Ebay or not Ebay, that is the question.

I've seen some auctions got for as little as £2($4) for 100,000G.

100,000g isin't even that much money but is definatly worth it for the 30 hours plus it takes to get now that everythings been nerfed.

I never wanted to go to ebay to spend real life money on in game items, but it seems like i'll never be able to get the items i want cos everything so expensive and it's so hard to get money.

You've got to think about the time you have and the ratio of time spent to money earned, esp now that it's so hard to get decent stuff for normal prices.

It's better to spend £2 and 5 mins on ebay then it is to spend 15 or so hours in FoW, well, i dunno if it's "better", but it's more economical.


I'm not gonna ebay it but i'm seriously considering it, whats your views?

(p.s it's 6am over here and i been up all night so excuse the grammar and poor spelling.)

Well it's against the EULA I believe, and in some games you'll get checked out and possibly banned for it (not sure if ANet does that) The way I see it though, if you're willing to pay real money for an in-game item or in-game money, you're taking the game way too seriously. The game is supposed to be a challenge to earn the money and items, if you just buy it off EBay, where's the fun?

don't ever use real life money to buy pixels. Not worth it.

Especially on a night like tonight where black dye sold to the NPC vendor put 8+ plat in your inventory.

Isin't that what your doing when you purchase the game in the first place?.

Your paying someone for the hard work and time they put into creating something (game, IGmoney, scrips, research w/e).

Also, wether something is "fun" or not is besides the point, games are designed as competitions, and if going on ebay to buy a guide, money, weapons is going to give you an advantage then why not do it?.

No it isn't. It depends on how you legally word it, appearently. I've heard by a few in these types of discussions that if you put in the fine print that you are chraging, not for the ingame property that is owned by Anet, but the time you spent collecting it.

[QUOTE=ShinJin Kahn]Isin't that what your doing when you purchase the game in the first place?.

Your paying someone for the hard work and time they put into creating something (game, IGmoney, scrips, research w/e).QUOTE]

way to follow up your argument with something that doesn't prove it.

I need to set a macro that types : You do not need money in GW. Cause Im sick of typing it. You dont, you need Droks armor, which I have never had a problem buying once I have gotten there. Thats it, grab a collectors weapon, toss in a few good mods and your set. Sure, there a VERY slightly better gold weapons out there, why would you buy money on ebay for a 1.2% advantage? Maybe 1.2% is being generous too... Yes, its a made up stat. Anyhow, you dont need money, you will eventually find whatever it is you want to buy.

Or buy from people like me, I dont need money, I have alot of it. If I get an 'uber' weapon, I offer it to my guild, if no one needs it I sell it at the best price I can in 10-15 minutes. I see crap worse then Im selling go for 100k and over on these boards, and I never get more than 20k for anything.

Here is my latest sell: Gold Shield (graphic looks like a wall shield) I think it was a Defender. 16 Armor, Healing +1 15% when using skills, +35 Health while enchanted. Sold it for 9k. Now check the boards for shields like this, its unreal what you lemmings pay.

I like to roll around on the floor and laugh every time I ask "Is this a trapping quest or smiter group?" and one of the people says "OMG What you need xp for? Monay is where its at!"

With the massive costs of Ectoplasma and Shards i feel like buying some Gold on ebay to get my FoW armor. Though i would have to spend about 500 dollors im sure.

I was addressing your comment, not backing up my argument.

of course, you don't "need" it
but you may "want" it if you're thinking about buying the granite citadelle/fissure armors

ive said it before, so it wont hurt to say it again... if you spend real money for fake game money/itmes/etc you really need to take a step back and reevaluate your life.. basicly what im saying is no, fake money is not worth real money... by the way, GW isnt about "uber" items and 15k armor, so the money wont go to much use if thats what your planning on using it for... just a hot tip i thought you should know

The main problem with buying gold online is that you are justifying the methods of botters, because that's where this online money comes from. It will encourage them to run more bots for optimal profits, offsetting the danger of getting one of their accounts banned for botting on occasion. With your money, they can buy new accounts to start new bots.

Bots do nothing more than pump money into the economy, which can only cause inflation. Because they can go at it 24/7, a bot will earn much, much more money than a casual gamer does in a game. What this implies is that the general wealth will be with the botters, and with those people who buy gold on eBay. The casual gamers gradually have less and less power in the economy, until finally their only option is to give up on trying to earn their own gold, and buy it as well (if they can afford it, some will simply lose out). Which fuels bots, and things simply go further downhill from there.

