Lots of Links

I am finally catching up on my google reader (which is still full) and some older items that I never shared. I have been very bad at sharing the other information and funnies that I have read. There were some really great blogging going on. This should also keep some of you busy before a three day weekend.

In no particular order some things…

·         Say Hello To My not-so-Little Friend - This is my favorite Pally story to date. They pretend to be all “For the light”. The idea of being Rezed to be killed again… I was in awe.

·         Out of Mana – Horns one of my favorite reads and documents some things in another of my favorite reads. Who can beat that!

·         25 Awesome Warlock Tricks – “8. You can banish druids in Tree of Life.” My new PvP favorite.

·         Embrace the Shadows: Level Your Warlock - Arrens is doing a great series about leveling. Part 4 came out and I am sure there are more great things. 

·         The Losing AV gives Zero Honour Fallacy - Very helpful AV breakdown. Now that I don’t get as lost and I actually know what “Galv” means it has become more helpful in follow-up readings.

·         The K Game – Agro game for the farming instance.

·         Be a Man… - ROFL *clears throat* Silly boys. Stupid Mage’s comment of “Testosterone puts brains on global cooldown.” Was icing. On that note… don’t watch this at work.

·         What do you mean, it was looted already? Ninja'd??? – This I actually shared with my other officers, we flipped. We don’t do Kara but going would be such an accomplishment. We will have to PuG some of the spots I am sure, so at least we are forewarned. But to have this happen in guild? They were nice enough not to have a witch hunt. Me? There would be a smack down people and you would see it coming because the anticipation is half the fun.

·         Webcomics shout out! – Because I am too lazy to do it myself when others have already done it.

·         Ratings Buster – Nibuca on one of my favorite addons for those pesky “How much better is this armor” type questions. And read her other stuff she is smart and just put up her first video.

·         Someone is leaving WoW and I wish him the best of luck I copied one of his entries here. It was an interesting read and was more information than I ever looked up.

Originally form Someone on Nov 28, 2007:

Alla, Thott, Wow, IGE, Gold Selling?

There's been (again) an up-rise regarding wether or not the three main WoW Database sites are related/owned by a gold selling company. The issue keeps popping, and the database sites keep saying that that's not the case. So, I decided to dig a bit deeper and ask someone (no, not myself but "someone" else who I believe knows what (s)he says), to try and explain me a bit about this article which seems to have re-spawned some confusion. I won't say who that person is nor where (s)he works, and thus you may feel free to ignore the following text if you want to keep believing what that article insinuates. For those with a more open mind, continue reading for some enlightenment...

The article draws some pretty erroneous conclusions.

There was a forum thread about this on the official forums a little while ago (which I now unfortunately can't find), but it runs down the gist of it.

This is the history as best as I can figure out: IGE started ages ago as an RMT business. They bought a few content websites and covered them with ads for IGE's services--the content websites promptly died, as you would expect they would. During the beta of WoW, IGE secretly negotiated to purchase Thottbot.com. But Thott was headstrong, and successfully argued with IGE that the best way to make money would be to keep the association a secret, increase traffic to the site, and make money off of banner ad rather than gold sales. He turned out to be right, and Thottbot got huge.

Later on, a clever web developer used a series of DNS lookups etc. to discover that Thottbot.com was registered to "RPG Holdings", which was a shell company that IGE had set up so that they could pretend they didn't own Thottbot. There was a huge uproar over IGE owning Thottbot, and a number of conspiracy theories about whether the Cosmos patcher was forwarding your information to gold farmers so they could hack your account. Thott is too smart for this, he knew he had to keep his nose clean if he was going to run a business.

About this time, though, IGE started to realize that the banner ad revenue from Thottbot was pretty significant in its own right. IGE is already two different businesses--one of which is the US RMT business (IGE US, LLC) and the other is the overarching company (IGE) which owns the US RMT business, as well as some other businesses in China and Korea. They continued to own Thottbot, and keep RMT advertising of any kind off of it. Around this time, Brock (founder of IGE) says to himself, "Wow...maybe this is a viable business model on its own, regardless of whether it can help out my RMT business."

So Brock rearranges the company. The overarching company (IGE) is renamed to "Affinity Media". The RMT business remains "IGE US, LLC". Affinity Media now legally owns Thottbot, IGE US, as well as the Korean/Chinese businesses and a few other content websites that Affinity has scooped up, such as www.ogaming.com. Affinity Media is a holding company that doesn't do anything except own the other companies. Brock is CEO of Affinity Media, but the rest of the staff is all accountants and finance guys.

Later on, Affinity Media buys Allakhazam. The content business is officially named "The ZAM Network". There's no crossover between ZAM and the RMT business, but ZAM is owned by Affinity, Affinity owns IGE US (the RMT business) and Affinity is formerly known as "IGE". After a while of doing this, Brock finally realizes that the ZAM Network is making more money through advertising than IGE is making through gold sales. Brock decides to sell the RMT business--or possibly more accurately, Atlas decides to take the business away from him, because they feel he's mismanaging it.

This is what we mean when we say "Affinity Media sold IGE". The RMT business is honest to god gone, they took it away from Brock. He's also resigned as CEO of Affinity Media--the current CEO is a hollywood entertainment mogul named Steve Bannon.

The reasons why articles like this keep popping up are two-fold.

1. Because the holding company that owned the RMT business (IGE US, LLC) was originally named "IGE", people are making the claim that "IGE" still owns ZAM. I guess you could still technically argue that this is true, but if you were to say that "A goldfarming company" owns ZAM, you would be wrong.

2. The class action lawsuit that was filed against IGE US, LLC was filed before the business was sold. Unfortunately, Affinity Media is not legally allowed to simply "sell off" a company that is potentially liable for damages in a lawsuit. The gold-farming business was sold in an "asset sale", which means that everything the business owns, including computers, employee contracts, etc. were sold to another company--but the NAME of the company, and the legal liability, still belong to Affinity Media. Affinity Media doesn't want to be associated with the name anymore, so they renamed "IGE U.S., LLC" to "Affinity Media Holdings, LLC". You'll notice that the line cited in the link you sent says "Defendant, IGE U.S., LLC n/k/a(now known as) Affinity Media Holdings, LLC, ("IGE US")".

Basically, Affinity sold the business and got left with the short straw, because they were unable to get rid of the liability. So legal documents and such keep surfacing which supposedly "link" IGE and Affinity Media.

Hopefully this makes the whole story a little more clear.

Hoping to have shed some light, see ya all around.

EDIT: Shalkis has posted a link in the comments that seems contrary to this interpretation. After more research, it appears that both ideas can be true. That is, Affinity did sell off IGE, but that doesn't mean they don't own other gold-related businesses... According to C|Net News: "Earlier this year, Affinity sold IGE, but it still has a hand deep in the market for virtual weapons, currencies and the like."

I've since mailed Affinity asking them about this, but I won't hold my breath waiting for an answer... :) If it does come, I'll post it here or perhaps make a new post for those viewing this through rss feeds...