This thread will chronicle industry firsts.



If you have a first, or you know of one that isn't yet documented in this thread. Post it here.
If you have a confirmed industry first, I'll give you some kind of graphical award. There ought to be SOMETHING, right?

First major RMT website
First guy recognized to be making his actual living from RMT.



In 1998, Robert Kiblinger from the USA began his RMT career as a major Ebay seller for Ultima Online (UO). He became a leading trader in the game, which becomes his primary income. (A first)
He registered the first major RMT website in 2001, uotreasures.com

As the video will show you, he's making 6 digits at the time of the video, but the competition is fierce and he knows that it might be a good idea to finish his pharmaceutical degree. This guy was before IGE, and would have made MILLIONS if only he had venture capital and a good team behind him. He basically did his work solo.

By taking a 'mom and pop' business approach, he literally lost millions in potential revenue. IGE came in shortly after him and brute forced the industry with millions in capital that came from Brock Pierce, and other investors such as Jonathan Yantis. There may have been some VC firms involved as well, e.g. Goldman Sachs, which now has major holdings in Affinity Media (now doing a billion per year in South Korea and seeking worldwide dominance through PlayerAuctions)

First company that went corporate big, IGE around 2001.

IGE was founded in 2001 and the best details on them are in Wikipedia. Take a look.

Brock Pierce was one of the first big multiboxers and was an avid gamer and entrepreneur making hundreds daily in Everquest by 6boxing (playing 6 accounts at the same time) end game content was groupable (can be handled by a group of players or accounts, raid not needed.).

Like many CEOs, he's a top gamer. He met his partner though a leading Everquest guild.
IGE had a LOT of VC, millions. That allowed them to advertise hardcore and become the first house hold name in the industry. They are the first RMT mega-power.

First player to player trade PLATFORM, PlayerAuctions, est 2000-06-13

Note, a forum is NOT a platform. When Ebay began actively killing any listings for virtual goods, PlayerAuctions (started by Don and Steve), was established to take up the slack and give traders of virtual goods a place to list their offers.

This same time is when MarkeeDragon.com got it's big start in RMT. Players didn't have ebay anymore, so they started trading in FORUMS instead. (More about MarkeeDragon later in this thread.)

The original incarnation of the site was a simple, customized auction script. The site was kicked off by a mass exodus of ebay Power Sellers with thousands of feedback. They needed a safe haven to continue business. That made marketing easy. "Hey Yantis, I see you're big on ebay, but now you can't sell. Why not list your stuff here at PlayerAuctions?"

Yantis's connection to PA, and his later connection to IGE resulted in them having an advertising monopoly at the site. Their offers would appear in a special location above the offers of everybody else. PlayerAuctions was a great solution for virtual goods traders because they all needed a feedback system. Anyone that was active during the feedback based era of RMT KNOWS how vitally important it was to have strong feedback. With no feedback, you just can't compete for orders very well, and you can't get sell at high prices. High feedback sellers could always sell the same thing, for more money, so they had higher profit ratios from it.

To this day, trust is still VERY important. Customers will come to a site, and if they have a good experience, they never leave. They're very paranoid about having a bad experience such as non-delivery, transaction dispute, delivery dispute, or even getting banned for buying virtual goods.

Eventually, PlayerAuctions started getting a lot of scammers coming over, and they had to implement strong security measures. Following this, the site started to fall into disrepair because of lack of web design talent. Don and Steve couldn't hold the site together by themselves, and they weren't getting ANY help from co-owners in the business. In a way, they suffered a similar challenge of Robert Kiblinger (uotreasures.com)

They had the potential to make MILLIONS, but they needed corporate muscle. You gotta have money to make money.

It wasn't until about 2009 that new investors came by to rescue PlayerAuctions, and COMPLETELY redo the website into what it is today. When this happened, PlayerAuctions got some more industry firsts, and I was on the development staff at that time so some of those firsts will also be in a companion thread chronicling my own personal influence on the RMT industry through product and service innovation.

It is important to note that PlayerAuctions currently has pretty much zero scammers. Through innovative use of technology, regulation techniques, and controlled delivery processes, any buyer of virtual goods is guaranteed to get delivery of exactly what they paid for. Delivery is confirmed, actual item is verified to match a seller's offer description, and the buyer themselves confirm a delivery by using a form and essentially saying, "Yes, I have my delivery, you may now stop holding the seller's payment for me. Please pay the seller because I am happy."

Sellers are also protected from bad buyers through the use of delivery evidence in the form of screen shot or video. Yes, yes, my children, there's the possibility that 1 in a bazillion new sellers might use an alternate or private server to make a fake video... but real, we're talking about 99.999% security here. Any low feedback seller that gamed the system like that more than once would be perma-banned. PA is the leader here.