This isn't an issue of whether or not you should earn your own money, or whether you really need it in the first place. This is an issue of what you want Guild Wars to become. Buy gold on eBay for whatever reason, and you move Guild Wars further towards a botter's paradise, while making the game less enjoyable to all the other players.

It has? Damn, good thing noone's told the drakes and the minotaurs and the griffons and the stone summit and the trolls, then.

Besides, what do you need 100 plat for? And why get a game if you're not interested in playing it?

If you don't mind spending real life money for gold, no one is going to stop you for trying. If you can get the item you want by doing that, sure, why not. The real problem is that gold is worthless in this game and the economy and traders in-game is in a trend to prevent gold farmers from profitting (in real life). While you are supporting the gold farmers, you're indirectly pushing the game towards a harder environment for regular players like yourself.

and if ANet bans you for using the services of a bot wel,l c'est la vie

GW Gold is worthless? Rofl, try telling that to the people who run the websites and make hundreds of $ selling it to players.

A.net are against it, it is a multi million dollar industry as it stands.
Sony have actually integrated an online auction facility for really money into some of its EQ2 servers, they ensure secure transactions, and that the players get the goods they pay for and take a commission.
£2 for 100,000 gold, if you want to go for it, its your cash. At the end of the day its about personal choice. £2 at the end of the day is no a lot of cash, you cannot buy alot with £2.
The only issues it raises are online security issues and online fraud. But seeing as this is an individuals choice it has nothing to do with A.net and neither are they liable if you do or don't.

If A.net really want to stop it, they would simply have to do it themselves.
Have an online website that sells items and gold that can be found in game for really money.
i.e. £1 for 100,000 gp direct, £1 for Max dam Gold Axe.

This would screw the economy, but compared to other trade based MMORPG's GW's hasn't got an enconomy it just has people shouting down a chat channel trying to sell max dam axe.
If you had a online trader that you could log onto and browse what people are selling, then it may work, even if people used their brains and sold collectors items. (not the staffs, but the items they where collecting, i.e. summit badges 2gp each, get yours here.) Alas this wouldn't work as GW economy is a chat channel.
The traders help, but, will leave it at that going off topic.

You are wasting real life TIME. And time is money. So i dont find it any different to spend money on getting something, than to spend time. And developers shouldnt try to ban these transactions, they should try to endorse them and make a profit out of it.

And yes money are completely and utter useless for gw and economy is completely broken. You pay more money to buy 10 steel from the material trader than to buy 10x 1 steel from the rare material trader.

The only really expensive things, are things that are identical with way cheaper ones but they just look cooler(fissure armor, crystaline sword, etc). If i want to get an item like that, i will have to play the game like 24/7 for like weeks. If i work or invest all those hours on something else(on a real life activity for example), i can get "more" in return. And instead of farming all those hours for such a stupid thing(to get a slightly cooler item), i pay an equally stupid ammount of real money and acquire it.

Time ppl. If you think someone who pays 2$ to buy something is an idiot, then what that makes someone who keeps slashing the same stupid rats/dragons/whatever for tenths of hours just to acquire the same thing? Personally, i think the first person is smarter than the second. But then again, there are priorities in life. Some ppl can spend tenths of hours doing the same repeatitive farming to get something that they want, while other ppl simply cant.

PS I have never paid real money to buy anything but i dont find it illogical or absurd to do it.

Well, I kinda feel like playing some golf today, but on the other hand, I am quite comfortable on this couch. Hmmm, maybe I'll hire someone to play golf for me.

It's just like that in my opinion. You pay for pixelated money which you don't really need to be successful in the game. You want it for frivolous expenditures, but not bad enough to actually acquire it yourself.

This game is and should be a voluntary recreational experience. not an all consuming, ego stroking toil fest.

Once you go down that road, you are forever a sad-ass individual.

I agree with NIB. I've never bought gold or items on ebay but I'm tempted to spend a very small amount of real money to save me many hours of real life time. I could probably get money selling off a few items but trying to be one of the hundred "WTS... " people spamming everywhere sounds worse than ebay. How does anyone sell anything or find a group in a city where that spam goes on all the time? Makes my eyes hurt just watching it.

Standing around Lions Arch spamming "WTS" or farming the same mobs over and over to get gold, or spend $5. You people against it aren't making a very good case. Anyone think Anet is banning people for buying gold? Anyone? I don't.

