ebay's policy starts to have an effect?

It looks like ebay’s policy on banning the sale of virtual items may actually be starting to bite.

On one of my regular trawls around ebay looking for Guild Wars Prophecies Collector’s Edition today, I noticed a massive decrease in the amount of gold sellers. In fact on ebay.co.uk there is not one single listing for Guild Wars Gold! There were also only three listings offering Guides/Macro Bots.

On ebay.com there were only eleven listings blatantly selling Guild Wars Gold, but again several that seemed to be selling Bots and "guides".

Overall this is a dramatic improvement on how things were only a few weeks ago and has to be good news for the majority of honest players.

Of course, ebay is not the only place that Guild Wars in game money is sold, but it was almost certainly the biggest. I am not sure, but I would also suspect that people would be less likely to hand over their credit card details to a random gold selling site than to buy on ebay and pay by paypal.

Now that this source is drying up, hopefully we will see at least some signs of the in game economy becoming more stable in the near future.

Yeah but there are still all of the gold selling websites

I just check ebay.com and I found page after page of listings. They are probably just being a little more canny about how they list.

Really its never going to stop gold sellers. eBay is just one way of reaching the masses. People will just use google and search for them.

Its a good step, but sadly it won't fix the problem in the long term.

Define stable...

Let us assume 3 groups of players

Group A - full time jobs, no time to farm, have disposable income.
Group B - full time non-job occupation (e.g. student), no time to farm, no disposable income.
Group C - no full time occupation (e.g. school kids, unemployed), time to farm, no disposable income.

Scenario 1 - Gold can be bought online, prices may be somewhat inflated.

Group A have all they want/need as they have cash to support their habit.
Group B struggle from lack of time/money
Group C may optionally grind farming spots to earn for gear.

Scenario 2 - Gold cannot be bought online, prices may come down somewhat

Group A struggle from lack of time.
Group B struggle from lack of time/money
Group C grind for good gear.

This is oversimplified, but serves to demonstrate that any economic model favours one or more demographs over another. Who is qualified to judge which is best?

Hey!! Wait a minute. I'm in Group A. I have a full time job and play Guild Wars on the side at night. If I wanted to, I could afford to buy tons of gold off e-bay or elsewhere. However, I have enough integrity not to do that!

I want to earn my in-game accomplishments legitimately!!

That is not going to stop them. In fact I won't be surprised if there is an auction site that is solely for selling virtual items now that the market is wide open with no competition.

In the end this will raise the price of gold so farmers are not sad. Auctions allow sellers to compete for the lowest price. Without an auction there the consumer has less tools to determine price so the price will inflate.

Farmers not too concerned about GW. WoW gold is worth much more and easier to get than GW.

Because your wealth directly affects your performance in WoW right? :P

Anyways, there are *TONS* of sites for virtual gold, heck you see it being spammed all over gaming forums without proper bot protection. It will NEVER go away unless some rediculous legislation comes in and drives them all off shore.

Real life money coming into ingame economies and messing things up is always gonna ruin online games - I messed up Diablo2 by buying a BOTD from a sell site - ruined a great game for myself by removing the challenge and danger and turned D2 into grind.
I belong also to Group A and there is no way now that I'll go near sell sites and Ebay. I applaud Ebays sense of morality and integrity towards virtual items. They are under no obligation to stop selling something that gives them an income (unless of course there are laws of ownership copyright whatnot being transgressed and Anet are biting back) I want to feel that Ive earned those armours now - I dont even buy weapons unless I pry them out of the bloody dead hands of bosses myself.

Alot of the big companies accept paypal which is safer (I think). Also many have recommendations and certificates from people who verify how legit websites are. they could not afford to be seen to scam people either, well the big ones anyway

Amen to that...I too have a full time job and kids...I LOVE to finish campaings, farm greens, get titles the old fashioned way....In fact i've got 185k in storage and about 20 - 50k per character...its not hard to get some money...

BTW, I agree with BSSuperman...my ranger needs a flatbow...time for my necro to go farm one...its number 2 on teh listof things to do...

Hey! Don't take my comments personally - just broad generalisations and as I said oversimplified.

As far as titles or campaign progression go, the economy has nothing whatever to do with it. The new one for sweet tooth, yes - one could purchase enough gold to buy a bazillion rice cakes, but in general no, so let's not even get into titles.

Buying millions of gold to buy FoW armour isn't going to get you through a campaign any quicker. Standard Max armour and a decent weapon is all you need, easily purchased at todays rates for cheap mods, even without farming. The whole business with 100K+uber ectos is vanity items, purely and simply. Rare skins and so on - this is what we are talking about. Not your in game achievements.

So please before you get on your high horses and all offended, I'm not talking about individual experience. I'm saying that any given change in the availability of gold will affect different demographics of differently. Some will benefit and some will suffer.

The OP talks about stability - but what is and isn't stability. That's all I'm saying. The current situation is stable. You might not like the level at which it has stabilized, but there is stability.

What I think he hope for is lowered pricing. Then again I don't know. Things used to be much more expensive until they changed the frequency of gold drops. Supply and demand has made mods very cheap, all can afford them.

Rare items will always attract a premium price.

Nothing will change.

eBay wasn't really doing it as a step to fix the problem of purchasable game currency in general, but rather to avoid the possible legal issues that arise from the grey area of virtual goods being traded (in conflict with EULAs and IP rights) on their site.

The 'problem' of currency being sold can only really ever be fixed by the administrators of the game itself, through measures to reduce the number of bots/farmers and penalties on accounts which are involved in these activities. Unfortunately, as demonstrated over the history of MMOs, this is practically an unreachable goal.