Do boxers sell their accounts?

[Ualaa]

A very geared Everquest account has gone for stupidly high amounts of money. Several of my friends were in Afterlife when it was a top 2 or 3 guild across all servers, at the height of Everquest. When they finally quit the game, their accounts made them $500-$1000 for the platinum and then $5000-$8000 (US) for the characters themselves.

Warcraft comparably is stupidly easy to gear up a toon. Unlike Everquest, it is not a two year process with a raiding guild which puts in 40 hours a week, to reach "top 5 on the server" status for your class. If it took you 25x longer to reach 85th and two to three years before you reached BiS or a close item in each slot after reaching 85th... characters might go for a lot more.

Taking into consideration, 80-100 hours to reach 85th from 1st without RAF if you have a half decent idea of what to do, where to go, etc... and possibly less than half that time, for someone following a quest stacking guide or playing with RAF, etc... For someone who enjoys the game, this is not a monotonous and painful grind, but a fun process. Classic + BC (Battlechest) + WotLK + Cata = $120. If you value your time at $10/hr (which is what you'd make flipping burgers here), and assume you could level to 85 in say 60 hours... You would need 60 x 10 = 600 + 120 = $720 or more for an undergeared character. If you wanted to do a pvp grind for full honor gear and say three weeks of points for the Conquest weapons, that's likely another 40 hours. I don't see an ungeared toon selling for $700+ or a decently geared character selling for over $1000 in Warcraft.

In an environment where it was painful to level, and a 15-30 minute death loop (whether dying at your bind point repeatedly, or dying 6-8 times retrieving your corpse) could set you back 20-25 hours of leveling... The half geared characters at maximum level, the equivalent of a level 85 with full honor gear and a conquest weapon (was actually full Skyshrine - Halls of Testing gear) would go for $1000 or so. I could level and gear two of these at once over the course of a month.

Having played Everquest for six or seven years, putting massive amounts of time into the game and doing lots of stuff that was quite fun... Then turning it into a business for eight or nine months. Sure it was enough to pay for my limited bills at the time, and got me by. A full time job, flipping burgers would have been close to $1600 a month gross. I was making $2000-$2400/mo, which is a bit better. But this was more like 80 hours a week (weekends included) where the burgers would have been 40 hours (half the time). And the worst part, my own toons which had been so fun to play up until 2-3 months into the character business, were a boring monotonous grind where I didn't have any fun playing them.

At the start of Warcraft, looking at the character selling site I had used (playerauctions) for the EQ characters, Warcraft characters were going for $300. Even if I were to crank out four characters a month (twice what I had been doing with EQ), the money was not there. Plus, being a new game Warcraft was actually fun and I wanted to log in to play my characters (was two-boxing, with two machines no hardware/software... exactly the same as EQ except two boxes instead of six).

So selling characters financially is not a good option. Selling gold is no good, if you were to rely on your own accounts to generate it. And going the keylog route and screwing another person out of their gold would never be an option for me. I might be vindictive enough to bring a higher team and camp someone for an hour, if they flagged (Carebear server) to take out my lower toons who inadvertently became flagged for something. But I won't ever put someone through the aggravation/pain of a hacked account.

Not really a hard choice -- play the game and enjoy it as a recreational activity (even if I sometimes "log" 100+ hours in a week), and never really consider it as a business opportunity. The money is not there, which is a good thing because the fun factor goes away very quickly if your recreational activity becomes your money maker.

[d0z3rr]

It's an interesting thing for me. I would never sell any of my accounts, I like all my characters and have spent too much time on them (at least to me, /played of 10days is A LOT to me). I also have done RAF ad nauseum, to the point that levels 0-70 will make my head explode - selling my accounts and having to do that all over again would be pointless unless I was in a dire financial situation, or my cocain addiction gets the better of me ( j/k ).