Fact is, I don't care enough about Fissure or Citadel armor to spend real life money on it. But I do get tired of not having enough money to buy a superior fire rune or whatever. I get tired of an economy that is poorly implemented. Seeing the vendor offer me 200g for a silver dye and want to sell it to me for 8p, well, that's broken. The chat channels completely spammed with WTS mean you can't even find a darn party when you want to, let alone buy the item you want. I don't want to deal with this stuff; let Anet fix it. In the meantime my purple and gold items wait for a vendor system that lets me get what my stuff is worth and without spamming the local chat channel for it and I think more about spending a few bucks at ebay. Really, is that wrong while spamming WTS all day to get your money is worthwhile? That's not fun; it's a broken part of the game. Meantime I finally resorted to farming so I could have more than 3 plat at once. I'm getting something like 2-3 plat per hour. Apparently that's much less than minimum wage considering the price of ebay gold.

The more I talk about it the more logical it seems. I'm against botters so I'd be willing to buy it from a farmer. Does that make it better?

Well, in golf you have caddies to help you and people pay them. They have a pro shop with stuff you can buy to help you play better. They don't make you stand at the 7th green yelling "Want to buy a better club!" They don't offer you the chance to "farm" sunken balls to dive in one at a time to get them, which is pretty close to how people farm gold in game now. No, you spend your real life money to make your recreation time better.

If part of the game involved you coating yourself in hot tar, either you'd quit the game or find a less painful way of playing it. Ebay sounds merely like a less painful way to play.

Paying someone to do a quest for you is much closer to your analogy. Then you're actually paying someone to play the game for you. Buying gold means you're still playing the game but using your resources to maximize enjoyment. Much different.

You have to understand the difference between playing the game and acquiring wealth. I like playing the game, like doing pvp but i really dont like the idiotic, repeatitive and insanely boring farming. So i get the best part of the game, the part that i enjoy, while i waste close to nothing(2$ for example) to get that extra something.

For example, we all love eating but cooking sometimes can be boring. So we pay someone to do the boring part(cooking) while we enjoy the entairtaining part(eating).

Bongo2k, help yourself and read what I wrote as a whole, not fragments of words.
Gold is not valuable in the game. Sure, you can probably sell a couple thousand plat on ebay for 2 dollars, but in-game, you cannot buy anything with 1 gold. You cannot buy basic stuff for the game (salvage kits, id kits, bags, bag runes, etc) untill you have hundreds of gold. When you can't use something untill you have a lot of them, I'd say they are rather worthless.

Buying items on ebay can buy you time and save time for those nice items you can get. But does it buy you fun? If you need it to have fun in the game, then by all means, do it.

I lost count of threads dealing with this tired issue. It is against the EULA. It will be dealt with as they catch it. It is really indicative of laziness on your part.

Double post content:

Although you are collecting a digital item that THEY own access to, the economy it is BASED on, and the resulting reaping from it. So no, legality is damned to common sense.

ban theM. This is supposed to be a competitve online game so paying real money for ingame cash you can use to buy weapons armor skills or runes should be a BANNABLE OFFENCE.

Hey! ANet might as well let me buy skills and a lvl 20 RPG character to boot. And Skip the whole gold buying. Just sell me the Fissure sets.

Then you cant tell the diffirence between who won things and who just bought it all like it should be.

Can I buy ranks too? I wanna see what animal comes out if I am rank 18.

I have read from the official guild wars people, who ever is caught using Ebay for Game purposes, their accounts will be eliminated on acount of the fact that its against the rules of conduct of the game.

ive only ever bought items for a game once and that was for d2, i got 73 acounts full of stuff for 50$ canadian, i put it all back up for sale on ebay and made close to 600$, so i think it was in my best intrest

I think there is a larger issue that needs to be addressed that just eBaying - why so much gold is necessary. The mere existance of gold items, fissure armour, ascention armour are carrots for those prepared to put hours into the game, to try and keep people playing until the next update/expansion. The problem is that people aren't prepared to wait and so grind for the items.

I personally don't think that balance will ever be found - people seem more than willing to sacrifice time and fun to grind for rare items, there are as such only three solutions:

1) remove all the rare armour and set limits on how much items can be sold for.
2) make the rare armour and items cheap/free/quest reward
3) create more items, to try and depreciate the value of specific items

I really don't get why people sell gold off of ebay, at my current farming spot i make about 10k an hour so for ten hours (100k) i get say ten bucks on ebay, when my friend stuffs shoes at target for eight bucks an hour (not joking) let's see....NO GULD 4 CHOO.

