| So can you give a basic explanation of how your business model works? Are you simply a middle man aka market maker or do you provide some method of improvement meaning a value added product? Whats the worst part of what you do? | My business model is a bit different than my competitors, which is also why I get the best accounts. |
| You see most "resellers" buy accounts cheaper, and sell them higher. Aka Lowball the seller, and take as much as they can. |
| Instead I operate as a more personal account provider. Basically when someone comes to me, they know they're coming for the best of everything. I have the best security, the best warranty, the best addon services, etc. I provide a lot of extras that no one else in the business can. So I make money on the services I provide to the buyer of the account, not on the account itself. Meaning the sellers are happy they're getting full price for the toon, and my buyers get a lot more for their money. Here's some examples of what my extras are - |
| 1) I am the only seller to offer a lifetime recall guarantee. I have good enough security to offer this to my buyers. Meaning if the account is recalled, they get their money back in full. I can't tell you how big recalls are in this industry, and this protection is HUGE. |
| 2) I offer Hacker Protection and Support. Meaning if the buyer gets the account hacked, I can recover and secure it for them. |
| 3) I Offer Character Resale Assistance. Say they get bored of the character, instead of just having them sell it back to me, I sell it on the market for them. Often times getting my buyers more money than they paid, or at the very least the same amount they paid. Also I offer to sell and secure any characters they have that they no longer want. |
| 4) For $500 they can have the account put in their name. This is also HUGE. I have a method I have worked out myself, and I am the only person in the world who offers this service (besides the one other website I have licensed it to). |
| The worst part is dealing with recalls, and having to sit on hold with Blizzard's phone queue. Especially since they fired a bunch of customer support in that lay-off wave about a month ago. Phone hold times went from 5 minutes to 2 hours. |
| How have you "licensed" this process? Do you have patents on it? What's preventing this company that you licensed the process to from handing it out else where? | I have had them sign an NDA, as well as a legal licensing contract. Honestly I have a personal history with the company's Founder, thankfully I know I can trust him. As far as patents go, that simply could not be done. |
| How difficult is ito get account names etc changed? You make sound as if you created a method (as opposed to exploited one), and have a patent on it? Please elaborate more if you can without giving away industry secrets, this seems a very important part of your service. | It is quite difficult and takes quite a bit of work out of my part to get done. (Forms, special departments, multiple calls) I have in fact created the method, and it is no exploitation. It isn't a glitch in the system or anything and does involve blizzard greatly. |
| I can't give away much other than the fact that I usually have 2-3 name change orders a week. |
| I Offer Character Resale Assistance. Say they get bored of the character, instead of just having them sell it back to me, I sell it on the market for them. Often times getting my buyers more money than they paid, or at the very least the same amount they paid. Also I offer to sell and secure any characters they have that they no longer want. What happens when someone wants their character back? Is it possible for someone to take their characteaccount back once it has been sold? | Fortunately its impossible for them to take back their account with my new recall security method. If they attempted to call in about their old account, it wouldn't exist. Blizzard would try and pull it up in their system, but due to a legal request it would no longer be present in the system. Thus there would be no link to the new battle.net which the character would be on. |
| and does involve blizzard greatly. | Trust me I wish I did, sometimes I get a rep who simply wont do it and I'll have to call back. Official Blizzard Policy is to NEVER change the name on an account, only for special circumstances. And it always requires a supervisor to sign off on it. |
| Man on the inside, got it :) | Honestly though I think if I did, the person who was doing it would get fired pretty fast. Blizzard keeps a really good record of what their account staff are doing, and if they see one guy keeps changing the names on accounts, they're going to get a little suspicious because it really is a SPECIAL CIRCUMSTANCE type thing only. Which is why I charge $500 to do it ;) |
| Basically, he's taking full ownership of the account. If you really want to buy the account from him, you have to pay the additional $500. Otherwise, you are not going to get a scan of his ID to go through the process yourself. | The addon service is just extra if the buyer wants the account in his name rather than the original owner's. |
