WoW auction house is now online

My brother practically stop playing WoW the traditional way and ended up instead "playing" the AH, you can make good money on some servers simply by getting an eye for good prices on items, buying out cheap ones and reselling.

He was more loaded than about 5 of his buddies put together simply by doing this constantly, i think this may attract a lot of gold farmer types who are looking to manipulate markets. More money in Blizzards pockets :)
 
note: It's in Beta now, limited to certain realm servers, and free for the time being.
 
The only paid service I'm aware of is the iphone app. The service on the armory will remain free. I guess that's better than having the cost come out of our subscription fees for something not everyone can use (jeez, now I sound like someone talking about taxpayer dollars).

Pretty nifty. I messed around with it and sold some junk that was in my bags.
 
Yoshiyuki Blade said:
The only paid service I'm aware of is the iphone app. The service on the armory will remain free. I guess that's better than having the cost come out of our subscription fees for something not everyone can use (jeez, now I sound like someone talking about taxpayer dollars).

Pretty nifty. I messed around with it and sold some junk that was in my bags.
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No, the website costs a sub too.
 
PrincessFrosty said:
My brother practically stop playing WoW the traditional way and ended up instead "playing" the AH, you can make good money on some servers simply by getting an eye for good prices on items, buying out cheap ones and reselling.

He was more loaded than about 5 of his buddies put together simply by doing this constantly, i think this may attract a lot of gold farmer types who are looking to manipulate markets. More money in Blizzards pockets :)
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Gold farmers thieve accounts and resell them and their items... and use them as parasites to spam gold buying...

They rarely pay for accounts. They take form the idiots though.
 
Archer75 said:
No, the website costs a sub too.
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No it doesnt. I logged in and bought something from the AH and never paid real money for anything. You can do it from wowarmory to for free. It says you have to pay, but I sure didnt yesterday when I bought some 30s wand off the AH through the website to see what it would do. And I just bought some 70s mace off there today to see and it's still completely free to use on the website.
 
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KaosDG said:
note: It's in Beta now, limited to certain realm servers, and free for the time being.
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FighterAce124 said:
No it doesnt. I logged in and bought something from the AH and never paid real money for anything. You can do it from wowarmory to for free. It says you have to pay, but I sure didnt yesterday when I bought some 30s wand off the AH through the website to see what it would do. And I just bought some 70s mace off there today to see and it's still completely free to use on the website.
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It's free for now, because it's in beta. It will cost $2.99/month once out of beta.
 
AMDXP said:
Gold farmers thieve accounts and resell them and their items... and use them as parasites to spam gold buying...

They rarely pay for accounts. They take form the idiots though.
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I run tight security on my computer. Havent logged on in more than 6 months, and just got an email this morning that my accounts have been banned for gold selling.

I went to log onto account managment, and it turns out my battlenet ID now has an authenticator attached that I didn't put there.

Now even though I wasn't playing I have to go through the hassle of having my accounts restored.
 
Spazilton said:
I run tight security on my computer. Havent logged on in more than 6 months, and just got an email this morning that my accounts have been banned for gold selling.

I went to log onto account managment, and it turns out my battlenet ID now has an authenticator attached that I didn't put there.

Now even though I wasn't playing I have to go through the hassle of having my accounts restored.
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Same thing happened to be awhile ago. I hadn't played for months, then all of a sudden I get an email from Blizzard saying I've been banned or something. Oh well.
 
PoweredBySoy said:
Same thing happened to be awhile ago. I hadn't played for months, then all of a sudden I get an email from Blizzard saying I've been banned or something. Oh well.
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Have to hand it to Blizzard support. Their front line CSR rep was helpful. And took all the necessary actions to get my account unbanned. Said it was obvious it had been comprimised. Said my secondary account had had Millions of Gold going through it.

Anyway my secondary account should be back up in a coulpe of days.
 
Spazilton said:
Have to hand it to Blizzard support. Their front line CSR rep was helpful. And took all the necessary actions to get my account unbanned. Said it was obvious it had been comprimised. Said my secondary account had had Millions of Gold going through it.

Anyway my secondary account should be back up in a coulpe of days.
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Good luck with that. My wife's account was hacked 11 days ago, still waiting for it to get unbanned. We've received an email from Blizzard a few days ago stating all the items that would be restored to all her toons, but still banned.

It's gotten ridiculous. I've canceled my account, and will find something else to do with my time and money.
 
Well found the issue, don't know how but I did find Keylogging software installed on my computer. Malwarebytes missed it but Symantec Endpoint found it.

Kinda odd, I run all questionable software through VMs..
 
Spazilton said:
Well found the issue, don't know how but I did find Keylogging software installed on my computer. Malwarebytes missed it but Symantec Endpoint found it.

Kinda odd, I run all questionable software through VMs..
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I used to think that it would somehow be your fault for getting that kind of stuff installed on your computer. But after experiencing an account compromise first hand, it's possible to get some nasty stuff installed without much knowledge about it.

