We have choosen to publish a translated summary of this report here at buy wow gold.

The report consists of the usual headlines, pretext, the studys format, the results and a final discussion. The pretext defines what WoW is and who the subjects in the study are. The subjects were handpicked from local swedish upper secondary schools based on their answers on a previous survey to WoW playing students. To assure diversity both people playing PvE and PvP, males and one female was picked. In total nine people were interviewed after the survey for one our.  All of them were classified as high consumers of the game.

The results is mostly a discussion of the different aspects of why people play the game,  why they quit and how they are being kept to play by blizzard. There is also a part discussing the distinction between real game addiction (in other words, casino, poker, lotto etc). The scientists are fairly in agreement that addiction to world of warcraft cannot be set equal to game addiction since it has totally different prequisites.

In general the problem the players express about the game is that it isnt linear, you cannot take a 15 minute break to go have dinner when mom calls because your guild needs you. The game is designed to take time (grinding, leveling, questing). It doesnt reward high intensity play or skill but rather that you actually put in 3-5 hours per day.

For younger players this becomes a problem when those 4 hours of daily gameplay collides with real life issues such as school, choirs, family and real life friends.  Time differences between the players on the same realms also effect how people play. If a important player has a different schedule than the rest of the group the entire group/guild might have to reschedule their activities.

Some lose connections to the same dopamine that is released by drug use and alchohol has been suggested, however the primary reason in WoW isn’t the usual gaming reward with quick kicks. In WoW it can take hours to complete a quest and thus the players dopamine levels wouldnt be as high as in other games with more frequent rewards. Instead, the social interactions is what count. The group, the community, the guild and friends are what makes people play WoW for hours on end.

Due to this, many deliveries are delayed and has to be resent. Many many gold buyers are right now complaining because they believe they have been frauded; that isnt neccessarily the case. Every serious company that delivers gold are trying their absolutly maximum to deliver their gold even if its costing them expensive extra gold for every order at this moment.

It is very probable that in the future gold deliveries will be done via some other means.  So, if you bought world of warcraft gold in the last week or soo, please dont get all to worked up; it is a temporary problem that will be resolved!

As many of you know, the latest content patch, along with many great new content additions, contains technical counter-measures designed to combat in-game gold spamming. Our efforts to reduce in-game abuse and create a fun, safe environment for everyone are never-ending.

With that said, we felt that it was important to share with the community just how serious we are in our efforts to combat this type of abuse. Blizzard has filed a federal lawsuit against the operators of Peons4hire, a popular gold-selling organization which many of you have no doubt seen advertised. As part of the lawsuit, the operators of Peons4hire have been asked to immediately cease all in-game spamming efforts by all entities and websites under their control.

If this organization refuses to act accordingly, further legal action will be taken. We’ll be sure to keep you posted on the progress of this topic.

Read the offical note on the forums and join the discussion.

[Via slashdot]

With a WoW visa your spent cash turns into playtime. One dollar becomes a point and 1500 points renders a months free play in warcraft. I know you can spend $1500 bucks on gold anyway, right? Either way the cards are a beauty and a pride to own. Show the world your a complete gee..ehrr WoW fan!

On slashdot the users are commenting the situation

World of Warcraft is considered a better target for theft than a credit card. What kind of nerds are running those crime syndicates these days? Maybe if Blizzard came down on more of these gold-selling, account-selling, and item-selling service providers, this kind of nonsense wouldn’t even be an issue.

BBC writes:

The flaw came to light in late March and lets attackers take over vulnerable PCs via booby-trapped websites.

Warcraft players seem to be one of the targets because accounts for the game are potentially worth significant sums of money.

Microsoft has issued a patch for the flaw early to combat the rising number of attacks.

The issue here is clearly that WoW accounts has plenty of gold and items in them – that creates a very significant interest from hackers and other blackhats for them to take the time to steal your world of warcraft credentials.

Buy your gold cheap from team vip or IGE instead. It’s that simple. Its not cheap because they have the lowest prices. It’s cheap because they actually deliver (most of the time anyway).

If you are still looking for cheap gold, there is also MMO Street.com. They have a solid track record and offer far better prices than IGE or TEAM VIP.

Whats really fun is that they take the issue of farming really seriously, to complete their quest they need to kill boars, which we all know gives little xp and next to zero gold. Smarter kids would have gone straight to IGE and bought their gold, geesh.

Watch the preview of the episode from comedy central here.