| What do you do with all that cash? All that cash inside your trunk? | Trust me though, I have made my fair share of stupid impulse buys. Lets see, I bought a brand new challenger last month for nearly 40 grand cash even though I know its going to diminish in value quite quickly, and on Sunday I bought an iPad just because I was at Target and felt like getting one lol. Sometimes I feel bad for my friends because some of them won't have $5 to their name, whereas I can always use my bank card on just about anything and never have to worry about it. Who knew all this would come from video games. |
| Way to make a business out of something. Virtual hi-five. Impressive. | Thanks man! I moved out and bought an awesome pad when I was still in high school, and now I invest most of my money in the stock market to grow my portfolio. |
| Thats awesome. Self made man, i have so much respect for you! | Thanks!! I appreciate the kind words :) |
| Do you level all the characters yourself? Do you use bots to do it? Have you ever stolen or flipped a stolen account? I'd say account jackers are assholes, but the time it happened to me I got all my shit back plus a really rare Super Simian Sphere, so I guess that's cool. On that note, how much value does a rare non craftable item like the SSS add to an account? | 1) I don't level the characters myself. I simply buy the characters from the original owner, and then resell them. |
| 2) I'm sure I have sold a stolen account, though I do take every step I can to make sure its not stolen. Basically the only way to sell an account to me is to prove you're the original owner by scanning your driver's license. Though people have tried to give me fake ID's all the time, I can usually point them out. |
| 3) Sadly there's no price list we can look at that tells us what adds value to an account and what doesn't. Really if an account is good as a whole its going to sell. What it sells for is really up to the seller. Its all about how well you market it to the buyer(s), and if you can sell them on it at the value you've set. |
| This is how you get the name changes... If you have the ID of the person who owns the account then you can fax it into them when I need proof. | Their policy is to never change the names on an account, only for special circumstances. I can assure you changing the name on an account is not as simple as just blinding faxing an ID scan to them lol |
| Would you say this is your full-time job or are you working/studying? How many hours a week do you have to put in to rake in 100K? | Right now its a full time job, but when my website launches I plan to hire a bit more help and then go back to school so that I can get my degree whilst making good money from upper management of my own business. Less day to day essentially. I've been training my "replacement" so to speak and he's set to move out to California and move in with me in September. |
| I'd say about a solid 40-50 hours a week, granted again a lot of those hours aren't straight work. I may be "working", but working can sometimes entail sitting in my room watching game of thrones while I wait for people to message me. Or on hold with blizzard while I play a game of League. |
| What kind of phone calls do you have with Blizzard? | Account recovery or name changes usually. I offer a service to recover and secure anyone's hacked or recalled account for $300. So if someone spent say $2,000 on an account and it was recalled from them a few months ago, I can get it back with ease and secure it for them. |
| You have a golden goose. Do not squander it. It's a rare opportunity. | Thus far I've had my employee sign an NDA and I should look into a non-competition document as well. You wouldn't by chance have any information you could forward to me about that? You seem skilled with lawyering up :) |
| If you ever get into anything like this with LoL and feel like hiring let me know. Never been a fan of WoW, but League's "black market" is really beginning to skyrocket with its hugely increasing popularity. | Yeah I might look into it, though League needs to offer out some sort of achievements system and title system maybe and then I could really see making good money with a nice league account. |
| Your story sounds awesome. I remember buying/selling accounts and items in Runescape back in high school. Dear God if I could have just stuck with that it'd been so nice to be doing something like you're doing. | Don't be too envious, what I do is quit stressful. At 19 years old I have quite a few grey hairs already. |
| Ps: non compete agreements are generally invalid. They probably should have been signed as a condition of employment at hiring. Formation of your company ? : llc , corporation , sole proprietorship , etc? Do you have an accountant? | I would love an accountant, and right now my company is a sole proprietorship. I really should start doing the books more organized, as like I mentioned earlier, sometimes I forget I'm owed money etc. |
