Virtual Worlds #20: Putting Your Money Where Your Mouse Is

Much has been written on the subject of the so-called "secondary" market -- where players can trade real money for virtual goods and services -- in massively multiplayer worlds, but accounts of actual experiences with real money services are hard to find.

Good reasons for this are plentiful: the threat of reprisals from vengeful publishers, the fear of unscrupulous companies playing fast and loose with your credit card details, and the very real stigma that surrounds the practice in most gaming circles, to name just a few. Are these companies as fly-by-night as their reputation indicates? I stepped up, opened my wallet, and secured the services of one powerleveling firm -- the perhaps concerningly named Dark Horse Leveling Studio -- to find out.

Dark Horse offers an impressive range of World of Warcraft services, priced anywhere between $2 for an hour of faction grinding up to $660 which gets you a character taken from level 1 to level 60, mastering two professions along the way. It also provides a similar range of services for just about every other MMO around, from popular games like Runescape and Lineage II to relative also-rans and unknowns like Silkroad and, er, Auto Assault. I opted for a mid-priced Warcraft offering: to take a character from level 1 to level 50, with a mount, 100 gold, and a First Aid level of 225 thrown in. Dark Horse asked $275.

Let's get a couple of things straight: I figured sending off my main Warcraft account details to an unknown firm wasn't too bright. For one thing, I wanted to keep my main account -- and for another, it'd be clear to anyone digging through the account details that it's a press account, and I wanted Dark Horse to approach this task just like any other. So I used a backup which already had a level 60 or two and a couple of lower-level alts -- no different than millions of other accounts around the world.

Mal'Ganis was the server I chose for my new character, mainly because I wanted to set Dark Horse a challenge. Mal'Ganis is both heavily populated and a highly competitive player-versus-player server, both factors that could increase the leveling time.

I'm not going to publish the character name, for the sole reason that I'd quite like to keep my account. Let's call him Cyril. Cyril is a Troll priest, for the sole reason that I got fed up with Alliance priests using mind control on my other characters and I felt like getting myself a piece of the action. He started life like all Trolls, but little did he know the fate that awaited him: being sent off to the World of Warcraft equivalent of boot camp. I created the character, logged in to take a quick look around, and then handed over my account (and the sum of $275, paid through Paypal) to Dark Horse.

I heard nothing, beyond an initial email confirmation, for eight days. Cyril had abandoned me - but I kept tabs on his whereabouts, like an anxious father digging through the cellphone bills of his college-freshman daughter, just with the World of Warcraft web site and a spare Mal'Ganis character.

Cyril was busy. In fact, as would later become apparent, he was clocking over 12 hours a day, being piloted by person or persons unknown. Eight days later, an email dropped into my inbox: "We are pleased to inform you that your order for the following DHLS service has been successfully completed..."

In the end, I did a little better than I was expecting. Dark Horse delivered over 120 gold, a First Aid skill of 270 and the account was back in my hands after eight days, well under the promised 11. By any criteria, that's a good performance. I wouldn't doubt that Dark Horse intentionally over-delivers on all its contracts; nothing generates good word of mouth like the feeling that you've got something for nothing, and in the grand scheme of things 20 gold and a little first aid grinding isn't as much effort as other things.

And Cyril even had some equipment. I'm hard put to find much positive to say about it except that it was there, to be honest, but I was paying for levels, not gear. Flipping through his character information sheet reveals an unsurprising little factoid about the chosen priest config for professional powerlevelers -- a generic-looking shadowpriest loadout. I'd be curious to see how they configure other classes, but not curious enough to fork out all that money. Check the screens for the details.