Most Expensive Items Ever Sold in an MMO (Page 2 of 2)

Deals that go on off the books can often be risky as with the 2004 case of the Qiu Chengwei who loaned his sword in Legend of Mir 3 to another player who then sold it for around $1000. Furious at the sale, Qiu Chengwei then murdered the seller and ended up with a life sentence in prison. Luckily, incidents where MMOs lead to violence are relatively rare, but as values rise and the black market grows this may become more of a problem.

Websites like ige.com allow you to buy in game currency for a variety of titles. For World of Warcraft, you’ll pay around $15 for 1000 gold while in Age of Conan you’ll pay $90 for 100 gold. Some items in WoW might sell for up to 20,000 gold which still only equates to around $300 in real money. The real big money transactions go on off the books.

In Eve Online, some of the larger spaceships are assigned serious value. Something like a Tempest Tribal Issue may be valued at 112,500,000,000 ISK. Something like a Rifter is worth significantly less. While the selling of in-game money for real world currency is forbidden in the terms, in practice you can still do it. You can buy 500M ISK for under $20 so once again it doesn’t represent a huge real world cost. However, if you look at something like a Titan Class ship, which costs billions and takes months to build, the real world value is estimated at around $6,000.

The really expensive sales seem to be occurring in the virtual world MMOs like Entropia and Second Life. Second Life features Linden Dollars which can be exchanged for the real thing, and the value is constantly fluctuating. People buy avatars, vehicles, furniture, and even homes and land. According to the developer’s own website, the most expensive sale in Second Life was the purchase of the region of Amsterdam for $50,000 U.S.

It is possible that there are big money transactions going on that we know nothing about. If you were to purchase an item or account in a game with rules which expressly forbid the practice, then you would be stupid to advertise the fact that you have done so. It seems that virtual real estate is the most expensive thing being traded in virtual worlds and that makes perfect sense since the owners can earn from their purchase. As these economies continue to grow, it seems inevitable that regulation and policing will become a necessity and there are already fears about the potential for using virtual worlds to launder money.