| What would farming for league actually entail? All I could imagine it being is getting an account to 30 and not spending any IP. I guess you could sell high ELO accounts, but that doesn't mean shit once whoever buys the account starts playing online and losing ELO. | Right now I don't think there's a market at all for "farming league". But in the future if they add stuff like Titles, Achievements, vanity like that, I could see people looking to buy rare accounts. |
| Side question: What character (alternate: what role) do you main and why? | I played a Holy Paladin for years primarily in arena. I played a paladin since Vanilla, and just really liked the playstyle. Well I'm not sure if I liked it, I was just good at it haha |
| What about League, what characterole do you play in that? (Taking a guess here based on your paladin choice, Tank/Support? Maybe Tanky DPS?) | I usually play solo mid carry :) After having played support for so many years, I just had to go the carry route ;) |
| Do you have some sort of back-up plan when/if WoW finally goes the way of AoC? Other games perhaps? Really made me ಠ_ಠ when you said that you actually told Ghostcrawler about this right to his face o.O. | For planning on my business model surviving if WoW were to die out, yes I would happily switch over to a new MMO if one were out. As I said earlier, luckily I am "The ToonVendor" not the "WoW Vendor". I know I will be on the fore-front of any major MMO that is actually good enough to properly compete with WoW for its audience. It would take at least a year or so to establish itself enough for me to make a switch, but I am ALWAYS very cautious of market conditions so I know when something like this is going to happen ahead of time. WoW Devs are just regular people at these types of events. The curse after party basically has all the "efamous" people there, the only reason I got in was because I personally played with a lot of the arena players at the arena event on my paladin back when I was good in arena. I was terribly starstruck when I saw athene lol very nerdy of me :p. Also it was awesome to have hotel staff serving me alcohol directly, couldn't beat the open bar and no ID event! Also cant forget the gross drunk e-sluts there! Though technically for that night only, they were real life sluts ;) |
| Wait, there are e-sluts? Seriously? | Yeah they hang around with all the efamous players like Athene had Mia Rose hanging around him constantly (the pornstar). Most of the esluts hang around the top guilds, Paragon, Blood Legion, etc. Its pretty gross tbh. They usually end up moving in together and heaps of drama goes down, she's talking in vent with some other person behind his back etc. lol |
| Ever considered just moving offshore to panama? or even mexico like the online poker players do. | I really don't think Blizzard will be targeting me, I'm part of the smallest market share of the real money trading community (high-end accounts). I mean I was at the Curse After Party at Blizzcon this past year and there was tons of Blizzard Dev's there and I was handing out business cards and talking it up with them, I told Ghostcrawler what I did he thought it was cool. I really don't think Blizzard cares anymore. |
| Oh no, I mean't to avoid paying taxes, since if it was handled offshore, you'd have no reason to declare your "virtual goods" income. | Very true, I guess I'm just not to keen on tax evasion since my grandfather ended up in prison over it. Apparently he just wasn't very good at it lol |
| How will you get around any legal issues that Blizzard will have with you buying and reselling a comodity that belongs to them? | Luckily they haven't paid much attention to us account sellers. I'd certainly be scared as Blizzard has one of the biggest legal teams in the business. |
| Especially if you start your own website. Won't they just shut you down? | That being said, I can simply argue that I am not selling the characters themselves, but the time invested in said characters. That is really the legal grey area were in. |
| You are selling and buying access to accounts, accounts that belong to blizzard. In blizzard's terms, it is equivalent to sub-letting an apartment, and is not legal. Haveing said that, I am by no means a fanboy, if you can make the kind of cash that you say you can, balls to the walls bro, do everything you can. I just hope they don't drop the hammer on you, would be a lot of time/effort/seed money on some accounts? , lost if they did. | Honestly I don't think I would be the company they would be going after. I sell a small volume of accounts at a high value. Whereas there's companies such as www.toonstorm.com, www.ige.com, and countless others that have been selling characters for years at high volume, making me a small time account seller in comparison. |
| I honestly see myself doing this for the rest of my life, as I love dealing with video games. | I should have probably paid more attention to that statement. |
