I’ve Ogre Suitbeen loudly predicting since the late 90s that virtual asset sales in MMORPGs were going to be a major part of the landscape, and while my predictions have certainly borne out in the East, the West has been a bit slow to pick up on them. Now, however, the largest MMORPG in world is adding to the roster of virtual items that it sells, though Blizzard is, characteristically, trying to disguise the fact that it’s doing it.

The way the scheme works is that you buy the items that Blizzard is selling by purchasing packs of their collectible playing cards. Each pack comes with a card worth 100 “points.” When you get enough points, you can trade in those points for some in-game items like a re-usable trinket that sets off fireworks, or the ability to look like an ogre (pictured at right).

How much do you think they might be selling these items for? Try ~$950. You need to spend about ~$950 on packs of cards to get the ability to look like an Ogre.

Now, to be fair, this isn’t quite the same thing as just selling virtual items directly like we do, but the difference is a small one. It’s exchanging real money for in-game stuff, which is already easily possible in WoW via services like IGE, of course, but this is one of the first times Blizzard has sanctioned it (it sold/sells a panda pet via making people pay extra for a Collector’s Edition as well).

All it would take to break the floodgates on direct virtual asset sales in the MMORPG market is the market leader engaging in it brazenly enough. I suspect that the way its sold items so far is enough to ‘fool’ the segment WoW fans who might otherwise object, but I’d love to see it take the next step and directly offer items to players.

I don’t play WoW (though I have a bit in the past), but were I able to legally purchase a higher level character from them, I likely would, and would play the game for a couple months using that character. I’m just not interested in getting the character there myself, and I’m also a stickler about trying to follow EULAs that I agree to, so using IGE or a leveling service just isn’t an option for me. I don’t have a ton of free time to invest into the game, and I’d rather simply spend some money to get ahead legally rather than illegally. I mean, either way it’s not as if the illegality (or greyishness if you prefer) of RMT via IGE is stopping a lot of people from buying their way ahead given IGE’s enormous success. WoW is a game where many many people have paid to get ahead, continue to pay to get ahead, and will in the future pay more to get ahead, both to Blizzard and to services like IGE, and it’s kind of irritating that the only reason I’m not able to is that I respect my agreement with Blizzard.

What’s especially galling, I think, is that Blizzard appears to quietly sanction buying gold from IGE, while condemning the practice out of the corner of its mouth. After all, it’s not the buyers of the gold who get their accounts shut down by Blizzard; it’s the producers of the gold. Blizzard knows that cracking down on the buyers (the demand from which creates the producers) would cost them a lot of business as a good portion of their players enjoy having the freedom to spend money instead of free-time to get ahead. Blizzard is even willing to engage in a bit of not-so-subtle subterfuge in order to sell things to players themselves, all the while scoring points with the anti-RMT crowd by shutting down tens of thousands of gold farmer accounts…most of which will be started right back up again, costing Blizzard very little business in the end and making very little actual difference long-term. Blizzard gets its press release touting its heroics in combatting RMT, and then takes the new account signups from the gold farmers it just shut down, all the while also happily continuing to permit the users who don’t respect the EULA to buy their way ahead while denying similar ability to those who do respect the EULA.