[patio11]

I don't know how they're going to manage this with the money-laundering/fraud angle. This makes Epic Boots of the Whale into a transfer medium for money between virtually anonymous endpoints, including internationally. (Long story short: You can run an auction which is honest or you can run an auction which is anonymous, but you cannot do both at the same time. Virtually any information flow from the system to any participant in the auction compromises the anonymity, since the attacker has perfect knowledge of the state of the system from both ends of the trade.)

That is guaranteed to draw heavy adversarial attention from both the bad guys and the good guys.

Business-wise, even Blizzard is going to eventually bow to reality and realize that INSERT ... INTO ITEMS; is the most profitable line of code any game company can ever write. They've experimented a few times in WoW with making folks pay for e.g. cosmetic mount improvements. Eventually they're going to realize that their core audience pays hundreds but values their gamerhood at (conservatively) thousands, and start monetizing that gap. After doing so, they'll be able to treat the base product as "Free 2 Play", assuming they think America has enough bandwidth to play their games without needing the assist from a truck of DVDs shipped to every Best Buy and Walmart.

[seanalltogether]

I disagree, Blizzard has done a good job with managing their in game economies and they wouldn't be so stupid as to screw it up by competing against their own players for control of assets, they stand to make way more money by just skimming off the top.

[patio11]

Blizzard is very good at what they do, but not perfect. The entire space is converging on Free2Play and games with 1 pct of WoW's budget print money hats. When Blizzard makes a tiny cosmetic sale of items, the Internet goes awash with geek rage and the shareholders at Vivendi get 20 million richer. Geeks rage hard at 5% fees for transactions but happily pay ten bucks a button press for a SQL statement with 98 pct margins.

I respect that you may no like this. I dislike gravity. Some days we do not get what we want.

[Shenglong]

I don't know what experience you have with online game economies, but saying they've done a good job "managing" their economies is misleading. World of Warcraft has had a good go, not because of any economic management, but because of innovative economic planning... to an extent. The economy in WoW is very artificial, and they've eliminated the majority of their economic issues by releasing new armor sets, and using the bind-on-pickup system.

More so than any other game, I've found arbitrage to be most difficult on WoW.

[onemoreact]

First off they make far more money than any of the free2play games even with a far smaller playerbase so I don't think they have much to learn from the F2P comunity. They already make money from people changing names and servers and non combat pets not just mounts. There are even benifits introducing another player to the game so it's got a fairly strong viral component. Also, as a wow player I would mention that you don't need a physical copy to play wow the DVD's are just there for marketing / gift giving.

[BenSS]

I'm more worried about how it'll effect the game from a personal/player angle than a laundering/fraud issue. Gold farmers are a problem in any MMOG, but this will likely exacerbate the issue.

There's also the question of accounts nailed for abuse. What happens to the distributed items and trades? The company will be far less likely to forgive innocent parties connected to the original abuse account since there is real money on the line.

[mey]

The nice thing about virtual goods is they can make both the seller and the buyer whole at the same time if they wish by simply duplicating the item/good. The scarcity is artificial.

[BenSS]

My concern is the other way. Duplication or balance bugs can make it very easy to suddenly produce an influx of goods and devalue (in real currency) other player holdings.

[noneTheHacker]

The points won't be anonymous. You need to supply bank information. Sure, someone could fake that, but there are plenty of routes to go if you are going to fake information. It isn't like this route gives you one of those debit Visa cards or mails an address cash.

Have you heard of rampant money laundering in eBay?

The only fraud they would have to deal with is the same fraud they have to deal with when they sell stuff in their online store.