| I could see myself doing this as long as I can until something better comes along. I think with my already having a successful business and focusing on getting good grades, I should be able to transfer to one of my dream ivy schools. From there I would make connections and work to increase my position in life. That is the plan, and who knows what could change. I could start some sort of gaming start up within the next five years and make a killing with it. |
| I have been dabbling quite a bit with investing the past 2 years. Right now I'm playing with the market myself, and I've luckily been having great returns, so well that some of my wealthier clients have already asked me to manage their portfolios. The market seems quite safe when you do the proper research, but I always understand that sometimes the unpredictable can happen. Unlike the typical young day trader, I have adopted the strategy of Warren Buffet who believes in making smart long investments with certain returns rather than favoring a stock with high volatility. Look for large, safe, companies that are undervalued. For instance my biggest turn around was Intel, I saw that it was quite undervalued last year around $19 late last year and rode it all the way up to $27 thus far. I've nearly gained 50% within 1 year, which brought in an additional $20,000 in just one year. Imagine what could be done with more money. |
| I guess I'm just rambling, but I do have a lot of skill for other areas, not just WoW account sales. This just happens to pay nicely for my time ;) |
| I remember a few years ago when I played on Sylvanas, this guy Zeuzo sold his account to some sheikh for about 10 grand. Insane. Have you ever trade in such high numbers? | I remember that article. btw the part about buying a blank account for 12 euro, and then power leveling the character to max level and selling for 400 is absolutely absurd. There's no way you would get that value, even at that time. |
| Source btw: Link to news.bbc.co.uk. | The highest number I've ever sold an account for is $6,500, and I've sold some of the best accounts in WoW. Even some of Blood Legion's characters are only worth $2000-$3000 or so. |
| Is Mists of Pandarea expected to decrease account values, increase them, or do nothing at all? | 1) The release of an expansion always increases the value of accounts initially, but usually the worst time for the market is the mid-point. Such as Ulduar in WOTLK, and Firelands in Cata. |
| Has the value on accounts gone down over time since Vanilla because there are more accounts or risen because of the larger playerbase? | 2) It has dropped drastically since BC because the game used to be much harder then, and full tier 6 toons by themselves would fetch what the best accounts are selling for now. Also there was a larger playerbase. |
| Is there really a market for regular accounts? Like just regular ole level 85's. I kind of figured that the people who would be willing to buy an account would be people interested in the best. Is there another market out the for people wanting 80-100 dollar accounts? | 3) There is a market, but one I'm not involved in. Typically sites that buy those only offer maybe $10-$20 for them and resell them for $100. |
| Have you ever considered branching out into other games? | 4) I have, and I'm always open to branching out. Just no game has shown profitable enough to sink any amount of time into yet. |
| Level 85 Warrior, level 85 Shaman. Decked out in epics well enough to level up to level 90 when the expansion hits. Account from the first day. European servers. What's it worth? Edit: Armory unavailable, haven't played in over 6 months (at the very least). An indication would be nice, though. 50 USD? 100? 500? | I personally wouldn't buy this account because I focus on good vanity toons (higher end type stuff). That being said, a wholesaler will probably offer you $20-$50. Www.toonstorm.com, epicmmo.com, etc. |
| How do you keep blizzard from banning the accounts you sell? I've heard rumors about blizzard checking accounts and banning those that log in from IP's that differ from the original or frequently used IP's. | Ah you're talking about the annoying as shit auto-lock that happens with an IP change. Every time I go to login to an account I buy it locks >_< So then I just do a password reset and it unlocks. There is no harm in this whatsoever. |
| As far as an account getting banned for being sold, hasn't happened since Burning Crusade. Even then they were never banned, just ID locked, meaning you had to submit an ID to unlock it. |
| How would say i, wanting to buy an account keep that account. Do you supply all information on the old owner like name, address, keys etc? | I sure do, though any account you buy from me is secured for life against recall so you get to rest easy knowing I have your back ;) |
| What is the most popular 'class' people want? ;P Also; what's the most expensive account you sold? | Melee classes are easily the most popular. |
| Id say Warrior > Rogue > Death Knight > Ret Paladin as far as melee go. |
| Ranged/Other, Mage > Warlock > Hunter > Shaman > Priest > Paladin. |
