This got brought up in another topic about micro-transactions and paying to win. I don’t want to get into all of that here, but I’m curious what the community-at-large’s stance is on buying achievements.
Should this be cheating? Does Blizzard passively approve of this or have they actively said there is nothing wrong with this?
They don’t approve but they don’t stop it either.
If somebody wants to pay me in the form of gold to run them through a dungeon, why shouldn’t that be allowed? Honest question. They are giving me a virtual thing, to do a virtual thing.
It’s more so just something to frown upon imo
I could be wrong, but I believe the stance is…
If you sell achievements for gold, you can do it, but if you buy and get scammed, they won’t be helping you recover your lost gold.
If you sell achievements for cash (real money), Blizzard will smack you hard.
Gold now can be bought with real money so “virtual-to-virtual” doesn’t really apply. I think the argument that its cheating probably more accurately applies to buying big ticket items (Feats of Strength) like AOTC and not so much achievements like “An Honorable Kill”.
If you want to get into the RP side of it, people would definitely sell their sword in a world such as this. I mean, we fight mercs all the time in the open world. They are NPCs, but they are for sure getting paid to do what they do.
That’s the exact stance as far as I know. You can’t advirtise selling a run in the group finder but Blizz doesn’t care if someone pays you in-game materials including gold to carry them.
They DO care if you trade anything not in the game though. That’s ban worthy for both parties involved.
Of course it’s cheating. It undermines the point of the game.
I just find it ironic to call it an “Achievement”.
Your argument is invalid. you can’t convert gold to cash/irl monies. I’m still being handed a virtual thing, to do a virtual thing for a person. I literally can’t make cash from this transaction.
Its considered an “unsupported transaction.” Meaning it’s not against the rules but they won’t help if you get scammed.
I personally don’t like it,and missed out on a Moose and Spellwing because I refused to buy runs (I haven’t had a guild capable of raiding in a while) but I know people who do, and it’s their gold to spend how they wish. Shrug
No, it shouldn’t be considered cheating. People are giving an in-game currency to do something within the game.
It’s an MMO. Aren’t we supposed to be doing things with each other? In real life, people buy other people’s expertise all the time. Why can’t we do that in game with in game currency?
Full disclosure: I paid for my Legion bird. Not on a raid team and didn’t want to wait around to see if I could win a spot on a free carry group, so I paid 250k gold for it. Worth it cos then I could focus on other things.
Buying AOTC isn’t the “right” way to get it, no. But it’s not ruining anyone else’s gameplay when someone gets an achievement that they didn’t technically earn either. The worst it would do is give people a ticket into a group only looking for people with AOTC when they dont have the raid experience to go with it. To go after people for things like that would really just be petty on Blizzard’s part.
No /thread
Not sure that has anything to do with what I’m talking about. That’s more like some weird scenario where a game pays you to play. In fact I’m not even talking about paying to win. I’m talking about buying Achievements which often have an impact on in-game interactions. For example many Mythic Raids require you to link your AOTC. The achievement is sort of like a false advertisement. That’s at least how I view it. Never the less I appreciate your input.
Gold= money . Money is used to trade things or services and running stuff is a service. In the real world its fair game to hire body guards to do things. So in the game exchanging the gold and time you took to make it for a run seems like no big deal. You are essentially trading services with currency. You work for it and you exchange this universal commodity for things you are interested in.
Does that behavior diminish the value of the AOTC achievement?
Considering Ysithens said in a different thread that he made all his gold from selling carries in MoP I doubt it’s going anywhere.