Up until a few weeks ago I didn’t even know this was possible. Last week, in my mains guild, our best raid healer was AWOL for a few weeks. Then she came back and was absolutely awful. We were discussing what happened in Discord and why all of a sudden she couldn’t talk anymore live and why she was playing so bad (trying to be empathetic as life may have thrown her a curveball). Well, HE finally admitted he bought the account and hasn’t played WoW in over 4 years. Because it violates ToS we asked him to leave the guild and wished him good luck. I am sure one of my guildies reported him, though I don’t know.
Then, strangely enough, last night one of my BEST friends from 8.3 and the start of SL came back online. I was so pumped to see him. Peppered him with a bunch of WOOHOO’s and Welcome Back whispers, no response. I shot him an invite and he accepted. His typing skills (grammar) COMPLETELY changed. Was very very broken English and couldn’t even hold a conversation. Total opposite of the guy I knew. I point blank asked if he just bought the account or something and he didn’t answer but instead removed me from group and then put me on ignore. I then remembered I had his phone number from our 8.3 raiding days so I texted him and he said he sold his account last week.
I started playing this game in 8.3 and never even considered that people sell accounts. I just never thought about it. I knew people bought gold and carries as I have seen lots of those sites, but never one selling accounts.
Does this happen a lot? I am surprised to know it exists at all and that Blizzard can’t somehow know this and stop it. My guild said they have seen accounts sell for as much as $20,000! That is just jaw_freaking_dropping to me.
It can be done (not allowed…thats a different question) … but seller could reclaim the account at any moment or it could be banned at any moment… so its a fools risk to be on the buyer side of this.
No, I don’t think so because most accounts aren’t worth alot.
I’ve never seen an account go for more than 10k, you have to have a Scarab Lord account, with S1-current Glad mounts, all the CEs since the dawn of time, that one mount from TotGC, Naxx mounts, MoP CM skins, basically a super neckbeard account in order to see big money.
What are they going to do? “We noticed you suddenly started playing from a different state so we locked your account” So no playing wow on vacations?
I met someone in Wrath. They were asking for gold in trade and everyone was terrible to them so I gave them some gold and apologized for trade’s behavior, they explained that they leveled characters and sold them. I looked it up, it was pretty widespread at the time. I know someone IEL that traded their account for a computer.
It was always dubious due to sold accounts getting closed for violating ToS and the potential of the seller clawing back the account. Also since you can just get your own account and pay for boosts with tokens it is kind of stupid to pay for someone else’s.
If everything unobtainable were moved to the shop (not that I’m suggesting that’s a good idea) I’d agree because then there would be nothing special about any account. But with unobtainables in the game there is a difference in accounts which gives them value to some people.
I have a friend that plays WoW that I know bought his account.
This is someone that I met 20+ years ago in the military. I deployed to Iraq with them. However, he will only give me his Battle Tag and not his email for my friend’s list. All my other military buddies are listed as their real names except him. Also, I was the first person in our shop to play WoW and the rest of them joined in 2005, 2006 time frame yet he has the CE pets.
I know my roommate had to sell his 2nd account back in MoP (lost the info for his 1st one) because his finances were… utter garbage. At the time, he played it off like he just wasn’t interested in the game anymore… but told me later on down the road that he had to make ends meet somehow and was desperate. It really sucks.
it used to really only be that people would sell accounts with rare stuff/mounts/titles/transmog
but ever since they started adding crazy grindy systems in legion onward people sell accounts with system progress for players that wanna play the game without all the chores