| Most expensive account I've ever sold was actually my personal account I had worked on myself. I had it since Vanilla and I was the OO. I had gotten 4x Rank 1 titles on it, every season gladiator, and a ton of raiding realm firsts since I raided with in WOTLK. I sold it for $6,500 total and included a battle.net name change with it. Meaning I changed the name on the battle.net account to the new buyer's, I normally charge $500 for this service. |
| Have you people been wanting warriors more or less in the past few years? | Yes, but sadly they're hard to find because a lot of the best warriors are never sold. I don't know what it is about warriors, but people never want to give them up. |
| Good point. However aren't you afraid they are building up a massive sweeping lawsuit to target a lot of service providers at once? That's usually how they handle those kinds of things. | You guys try and get me scared every time I do an AMA :P Why must you do this?! lmao I mean I could sit around and think what if blizzard does..?! And worry about it constantly, but honestly I don't. Its been going on for so long, and Blizzard has recently shown they're embracing RMT with the Real Life Auction House in D3. I just don't see them doing something like this. |
| As I said earlier, I was at Blizzcon this past year at the Curse After Party handing my business card around like crazy. I talked to Blizzard devs and other staff and they all thought it was awesome. No one had a problem with it, it seemed perfectly acceptable. We make money with the game despite however we do it. I know to you guys the typical wow audience, you see that its against the EULA and you think its illegal. Breaking an EULA is against a game's policy, and technically I shouldn't be allowed to play the game after I've broken it. But really thats as far as it goes. You say I'm selling blizzard's property, I say I'm selling the time invested in Blizzard's property. So on and so forth. Simply put, Blizzard as a company has really changed over the years, and they are embracing real money trading. They have noticed that people who participate in RMT are MUCH more likely to pay for their virtual items in their blizzard store, or buy extra game accounts, and overall just willing to spend more money on other blizzard products. Thats why they don't ban these people anymore, because these people are paying the biggest tabs. |
| What I do isn't hurting anyone, or the game itself. Most of the people who buy accounts from me succeed in real life (make good money), but the trade off is they don't have enough time to play the game as much as they'd like to. So they can't succeed as much as they want to ingame, so they cut corners where they can. This brings up a whole 'nother argument in itself, but I'll leave it here ;) |
| Thanks for answering some of these mate, quite insightful. Last question for me. What do you do when someone wants to sell you an account that has other games attached to it? Has the problem every arisen? Ever lost a sale/buy because of this fact? | All the time, that's why I'd say 80% of the time I just buy the single character and pay to transfer it off of the battle.net account onto a new battle.net account I set up. This costs about $85 to do, $60 for cd-keys and $25 for the character transfer. Then the old owner can keep his/her battle.net and all their old games/alt characters/etc. |
| How do you get around all the personal info they ask you for? dont you input your email..most emails ask you for names..blizz asks for your CC info if you pay that way... | Blizzard Activision is not the same Blizzard we once knew. Simply put, they accept account selling/buying now. They don't encourage it, but they do accept it. You could call blizzard and tell them you bought your account and they won't do anything anymore. |
| They have really embraced the fact that the people who are buying accounts are most likely buying all the pets and mounts in the blizzard store as well. |
| I think it also has to do with their subscriptions. If somebody buys an account, it is another account that is paying $15 a month rather than just sitting idle. | Plus the money people spend on character transfers (I do nearly 20 or so at LEAST a week), on top of cd-keys (Again at least 20 sets a week, about $100 a set). Race changes, Faction Changes, everything blizzard makes a nice profit on. |
| Is the only real value in a character based on capped level + current gear? Silly question, but I have a WoW account from vanilla with BWL / MC... couldn't bring myself to grind when the level cap was increased. Just curious if people would be interested in the nostalgia of the gear :) | Yes, twinks actually fetch quite a good amount on the marketplace for what they have. Most value in accounts actually comes from achievement points & feats of strength, not necessarily gear. |