The only suspicion I have is that one of Wowhead's ads had something malicious in it, which installed silently into my computer. No UAC prompts, no antivirus warnings, nothing. But my browser did happen to get "hijacked" with a full-screen popup ad while I was looking through the site. I had to enter the task manager to kill it. I didn't think much of it till it happened the following morning. My browsing habits haven't changed for YEARS, so it wasn't anything naughty that I did recently. Maybe you were hit by something similar.

So even safe browsing habits can be unsafe if the reputable web sites can't control these things. I run firefox with ABP and noscript nowadays as another security measure ([H] whitelisted of course).
 
Honestly I do think It was probally something similar to what you were describing.

I own a copy now of VMWorkstation and have a dedicated VM that is only used for sensitive stuff, Banking, account managments etc..

Yea still kinda perplexed, I haven't been nailed by a trojan/keylogger in over 5 years. I honesly have to say I'm glad it was only my WoW account that was nailed and nothing that will have long term impacts.. Already changed ALL my passwords to everything, god that took a while lol. Also wiped and reinstalled my OS for good measure..
 
You have to be careful of those emails stating your accounts are banned/etc. It's a way they use to compromise accounts as well, you go to their link and it looks the same. I haven't played wow in over a year and I got one of those bogus emails the other day, I laughed at that because I know my account hasn't been used in a year probably more like two. It doesn't even show up on the armory and has never been converted into a battlenet ID.

Plus their system is whacked out, I remember playing wow and having an email sent to me from official channels about how I was caught using racial slurs on a specific character. The thing is, that character is on a secondary account and it's a pain in the butt to type anything in on it the way my setup was. So, I didn't talk much in game to begin with, and then it was on this second account I ran exclusively on another computer with a really diffiicult to read chat bar because I shrunk it down...so I never talked to anyone without a lot of effort.

I quit the game when I got tired of the bots in bgs and stuff, and overall felt that while the game was good...their overall approach to dealing with problems was pretty pathetic. It seemed like they over reacted in cases that weren't even investigated, sending out warnings and such. And when it was blatantly obvious people were using automated play systems, they would do nothing for months. I had a guy who had a script that would play his character for him, group with other automated scripts in instances. Then run it, and reset it after a certain point. He reset it by joining a group with a level 1, since there were so many idle gold sellers, he would just invite one at random...because they would always accept the invite. Well my level 1 auction house mule would get them in the middle of the AM hours when the gold spammers weren't lurking. So one time I accepted and his script screwed up and didn't kick me out. Watched it play for hours by itself until he finally came back and noticed he was grouped and I was the leader because his script would disconnect randomly to clear things. There's just no excuse for that to go on, this dude did it on multiple chars..because it was the same script that would invite my auction mule in the middle of the night.
 
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Re: The confusion on paid/free, scroll down on this page and look at the chart: http://www.wowarmory.com/wow-remote.xml

Re: hacked accounts, yeah, infected ad banners happen occasionally and have for awhile, it's not ALWAYS ignorance or a phishing scam that results in a stolen account.
 
Get a WoW authenticator, it's free on iPhone. Or get the keychain one, it's worth it.
 
Fletch101 said:
It's also available on Android (still free).
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Good to know... only thing is, I share my account with a relative sometimes and this would make it so we couldn't use the same account (I think)... :(. Definitely more secure though. Could I just attach the authenticator and then tell her the code over the phone when she wants to log in on it?
 
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GoldenTiger said:
Good to know... only thing is, I share my account with a relative sometimes and this would make it so we couldn't use the same account (I think)... :(. Definitely more secure though. Could I just attach the authenticator and then tell her the code over the phone when she wants to log in on it?
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That should work I think. Each code the authenticator gives you is probably block from use again for some set amount of time.

WoW is a fantastic waste of time, but after 5 years I've honestly gotten to the point where I want to move onto something new. I have a few years of other games to catch up on, and you know... that other game called real life
 
RedTalon19 said:
That should work I think. Each code the authenticator gives you is probably block from use again for some set amount of time.
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Yeah, each code is only valid once. It's definitely possible, but it would be quite a hassle to give her a new code every time she wants to log in. You can't duplicate the authenticator either since each one uses a unique algorithm.
 
I know the authenticators have been hacked in the past, but it's still way more secure to have one. I believe they used a key logger to send the code immediatly to the hackers, and it would immediatly log them in and let them change your password or something.
 
It's not that authenticators themselves get "hacked." That's also known as the "man in the middle" attack. You had to have had something installed into your computer to get infected by that (some dll file). I doubt that they would use it to change your pw though, since they would need another code to log into the game. I forgot the exact nature of the program, but I think it somehow prevents the owner from logging in while simultaneously giving away his pw/code to the loggers.
 
Yoshiyuki Blade said:
It's not that authenticators themselves get "hacked." That's also known as the "man in the middle" attack. You had to have had something installed into your computer to get infected by that (some dll file). I doubt that they would use it to change your pw though, since they would need another code to log into the game. I forgot the exact nature of the program, but I think it somehow prevents the owner from logging in while simultaneously giving away his pw/code to the loggers.
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Right, that's what I was getting at. I didn't mean to imply that the actual authenticators got hacked lol. It would be hard to "hack" a piece of plastic that produces a random set of numbers every minute or so.
 