Ah, I've been expecting threads like these starting to pop up soon. ANet has done EVERYTHING to push people towards ebayers ... everything to increase the profits of the botters. Now it's just a matter of how soon and how many players will become desperate enough to do it ...

Normal players like myself can't accumulate any money anymore because nothing is dropping ... i'm playing alot, and finding one minor rune a week ... how pitiful is that ... noone but botters and those who managed to accumulate cash before the big nerf can get any serious cash now.

well, maybe farmers but that's way too boring for me to consider as an option.

I don't see what the big deal is. I made 36k the other night in about 5 seconds (admittedly, those 4 ectoplasm that had been in my inventory came from a single drop in the underworld of a Bladed Aatxe before all the nerfs.) I probably could have made more if I wasn't so impatient in spamming "z0mFgz0rZ!!11:~ s311iNg uBeR 1337 g34r!!11shift+1" for an hour.

ok, it may not have been one, but you had the form of an argument followed up by supporting statements. It just had the look of something to be debating and disputed.

I see your point how in a way it really is all pixels. I think that what people are buying is what they already get for the $50.

Lets face it! Wether nerf(Balance) or not, bots are still effective arround, just the fact that virtual merchandise sites are full of it proves the fact. And in my opinion it's the virtual items comming from other source that is destroyng the economy in GW.

Nothing else to say except; buff the missions, let drop more rare items, rare materials etc. and you would see those sites in huge dissadvantage and frustrated state.

"Nerf the bots not drops"

I have bought gold from ebay. 100k for 3$
So lets get some perspective here....

That is about 10-30 hrs+ of mindless farming I do not have to or want to do. Thats a big saving, can spend time developing characters and helping ppl instead.

If you think its sad to pay for pixels hey!- you bought the game didnt you that was $50 thats a lot of pixels. Oh and how many game updates have you bought, add ons, extra maps and so in the past. Will you buy a GW update? Hell you pay for the internet as well, maybe even a guide book. So what is 3$ I say.

For me it is about my game enjoyment, and before you flame me, my game enjoyment and requirements will be different to yours.
And I (thats me not you) simply could not find a good way to earn enough gold in game to run 4 characters and develope them how I desired, unless I played full time of course. If you can get zillions every hour good for you, I bought game not long ago and have had the pleasure of seeing every farming spot being nerfed with updates just before or even as I got there.
I am strictly a PvE player.
So before you condem me or anyone like me look to Anet first, because I want to experiment with things like superior runes and so on, I may want to use black dye, I may want to play around with armour and develope my characters and I like doing quests and going to collectors and help other players. But does that get me enough gold for what I wish to do..NO!

This is my first mmog, I have seen ppl play WOW etc and was never interested in spending 30 days play time to get some trinket (woo hoo) but thats me, when I first played GW I found that I didnt have to do any of that stuff and I loved it. Many updates and so called fixes later this is not the case anymore.

I still farm sometimes, get very little, have done all missions and quests, sometimes 3-4 times, go out help ppl, spread the wealth etc etc, but i do not want to spend 50hrs to get 1 item sorry!

I have spent 200+hrs, got considerable enjoyment and now am getting more for $3, now thats good value to me (ie me, you play how you like)

Ps, If I get my account banned for buying of ebay i really dont care ppl. If i cant play the game how I like I wont be playing and thats the crux of the problem here. So I say plain and simple - Anet needs to fix the economy.

Well thats the wonderful thing about GW, you dont have to farm to survive.. the problem with this community is everyone is focused on having a bazillion plat... and ebay just shows how much people want it.. which is pretty lame

Edit/PS: would people stop comparing buying in game gold to buying the game as a whole from retail.. because they have nothing to do with eachother what so ever...

pps: there is nothing wrong with the econ.. get over it.. and just to cover all bases no one complain about nerfs either.. there.. i think i pretty much wraped everything up in a nice little package that totaly reaks of awesomeness

Not ebay, that is the answer.


Rather than taking the bitch-who-ruins-game's way out, why don't you go farm the underworld? a single ectoplasm sells for over 10k, at the moment. Why don't you use it to your advantage? Otherwise, don't compensate for your ingame inadequacies using real world cash. EbayingItems:RPG::Hacking:FPS

I've been to underworld 10+ times and not once have had an ecto drop for me.