| How much can I sell my mage for? I have gladiator s3, brutal gladiator, and gladiator in each season of wrath. I also have atiesh... I stopped playing when cata came out...fucking hated it. | Its too bad you didn't sell before cataclysm because you would have been able to get a LOT more value. I'd need to see your armory to give you a decent quote, why don't you shoot me an email at [email protected] and I can work with you there. |
| I wouldn't write your email in real format on a publicly indexed site if I were you. | Its my company email which is displayed on multiple publicly indexed websites. I want my email to be out there for a reason so that people can easily get ahold of me to have me quote their account. |
| Especially when you're not playing by the book. | By the book, is technically a legal grey area. Yes I am breaking a game's EULA, but the worst they could legally do is have a restraining order against me using their property again. Though I won't argue with you, if Blizzard legal were to come after me, I'd be scared shitless. They have one of the biggest legal teams in the business. |
| Never knew you could make over 6 figures just by doing this... WoW is really that popular huh? I know of account gamertag sellers on Xbox Live but they don't usually make much if any at all since it's so many games while WoW is much bigger with a huge worldwide audience. | WoW is a game played by over 10 Million people world wide, that's about the size of Czech Republic ;) |
| My sister plays Wow... but if it's illegal maybe I won't tell her to try any of this. | Yeah I couldn't see gamertags making that much, but at least something due to gamer score. |
| What's awesome is that this is videogame related (your passion) AND you're making good money especialy at my age (19). I'm jealous to be honest. I wish I could do what I love (relating to fitness, health, and videogames too mainly console games like Halo MLG) and make that much. | It surely isn't illegal, just against a game's EULA. You won't get into any sort of legal trouble for this, breaking a game's policy just means you aren't allowed to play the game anymore. Nothing more. |
| Do you feel that you're definitely successful and that you're well better off than most average American nowadays? I think your answer will be yes. | I definitely feel I'm better off than most americans these days. I can buy basically anything I want to an extent, and I have been making more money than my parent's since I was 17. Sometimes I feel bad to see my friends from highschool working manual labor jobs 10 hours a day and coming home with about $60-$70 after taxes from a full day's work. When I just brought in $1000 from one account selling that same day. |
| What do you do besides "working" ? Whats your level of graduation ( iahve literally no idea about the american school system, just tell me in what of the xTH year you're in :-D ) What do your friends, family, etc think of your "job" ? | I have only completed 12 years of school, a highschool diploma is as far as my education goes. Though I wish to attend higher schooling (college) asap. I don't think I can ever get a proper job unless its something like corporate management of a large company that pays well over 100k a year. I really wish to be my own boss for the rest of my life, and I'm always looking to start another start up, possibly game related. What I am doing right now is really just building a nice savings account so that I can have more freedom to do whatever I want. |
| Oh I remember the times in vanilla where I botted 8 chars at the same time. They were 60 within 2 weeks and I could instantly sell all of them for $100+ each, fresh lvl60s without gear or gold... Good times. | Sure man, shoot me a message to shoot the breeze anytime. |
| Stopped doing this for a long time now. Is there still money to be made by mass botting? Or selling gold? And also I would love to have a chat with you, just for fun. | That being said, there really isn't much money to be made in either. A plain 85 sells for hardly more than the cost of the cd-keys if that. And gold is going for $0.5/k retail, even less in bulk. |
| I've emigrated from Europe to Australia and I'm unable to play my character because of a clash with raiding times and high ping. I have two 85, a 70 and a few other high levels I can't remember off hand. My mains characters are Shadow Priest and Death Knight. I have over 16k in gold and now non-available pvp armour. How much money could I make selling my account? | Really the only way for me to quote on a character is to look at the armory. Too many factors can affect pricing. |
| Do you think a lot of accounts come from sweatshops? I think the vast majority are from people farming accounts. How do you feel about that? On one hand, they make the game suck for the rest of us, but on the other hand, it's providing a source of income for some poor people. | I can't speak for the wholesalers, but the accounts I sell are from pure 100% USDA-approved Americans :) haha. Really though, the accounts I sell are of a certain quality, they aren't just your typical chinese farmer account. They generally have over 10,000 achievements, top level gear, etc. A sweatshop wouldn't be doing something like this. |