Yoshiyuki Blade said:
Yeah, each code is only valid once. It's definitely possible, but it would be quite a hassle to give her a new code every time she wants to log in. You can't duplicate the authenticator either since each one uses a unique algorithm.
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Sounds like a big pain :(... I've never had an account hijacked, but still, the authenticator would be a good peace of mind thing.
 
Yeah, I'm using a Verizon Droid Incredible (HTC), so free for me... just the hassle factor on giving the code each time. I'll probably do it anyway just to be safe.
 
veterator said:
You have to be careful of those emails stating your accounts are banned/etc. It's a way they use to compromise accounts as well, you go to their link and it looks the same. I haven't played wow in over a year and I got one of those bogus emails the other day, I laughed at that because I know my account hasn't been used in a year probably more like two. It doesn't even show up on the armory and has never been converted into a battlenet ID.

Plus their system is whacked out, I remember playing wow and having an email sent to me from official channels about how I was caught using racial slurs on a specific character. The thing is, that character is on a secondary account and it's a pain in the butt to type anything in on it the way my setup was. So, I didn't talk much in game to begin with, and then it was on this second account I ran exclusively on another computer with a really diffiicult to read chat bar because I shrunk it down...so I never talked to anyone without a lot of effort.

I quit the game when I got tired of the bots in bgs and stuff, and overall felt that while the game was good...their overall approach to dealing with problems was pretty pathetic. It seemed like they over reacted in cases that weren't even investigated, sending out warnings and such. And when it was blatantly obvious people were using automated play systems, they would do nothing for months. I had a guy who had a script that would play his character for him, group with other automated scripts in instances. Then run it, and reset it after a certain point. He reset it by joining a group with a level 1, since there were so many idle gold sellers, he would just invite one at random...because they would always accept the invite. Well my level 1 auction house mule would get them in the middle of the AM hours when the gold spammers weren't lurking. So one time I accepted and his script screwed up and didn't kick me out. Watched it play for hours by itself until he finally came back and noticed he was grouped and I was the leader because his script would disconnect randomly to clear things. There's just no excuse for that to go on, this dude did it on multiple chars..because it was the same script that would invite my auction mule in the middle of the night.
Click to expand...

I didn't respond to it via email. I called Blizzard directly and confirmed the account had been hacked and an authenticator had been attached.

I have my own authenticator attached to my battlenet account now, and still in the process of having my account restored. The guy I talked to said they are getting SLAMMED with stolen accounts, GM wait times are now up to almost 10 days from 2.
 
Spazilton said:
I didn't respond to it via email. I called Blizzard directly and confirmed the account had been hacked and an authenticator had been attached.

I have my own authenticator attached to my battlenet account now, and still in the process of having my account restored. The guy I talked to said they are getting SLAMMED with stolen accounts, GM wait times are now up to almost 10 days from 2.
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My wife is sitting at 18 days on a hacked account with nothing fixed as of yet.
 
braamer said:
My wife is sitting at 18 days on a hacked account with nothing fixed as of yet.
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I was hacked over the week end, no idea how, but i suspect my Flash wasin't up to date on one of the PC i play WOW from, i was told it could take up to 2 weeks to get my stuff restored, if after 14 days i get no contact from them, to email them directly to [email protected]

Back to topic! I installed the WOWarmory on my phone which lets you browse/bid in the auction house, holy cow it works great and will bring me to a new level of slacking off at work!
 
Authenticators are about the best things to help prevent account's getting jacked. Several of my guild mates that are un-authed lost their accounts and it took WEEKS to get them back. I know there is always the chance the account could get stolen, but I hopefully reduced my chances by putting the authenticator on my account.
 
222 1/3 evil said:
Authenticators are about the best things to help prevent account's getting jacked. Several of my guild mates that are un-authed lost their accounts and it took WEEKS to get them back. I know there is always the chance the account could get stolen, but I hopefully reduced my chances by putting the authenticator on my account.
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Sadly they are a doulbe edged sword. They can also be used to keep legitimate owners out of hacked accounts. ESPECIALLY since the application is free on mobile phones.

Anyhow,
Their investigation was completed. Appears whom ever stole my account used credit card to pay for time, as there was a $14.99 charge on the account (Since it was inactive)the day it was hacked

My account has been fully restored and unbanned and they kept the game time that was paid for on the account, so the account is active until the end of the month

Overall 8 days from the time the account was banned to full restoration. Not too bad considering the huge volume of hacked accounts they are getting.

Only thing I'm a tad upset about is I lost a character name. I had a 3 letter name that I got way back and someone snagged it when they deleted all my characters. I was forced to change his name. I think I am going to put a ticket in, as I shouldnt lose my character name becasue of an account hack.
 
Spazilton said:
Sadly they are a doulbe edged sword. They can also be used to keep legitimate owners out of hacked accounts. ESPECIALLY since the application is free on mobile phones.
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Indeed, what what makes things worse is that the same authenticator can be used on multiple accounts. A blessing for multi-account owners or relatives that you can share it with, but dangerous for these hackers that slap it on every account they steal without much hassle.
 
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