Some of you may have been wondering...

 ...why things have gone somewhat quiet here. Well, I'm here to answer that! Recently we have had the winds of change blow upon our offices here at PlayerAuctions and have had some new direction breathed into the PA team. I myself am "old blood" as some would say, as I have been with PlayerAuctions since last year. So what changes might I be referring too, you ask?

 

Well for starters, you'll notice the more personal tone of my lettering. We have felt here at PlayerAuctions that it is time to start becoming more involved in the community. Not only that, but we also want to become a place of "reference" for those in the RMT industry. Having been active since 2000 in the RMT industry, it might not be so haughty to say that we have a bit of professional knowledge when it comes to buying, selling, and trading virtual goods . Not only that, but we have a lot of dedicated staff working hard to ensure that PlayerAuctions is a safe haven for buyers and sellers.

 

In addition to fostering a community amongst our members, we have design plans on the horizon to to make our user interface more "friendly", sleeker, and add some additional service options which other sites do not offer. I can't give out details quite yet, but I just want to drop a note to our members who read our blog and say "keep your eyes peeled". 

 As for myself? Some of you may have interacted with me before (Mr. Flowers anyone?) in our Instant Chat service, as I was the "Quality Monitoring Officer" who had those more "special situation" chats escalated to. Now, I'm filling the role of your very own Community Liason (although that isn't my official job title to keep you connected to what is going on here at PlayerAuctions, and also to begin provide content and dialogue for safe trading, news on the RMT industry, and whatever else our loyal community may fancy. Comments welcome!

 Look forward to our next update, I'll be posting a small interview from one of our community members!

 

Yours truly, 

Mr. Flowers

After many months of working diligently to enable a safe online trading environment for our new product, we are very pleased to announce that unparalleled protection will soon be available for the secure online player-to-player trading of frozen water, or as we proudly refer to it at PlayerAuctions, “Arctik Freeze”.

Unlike our other supported product types, Arctik Freeze (commonly known to many people as “ice”) will need to be shipped to a mailing address after purchase. We appreciate concerns our buyers may have with regard to providing their mailing address to sellers. However, to address and alleviate those concerns, PlayerAuctions has developed a new security model specifically for trading Arctik Freeze: sellers will deliver the Arctik Freeze to PlayerAuctions, who will send the Arctik Freeze to the buyer’s mailing address provided during registration.

Below is the summarized order process for Arctik Freeze:

1. Seller posts Arctik Freeze For Sale Offer on PlayerAuctions
2. Buyer creates order and sends payment to PlayerAuctions
3. PlayerGuardian secures Buyer’s payment, and informs Seller of purchase
4. Seller sends Arctik Freeze to PlayerAuctions
5. PlayerAuctions confirms Seller’s delivery
6. PlayerAuctions sends Arctik Freeze to Buyer’s mailing address
7. Buyer confirms delivery to PlayerAuctions

Our members and the gaming community can rest assured that with our security model, both the buyer and seller will be protected.

As a preview, the Arctik Freeze product icon will be:

We have high hopes for PlayerAuctions with the addition of Arctik Freeze. Our website will certainly first receive an update to enable our members to securely buy and sell Arctik Freeze online, and our IT and Design teams are working assiduously to have that update on our marketplace soon.

Stay tuned for more updates!

 

April 2, 2009 Edit: We hope everyone had a nice April Fool's day... ... and to remove any ambiguity: This blog post was in honor of April 1st. PlayerAuctions will not be securing the buying and selling of ice over the Internet any time soon.

On February 1, 2009, we began our Win an Alienware® Gaming PC promotion, which will award the gamer who sells the game account with the best-written and most visually-attractive For Sale Offer description with a spanking new, top of the line, and free Alienware® PC! What will you do with this super-fast computer if you've sold your game account, you say? Who cares - it's a FREE, super-fast computer!

Once you've sold your game account on PlayerAuctions within February 1 - April 30, 2009, you will be entered into the contest, and PlayerAuctions will select 10 finalists with incredible For Sale Offer descriptions of their game accounts. These 10 finalists will be presented on the website for the player community to cast their vote on who had the most attractively-presented offer description. When we decide on who these 10 finalists will be, we'll be looking at how skillfully they present and describe their game account to potential buyers in, and the attractiveness of, their For Sale Offer. This means creative use of fonts, colors and images, and tempting titles! (We're not, by the way, going to judge your entry based on how über your game account is. No, that is much too simple. This way is more fun!)

The community will vote, and the gamer with the best-written offer description of his game account (as decided by fellow gamers) will win this really cool PC. But wait, there's more! The 5 finalist who receive the second highest number of votes will receive this Razer Copperhead Mouse, which is cited by IGN as their favorite Razer gaming mouse ever! I have mine in red.