I used to buy and sell accounts back in the Vanilla days. The reason I did this was to try out the different classes without having to level to 60 over and over again. It also allowed to me to get a level 60 character with already decent gear so I could join higher level raids and pvp without having to grind out instances or raids and save dkp. If I got bored playing a mage, I'd sell it and get a rogue. Most of the time nobody knew the account had been ebayed, and if they did, they were cool with it (since I didn't suck ass).

The only reason I stopped doing that was because of multiboxing. I can level 5 characters at once all 5 different classes, and boom - after two groups I can then play any class in the game. I can switch between melee and caster classes, if I feel like healing or tanking I just jump on the tank or healer and PUG.

[Mukade]

Something else to consider these days is that making an endgame raiding capable character means you're going to be putting up with pug hc groups.

All the changes that cata brought in to heroics and class mechanics means that multiboxing is not going to be usable to farm too many of them.

I'm guessing any boxers who are at the point where they can even do some of the cata heroics, have already geared their characters by playing them solo.

[Littleburst]

It might be fun at first, but having to play in order to make money would probably burn a person out pretty fast. Can you imagine having to play WOW 6, 8 or 10+ hours every day?

Beats working at a Conveyer belt any day, i'd asume

[kate]

Personally I don't care if people think I sell accounts or gold or whatever - I've been told "Reported!" quite a bit and yet I haven't been banned, so obviously whatever those people think is irrelevant. Why would I get bothered by it?

While I personally wouldn't sell accounts or gold (it simply wouldn't be worth my time), I really don't care if other people do, either, because I don't particularly think it has any real impact on the game. We've all seen people who are so incredibly bad that we assume they must have bought their accounts on eBay, but the fact of the matter is, some people just suck and suck HARD at this game. I really cannot imagine that the number of bought characters/accounts is somehow so large that it would even begin to have an impact on any area of gameplay.

I do have a friend who is unemployed and, while she's looking for work she has taken to offering powerleveling & rep grinding to people. She works on about 10 different characters a week and makes enough to cover her bills, but it's not exactly a good living - just something to tide through until new work. I also know a few people who sell gold to their guildmates in exchange for timecards and stuff like that.

Seriously, when I think about things that are problems in this game, people making a few bucks here and there on the fringes is not even on the radar.

[valle2000]

Also another thing you hear quite often is: But isn't it expensive?
This is a very strange question, because all hobbies usually cost money and this is my hobby.

It's all about what you prioritize. Some people use up way more money than a month fees of five accounts just by e.g. going out one night. Or buys cloths more often due to fashion, or going to the cinema paying same amount as a month fee just to be entertained for 2 hours...

[Fat Tire]

Most of the people that sell their accounts are done playing the game never to return. No one can blame anyone for trying to recoup any money spent on wow if another person values it especially if they are done playing.

In my opinion the better question would be, why do people buy accounts? Here you will find the answer as to why people sell their accounts. Why chase the carrot when you can just pay off the guy holding the stick.

[Tonuss]

Beats working at a Conveyer belt any day, i'd asume

Hah! True. If I had a choice between working the counter at McDonalds and playing WOW all day...

Also another thing you hear quite often is: But isn't it expensive?
This is a very strange question, because all hobbies usually cost money and this is my hobby.

I had a player comment to me the other day "you must be loaded... five accounts?"

To me, it just indicates a young player. Hey, there was a time when $15 a month was not easy for me to come by, much less a whopping $75 a month.

Then, you know... I got a job.

[Dorffo]

Hah! True. If I had a choice between working the counter at McDonalds and playing WOW all day...

I had a player comment to me the other day "you must be loaded... five accounts?"

To me, it just indicates a young player. Hey, there was a time when $15 a month was not easy for me to come by, much less a whopping $75 a month.

Then, you know... I got a job.

This is what I encounter the most often. I do recall having to work an extra shift to pay for my everquest/dial-up way back when, so I can understand that POV.

[jinkobi]

Biggest problem if you want to sell it is that 99.9% of the buyers are just scammers. Really just asking to be scammed..