Virtual trading cards?

[Jantz]

Originally Posted by pokerplyr80

I don't get this at all. People spending real money on virtual cards? If I want to see a virtual collection I'll just click on a few of the other member's collector focus pages.

Actually this trend started years ago with online pc games. There was a game where you could play the game at home on your PC and advance your character in levels making him/her stronger. Along the way, a player could find equipment to aid their character. This equipment could be traded with other gamers online as well. Someone along the way got the brilliant idea to sell their virtual equipment on Ebay. Other gamers caught on to the idea and began buying this virtual equipment to equip on their character and make them stronger.

This equipment was put under a dummy account, "mule" account in the gaming world and when a gamer paid for the virtual equipment, the Ebay seller would send the buyer the passwords to get into the mule account and transfer the equipment to his/her character.

Gamers were paying up to $100 or more in real money for a computer generated piece of equipment.

A new version came out of this game years later and all the virtual equipment in the former game was basically useless. The new version of the game had an actual auction prompt where you could sell computer generated items for real money. So now instead of selling the items you found on Ebay, a gamer could sell them inside the game itself for real money. A gamer in Japan once paid $1500 for a piece of computer generated equipment so that he could advance further in the game.

The game is still active and there are leader boards, much like a registry board where players are ranked by how strong their characters are, but the auction part of the game is gone.

Believe it or not, before they shut down the auction part of the game, a gamer could sit at home and play the game, find a few strong items, sell them in the auction and make a second income. Is anyone shaking their heads yet?

In a recent thread, a board member asked if any other members flipped cards to buy more cards. Nope, I sold a computer generated sword to supplement my card collecting. (That wasn't a joke!)