Sparter Stops Selling World of Warcraft Gold?

Sparter LogoWell its been a hectic month, and I’ve been busy in real life with not much time to blog. However since this was pretty big news I had to blog about it. There is a new update on Sparter’s blog that states:

Today we removed the ability to enter new purchase orders for all games and worlds currently supported by Sparter. Existing orders will continue to completion, and may be accessed by visiting the My Account area.

Going forward, we believe the best course for our business is to focus solely on providing marketplaces with the full support of game developers and publishers.

Short announcement, and no notice sent by e-mail to its users. I wonder what caused the change of practice for this company to undertake this change? Anyways if you want to read the full article you can find it here.  As for me due to the lack of interest in people wanting to buy gold in the recent months, I’ve cancelled my subscription to World of Warcraft finally.  I’ll be moving on to Age of Conan with a bunch of friends.  By the way that game starts up today if you picked up the early access key =).

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December Totals, Forgot November Too

Another month has passed, and its already time to bring up earnings. Funny thing about having posts sitting in drafts, and forgetting about them. I found that I’ve had like 5 posts carried over from my Blogger blog, that made it into this Wordpress one in draft form. Among them the November post, which I had apparently forgotten to post as well. So I’ll post both months earnings here.

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Sparter CEO Dan Kelly Interview

Sparter doesn’t usually put up blog posts so when this one came through I thought it was an interesting read. Its an interview of CEO Dan Kelly of Sparter done by Usable Markets Alex Kirtland.

Some interesting information from the interview for me was these points from Dan Kelly:

Globally there is a 2 billion dollar per year business for digital items in all the online games, from World of Warcraft to Maple Story, mainly centered on games in the Korean, North American and European markets.

Imagine that, a whole economy worth 2 billion dollars that could basically be erased if someone formatted each game company’s hard drive.

A typical seller makes enough to play World of Warcraft for free – about $200 a year – but some make a lot more than that.

I chuckled at this one since I find making gold fairly easily. Why would someone just make a few hundred, and leave? I guess the answer to that is that I know a lot of people who stop playing wow, and just sell off their gold/characters never to come back to the game again.

Some guilds in WoW, for example, only want to raid. They prefer to buy the gold they need and focus their time — 20-50 hours per week — on the parts of the game they love most. This is not a bad thing.

Desperate times call for desperate measures I guess. I remember raiding with a not so full guild, and we were always hurting for certain classes or consumables. While hard core role players hate people who just buy a lvl 70 character or buy gold just to get mounts or gear instead of instancing. There are times when those people just shut up just to have that extra player or character around. This way the whole guild can experience end game raids, and get further ahead. The 20-50 hours a week raiding adds up, and when you have to farm for repair costs or consumables you either have to play WoW full time, make a lot of gold efficiently, or straight up buy gold to stay ahead in progress.

We think that online communities will continue to grow at very attractive rates. As they get bigger, more people will want to trade. And the secondary markets will have to be there because otherwise they’re absence will hold back the growth of the primary markets.

The black market for gold in World of Warcraft or currency in other games will always exist as long as it takes a certain amount of time required to maintain a character. The key is the time required to acquire those items. There’s no black market currency for games like Dota, Team Fortress, Counterstrike since all players start out equal with items being reset at each session. However once you start involving time or ranks a market will appear to sell that service to save you time. Even if one were to try, and stop a virtual black market. They would just find another way to sell the services without getting caught.

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Sparter’s Commission Rate Doubles to 20% – Ouch

Here’s the notification from Sparter:

Since launching earlier this year, Sparter has succeeded in transforming the landscape of trade in virtual goods. As a Sparter seller, you have been a key contributor to this success.

We have continually been making changes to meet the needs of our buyers and sellers. Just in the past month we have offered new market pricing charts, seller profile pages displaying your offers (with unique URLs), and alerts that allow buyers to ’subscribe’ to their favorite sellers.

Today, we want to inform you of other changes we are making to Sparter – changes intended to allow us to stay competitive in attracting more buyers for your offers, and to keep Sparter the safest place to trade.

Effective November 1, 2007, Sparter’s commission on completed trades will be 20%. In addition, disbursements will now be processed semi-monthly – sellers will be disbursed on the 15th and last day of each month, for sales credited in the previous period. For example, the proceeds from a sale credited on November 10 would be disbursed on November 30.

We are confident that these changes are necessary to allow Sparter to remain the easiest and safest place to trade virtual goods. We understand these changes will impact your business on Sparter, thus we are informing you now so that you may incorporate them into your plans for the future.

Thank you for using Sparter.

So I was under the impression that I was going to hoard my gold till the prices come up to sell them. Now I get an e-mail from Sparter stating that the commission rate is going up to a whopping 20% on each sale. So if I sell 1k gold at $50(the current market price), I would get only $40). While it might not seem like much, as I mentioned before I have about 10k gold meaning I would lose out about $100. Also payouts are now bi-monthly instead of nightly.

Now I’m trying to figure exactly what I should do. Sell what I got now or wait till afterwards. This move will probably make gold farming companies happy as player to player trades cut out the middle man. However in light of this news I kind of expect the prices to hit rock bottom as people try to sell their products before the big 20% commission rate kicks in. Or I can just sit, and wait and charge an extra 10% once the new rate kicks in. Decisions, decisions.

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September Totals – 1 Month Anniversary – Link Lovin

I’m a few days behind, but Money News – My Financial History just hit one months old. While I didn’t do as well as I’d hope, I did learn a lot of new things, and I am finding quite a bit of interesting things to read.

September Totals: $23.65

Also some thanks to Shai for motivation since I started the Whypark site to Just make money online. Now that I’ve tried that I’ll try some other projects. I happened to stumble upon Mike’s Money Making Mission, which eventually add my stuff to Zimbio to try as well as add a bunch of new blog directories for some traffic. I hope to make enough money to atleast be able to work from home like Amy eventually.

My goals for October? Well if the WoW gold market doesn’t go back up then I’ll try to hit 20k gold again by the end of October (approximately worth $1-1.5k). I’m about halfway there, and should make 10k gold sometime this week from just playing less than an hour a day.

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