Picture this: A struggling early-game Lost Ark player arrives at Luterra Castle with little more than his equipped gear to his name.
He opens the bustling city’s local chat to find hundreds of rapidly spammed messages from accounts that, at this pace, must be doing so automatically. They all feature what seems like some variation of a URL, with each avoiding the dot that precedes the “com,” as to get the website past the game’s chat filters.
These posts all advertise the selling of Lost Ark gold, for as cheap as 1,500 gold for only a dollar, provided they do business on the provided third-party website. To the new player with almost no gold at all, a dollar for that much sounds like a steal.
However, this player may be misunderstanding the ramifications of real-world trading.
Real-world trading as a black market service
As such, there are very few, if any, safeguards in place to protect potential buyers from getting scammed of their money. From sellers not delivering on their gold to dealers running off with players’ credit card information, a lot can go wrong for buyers dealing behind closed doors online.
Speaking objectively, and rather than simply resigning to do the right thing, players should ask themselves whether or not buying a few thousand gold is worth losing the progress on every character they’ve built to that point.
