WoW Gold and Blizzard bank?

There have been some interesting stories of Bitcoin being declared a legal currency by some legislators / courts around the world. Wikipedia has an interesting page on the matter.

The problem is that Bitcoin is not like any conventional currency - it has no central bank or issuing or control authority in the same way as a "conventional" currency. It is not tied to one nation, like a "conventional" currency. That scares nations, obviously! It is pretty much anonymous. It works at a distance without needing any trust.

One of the classic issues though, if Bitcoin is to be treated as a legal currency, and the legal burdens that can imposed, is how you define it. You cannot have the law say "bitcoin" as there are already many other similar digital currencies like Bitcoin, so you need to be more general.

The danger with a more general definition is including something like World of Warcraft Gold in the definition, or points in any other sort of game. Some games have in-game currency which is directly bought and sold (exchanged) for "real" money and used to buy things in game. It could be used to launder money - buying virtual currency, passing it in game, and selling it, so legislators may consider it worthy of the same legal controls.

But in-game money, like WoW Gold, does not follow most of the rules of "real" currency. Making it subject to the legal controls of "real" currency would be a problem. In the game, vendors sell things for WoW Gold and that WoW Gold does not go to the vendor account or a "Blizzard account", it just goes. Similarly there are things in game the provide WoW Gold or goods that vendors will buy for WoW Gold and again that gold is just created by the game, it is just a number. Overall the game has some controls, and so there is an internal market for goods and gold (the action house). But most of the way WoW Gold works in-game would not be allowed if it was deemed a "real" currency, and Blizzard might have to become a formal bank even!

Until recently and buying or selling of WoW Gold for "real" money was not allowed in the terms, but even so there are web sites selling WoW Gold, and they still exist. Players using them could lose their account. But Blizzard actually created a real way to convert money to WoW Gold in the form of a WoW Token. It is purchasable in the UK for £15 and can provider 30 days game play. However, you can also buy and sell WoW Tokens on the auction house, and they currently go for around 68,000 WoW Gold, which is quite a lot. This means there is an exchange rate for WoW Gold in the real world. Blizzard have been cunning, the game rules don't really allow laundering money - one could put money in to buy WoW tokens, but one cannot get money out of the game - you can only sell for WoW Gold or use for game time, so hopefully WoW Gold would be kept out of legal currency legislation.

But it is a fine line for legislators to make a sensible definition.

On a side note, this did mean I could be slightly extravagant, and for two WoW Tokens I managed to buy a vanity mount, one of the most expensive in-game things, a Grand Expedition Yak at 120,000 gold.

P.S. my favourite comment...

WoW IPv6

Having chased this as an ISP, we finally got someone in Blizzard who fixed their IPv6 issues.

It sounds like the front line people had no clue, closing faults as "resolved" even admitting it was not actually resolved.

Even though supposedly passing the issue on and the fact this is subject of several forum posts in US and EU, nothing happened.

Finally got someone in their ops, and he not only sorted the issue but set up the peering for us too. He did so in 3 hours of my email.

It feels like we could have sorted weeks ago if the right people had realised.

But good, once again IPv6 is working on Blizzard, and we have direct peering on IPv4 and IPv6 to Blizzard for A&A now. All the better for low latency on our services which have good low latency in the first place.

Blizzard working on IPv6

I am pleased to see an email from Blizzard on the IPv6 issue.

Hello Adrian,

Thank you for contacting us earlier and I hope that you are doing well.

As discussed previously, the issue you mentioned was under investigation and changes have been made which should address the Ipv6 connection issues you and other players were experiencing. 

Best regards,

Mesmartiys
Blizzard Entertainment

But rather puzzled by the email. It seems my email address which has a local part of "battlenet" has been obfuscated to "BATTLEN**". Yes, the also changed case which could impact delivery. Obfuscating an email address is fine for display in text, but oddly they have actually used the obfuscated address to email me, i.e. BATTLEN**@mydomain with actual stars in the local part!

This only got to me because I run a wildcard on the domain.

That is special in the extreme!

Sadly these changes that "have been made" have not in fact helped. I still cannot play with IPv6 ticked on the game. Shame.

Update: They marked by ticket "resolved"! I have opened another, and found a forum post on the EU forum http://eu.battle.net/forums/en/wow/topic/17612333772?page=1#post-8

Blizzard withdrawing support for IPv6?

SEE UPDATE AT END

It seems that once again Blizzard have their IPv6 connectivity for World of Warcraft not working properly. I opened a ticket and explained the issue in detail. The connectivity issue is entirely in their network. My guess is, as they seem to be using SLAAC addresses, they have simply failed to update addresses when they changed hardware and MAC. That is only a guess though.