If you're saying to yourself, "Aw, gee. I can't write good" or "How can I write a good offer description?"- no problem! We've created a guide called Making a Game Account Offer that Sells, which will walk you through the essentials - everything from the offer title, to price, to the description.

Remember, writing a great For Sale Offer description isn't just so you can try and win a free computer - it'll help you make that jump from "For Sale" to "SOLD".

So.... what are you waiting for? Sell your game account now and enter the contest!

The Free Pizza promotion, which opened alongside our official launch in November 11, 2008, closed on Jan 31, 2009. In this promotion, we gave away a free Papa John's $20 Gift Certificate (good for 1 pizza!) to buyers that complete 3 or more purchases within the promotion period. I'm happy to report that we sent out over 100 gift certificates in total, enough to feed 100 hungry gamers and then some!

Our congratulations to the recipients of the gift certificates. We hope you enjoyed your hot, fresh and delicious (and FREE!) pizza delivered straight to your door.

The big day is here! Our whole team is proud to achieve this milestone for our service.

As part of our official launch we’ve made the following improvements:

• Fun new homepage to better introduce PlayerAuctions
• Buyers: Free Pizza Promotion – when you place 3 orders between our Official Launch and Dec-31 we’ll give you a free Papa John’s Pizza!
• Sellers: Zero commission fees for your first 5 game currency orders!
• The average delivery time for game currency sellers is now automatically calculated and displayed to further add to the transparency of our marketplace
• Improved market price comparison charts
• Other miscellaneous improvements

We have a lot of free pizzas to give away, so start trading!

It is almost time.

All of us at PlayerAuctions have worked many a moons to officially launch the most secure place for players to buy and sell MMO game assets. I'm very happy to once again say, it is almost time.

In our official launch update, we will be adding several features that we have been preparing for the past few weeks, including another new (better!) look. Click the image below to see more. I betcha you can't guess the promotions we'll be holding for buyers and sellers in light of our official launch. No, really, I betcha.

PlayerAuctions will leave open beta and officially launch in the early hours of November 11^th, 2008. Blink, and you'll miss it :-)

Yesterday we completed a significant update to PlayerAuctions that included the following enhancements:

• Further refined player-to-player order handling for buyers and sellers, including a redesigned My Account homepage that provides improved access to, and information about, your order activity.
• Payment methods expanded to include Google Checkout.
• Enhanced and expanded game currency market price charts and comparison tools show how much you save when ordering on PlayerAuctions.
• The currency Bulk Offer Upload system is no longer only available to PowerSellers, all sellers may now freely use it!
• Improved currency shopping experience for buyers:
  • Less confusion! We’ve removed the Single-Unit Currency Offer format; all currency offers will now be Multi-Unit Currency Offers.
  • Less clutter! The maximum number of active currency offers a member may have in a single market (game > server > faction) has been reduced from 5 to 1.
• Simplified powerleveling and game guide offer management; a single offer for each these product types will now appear across all servers in a given game.
• Improved support for more web browsers, including Google Chrome & Safari
• Improved feedback graphics (cool smileys instead of wimpy hearts)!
• Lots and lots of usability enhancements and miscellaneous bug fixes.

We’re now getting near to the end of our open beta period, and our official launch is just on the horizon. Exciting times lie ahead.

Until next time, safe and happy trading!

Starting shortly after midnight PST tonight, Wednesday October 30th, PlayerAuctions will conduct planned maintenance for several hours. While no trading will be able to occur during this time, we will be releasing a significant update to our trading platform that will include many exciting enhancements.

A summary of the changes will be announced shortly after the update is completed.

Occasionally, an enhancement we develop will change our website in a way that we think is best to first notify our community of in advance.

Today’s post is the first of these occasions. We’ve found Single-Unit Currency Offers to be introducing unwanted complexity for our members, especially first time buyers. As one of many other enhancements scheduled for our next system release early next month, we’ll be merging Single-Unit and Multi-Unit Currency Offers together. The result will be a more simplified buying and selling experience; and perhaps a few more orders for our sellers.

Don’t worry about any negative impact to offers you may post before this change goes live. All the offers that were created using the current system will be smoothly transitioned to the new system.

For some time now PlayerAuctions has scanned game currency prices from multiple sources across the web. In our last release we enabled a feature that gives our members access to this data so that buyers may more clearly see the benefits of making their purchase on PlayerAuctions.

So far we’ve only been testing this feature on a limited basis with our PowerSellers. The response we’ve gotten has been very positive, and with our next release, all sellers will be able to enjoy this feature to boost their orders.