item is worth $100 but they think someone will pay $200 for it so they buy it. The market seems really erractic right now so you can make big money or lose your shirt.

And this is why you don't spend real money on digital goods that can easily be patched or altered

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/ ... 769?page=1

But by acknowledging that these items clearly have value (or Blizzard can't take a cut as the middle man) they actually open themselves liable for lawsuit.

Given every thing with RM trading talks about how they have an economy comparable to some nation out there, you can make a case that this is like wiping out the GDP of a small nation.

This guy makes the best point, though: "this was announced before the release of RMAH."