The impact - I could not log in to play the game for several days. I assumed they had a fault or were busy and to be honest, given that I use IPv6 for almost everything I do (google, Facebook, all A&A web sites and internal systems) and have done for about 14 years, it did not even occur to me to check if turning off IPv6 would fix it for a while. These days I rarely play, but have been off ill for a few days and though I may have a game or two.

It seems the game is not falling back, trying IPv6 first, which is sensible, and failing totally without trying IPv4.

Now, anyone can make a mistake, and I am sure they can fix it easily, but it seems they are not interested in making it work with the current Internet Protocol. Basically, it seems to me from this response that Blizzard have withdrawn support for the current version of IP protocol, IPv6. It is simple, either you support it, in which case you take a fault report seriously, or you don't.

Heya Adrian,

Thanks for the ticket. I had a look over your history of issues with IPv6. We take a soft approach to support of this as many places haven't fully transitioned over. Normally IPv4 works perfectly and is what the majority of places use despite the other being the upcoming industry standard. Whilst we do appreciate your tests with regards to Tcpdumps and your suggestions about hardware upgrades on our server's end being the cause, since IPv6 is relatively new when it comes to large scale servers it's not something that's 100% works all the time as you're evidently aware yourself.

At this point we've expended our scope of support regarding it's use solely over IPv4 and would suggest that, if able, for the time being you connect using IPv4 whilst we're working on improving how our hardware works with this. 

Just a few comments on this.

• "Many areas have not fully transitioned over"? Well no, you don't "transition", i.e. use IPv6 instead of IPv4, for a very long time, but IPv6 does work along side IPv4 on many ISPs, and many services work on IPv6 (like google, and Facebook to name just two). Only when people are all taking IPv6 seriously can any sort of "transition" start.
• IPv6 does work 100%, well, as well as IPv4, when people actually make sure it works, like ensuring that the machines they have are on the right addresses and have connectivity. This is no different to the way IPv4 works. The only reason IPv6 might be not 100% is if some company stupidly decides to not make things work, or worse, decides to ignore support tickets raised when things are broken. Suggesting IPv6 is unreliable is not valid.
• Also IPv6 is not "relatively new", it is all grown up with RFC2460 being 18 years old now. A&A have been offering IPv6 since 2002. How many decades must IPv6 in place before Blizzard consider it is not "new"?
• As for improving how your hardware works - as far as I know it works - you have connectivity for IPv6 to your network (I get 4ms pings) - you have IPv6 in the game client and the servers work with it - you just need to fix whatever config that you broke a few days ago. Not hard!

Now, if they have "expended their support scope", that sounds a lot like "not going to fix it" and basically taking the massively backwards step of dropping support for the current version of IP, being IPv6.

That is a bold step Blizzard, not many companies would take such a backwards step. I think it is time for me to cancel my subscription, as I cannot really work with such a backward looking company. I wonder what our thousands of IPv6 connected customers will think.

P.S. Obviously if Blizzard have any official comment on this, I'll be happy to add that here, or they can simply comment below.

Update: After posting and adding it to their ticket I had a slightly more encouraging update:-

Hello Adrian,

Thanks for taking the time to get in touch with us and I'm sorry that I couldn't get back to you any sooner.

I was able to get in touch with our net engineers regarding the issue you brought up and it seems that are already working on the issue. Sadly, I do not have any ETA as when we will have a solution or any further information at this time.

Thank you for your understanding I hope that we have this resolved shortly.

Age of Empires

Well, anyone who played back in the day would have concluded that Age of Empires II (2) was the one to play - the III was not any good, but II was. With the Forgotten expansion, obviously.

It was fun, but at the house we played on some whacky network that was a wireless link from Reading on Tele2 which caused hassle as I played against a neighbour on the same system but the way it worked, even though we had real IP addresses, it did not allow people not the same LAN segment to communicate, which was crazy. We had do to some special ARP and/or route logic to work! Yes, it was that long ago...

It was something of a game we'd play at Christmas.

I had no idea that it is all making a come back, and, apparently, there is now an Age of Empires II HD, on Steam. They have redone all the sprites in higher definition and colour. It is meant to be windows only but it works under a wine steam install under my 5k Mac, and, well, FFS, it works! Well worth the £19 or so.

So maybe I'll play a few games.

What fun.

P.S. couple of quirks on the Mac, as usual with wine - the message box is black on black or something, so you type blind, and the stuff that does steam things generally does not work, but the game works, and multiplayer works, and I trashed James (KE55ARD, Also known as: SON GOHAN, kappa, Ailuj, TOP 3 PLAYER WORLD, DIETER HACKING, Hi Im Good, Hi im God, riot pls, rip in peperoni) on my fist multiplayer game. I was killing him, converting him, and building a wonder all at once, so sad.