ISK Seller Odds And Ends

Sometimes my blogging life gets a bit interesting.  I don't know about other bloggers, but I occasionally receive offers and other PR emails from companies wanting me to put some of their content on The Nosy Gamer.  The latest offer was pretty amusing.

Greetings!

I work for                    .com, a price comparison engine for PC and Xbox digital games. The CD keys (Steam, Origin, uPlay, Battlenet) are almost 50% off the normal price. We compare all the best cd key sellers like GreenManGaming, GamersGate, GamesRocket, G2Play, mmoga, etc...

I am contacting you to discuss if you would be interested in a partnership with us, as we wish to sponsor a PC game giveaway for your site's visitors.

Thank you for your time, and I hope to hear from you soon!

If you get an offer like this, please decline.  In amongst some of the legitimate GTC sellers I found RMT sites selling ISK.  That wasn't really a surprise since MMOGA is an ISK seller that a reader brought to my attention.  The site isn't even very competitive with CCP, which is the reason I actually mentioned the site and didn't black out the site's name.  So sorry, no free game giveaways here!

However, while investigating, I did find a new secondary market ISK seller.  That was good, because over the past 10-12 days two more RMT sites de-listed EVE Online and no longer sell ISK.  Last week Guy4Game stopped selling ISK.  In the last few days a company called MMORun followed suit.  These companies could change their minds at any time, which is why I usually try to wait before posting about this.  But so far, so good.

And don't think that CCP doesn't know that ISK sellers are experiencing interesting times.  I saw this tweet from CCP Stillman yesterday.

Hey @noizygamer, how's the EVE RMT market doing these days?
— CCP Stillman (@CCP_Stillman) December 5, 2013

He knows that he and CCP Peligro are doing bad things to the illicit RMT sellers, but doesn't really know how bad.  Either that or just wanted someone to bring it up because he's too polite to talk smack directly.  At least that's what I got from this tweet:

@RossMP9999 @noizygamer I really don't believe it's because an increase in demand, lets put it that way :)
— CCP Stillman (@CCP_Stillman) December 5, 2013

The rise in prices for a couple of sites I've seen doesn't impact the median price on my list as Team Security hit the ones with the lowest prices.  A good strategy, as the smaller the difference between the "official" price in Jita and that offered by ISK sellers, the lower the incentive players have to go to a sketchy secondary RMT site.  And some of the sites are shady.  I removed one site from my monitoring list based on MMOBUX warning that the site was repeatedly getting reported for fraud.  I don't care that the reports were possibly for another game.  I want to monitor sites players actually go to for ISK.

I should also address the desire of some people who would like me to make a regular post about RMT or at least about ISK prices.  I don't really want to do that, and not just because I'll wind up with more letters like the one at the beginning of this post.  Often I'll take two or even three weeks to figure out what is happening.  If I try to post the figures every week I'll have no idea what is really happening.  Trying to figure out what's happening in the shadow war between CCP and the illicit RMT companies is difficult enough as it is.  Trying to do so on a weekly basis is a disaster waiting to happen.

One last item of business.  If anyone knows of an active ISK selling site, please shoot me an email.  The way the business is shaking out, I may need a replacement to plug into my watch list soon.