Either they or the late Sparter.com have the world first of being the first service to GUARANTEE delivery of digital assets for player to player trade with a 'double confirmation system' where both buyers AND sellers confirm the completion of a delivery. (If you have a correction, contact me.)

First RMT Forum.

There's a lot of forums out there doing RMT, and they're all trying to copy the early success of MarkeeDragon.com, which was originally a guild forum for Ultima Online. The guild was pretty small, with about 5-7 core players. They cheated, and they also profited big time from it. I actually met one of the forum members here in China and we're now doing some work on RMT ventures together.

Marcus did some selling on ebay and in game. He became a very well known trader. He didn't make a website dedicated to trade, however. He did begin doing price checks and general trade talk right in the forums. He was a gold broker and eventually other top gold brokers joined him. In no time, he had a thriving community. MarkeeDragon.com wasn't really well known until World of Warcraft came out. Marcus added more forums for trade (wow trade this time), then traffic EXPLODED!

He STILL didn't make a site dedicated to RMT. Instead, he made a site for selling game time card codes, and cd Keys. ShatteredCrystal became the FIRST big site which sold cd keys and time cards with email delivery. He's still actually the best site for that because you can get delivery in as little as 10 seconds from payment. It's all automated now. Marcus made millions. Although his own personal dealings with RMT were pretty limited by now, he is hailed by millions as the 'Godfather' of RMT and he is credited with giving birth to the entire industry.

When approached about being the godfather, he doesn't take credit for it, or say something like, "Yeah, that right, I made it all!" - He smiles like someone that's been given a title that might be a bit too big, and then he tells his side of the story, exactly as it was. Although he might not necessarily be the godfather of an industry, he is absolutely the godfather of the 'RMT forum' industry, having spawned many copy cats, of which rpgreseller.com is one.

Marcus began covering RMT related news. His news channel at youtube, is the closest thing the world has to the FIRST video news network dedicated to RMT. Today, he mostly covers games and games development. There are not plenty of other news networks out there for gamers that have matured enough to do videos on youtube, but Marcus Eikenberry appears to have been the Paul Bunyan that trailblazed it.


As the forums brought in a lot of legitimate business, they also brought in hundreds of frauders. Marcus responded by developing the FIRST open ended system for identification of people online. Trustwho.com functions on a simple thesis. People that are professionally trained to identify others through phone interviews and usage of internet based technology will review the details of a paypal payment and then talk to you on the phone to confirm your true identity. They're pretty good at it. If you pass the test, you have a verified member profile at trustwho.com. Anyone that checks your email address can see that your personal information is on file at Trustwho. They can't see that information though. At the least, you know who to subpoena if any fraud happens.

In early 2010, Marcus had a hard decision to make.. Through Shattered Crystal and TrustWho (which was now doing risk management services for RMT businesses), he was making good cash. But he wanted to make even more. He tried to monetize the RMT on his forums a few times and had limited success, so he had continued to focus on business that was taking him in a direction of publisher approved content, interviews, etc. Publishers don't trust you if you do RMT, though.

He finally decided to sell the RMT realted forums out of MarkeeDragon.com. Today, MarkeeDragon.com no longer hosts RMT forums

The RMT forums sold for a sum of $50,000 USD to the owner of mmobay.net, who had been running an auction script that competes with PlayerAuctions.com. The forums have been integrated into mmobay.net.

The remaining forums at MarkeeDragon.com cover gaming news and members are no longer allowed to do RMT there.

First forum dedicated to teaching RMT as a business or career.
Rpgreseller.com, Klancy Kennedy (myself), est. 2006-04-08

At the time, I was a top poster at MarkeeDragon.com and eventually made the leaderboard there. I was reselling World of Warcraft accounts. After seeing that mass fraud was occuring at MarkeeDragon, I began to post detailed guides on exactly how to stop it by educating the user base and employing techniques similar to TrustWho.com

Surprisingly, although TrustWho was originally made to address the MarkeeDragon fraud problem, there was limited and poor quality information at MarkeeDragon about how to prevent fraud by verifying trade partners. This was perhaps, due to a conflict of interest. If you tell people how to be safe, then that means less sales for TrustWho verification.

Seeing the problem, I did the math and found that by conservative estimates, over a million dollars in virtual goods was being lost to fraud each year. Being concerned by this, I began posting high quality guides about how to prevent it. There were some existing guides at MarkeeDragon, but they had mostly been authored by teenagers that do RMT. The writing quality, ease of location, and information quality was not good enough to provide acceptable protection for the community.

I regarded MarkeeDragon's problems as opportunities to do better with my own forum. Members got information about how to be safe by both email, and private message as soon as they registered as a new user.

By posting safe trading guides at rpgreseller and other communities, I began establishing myself as an expert in RMT. This worked out pretty well by driving traffic, so I started to write about other topics as well which related to doing RMT either safely or more effectively. e.g. I wrote the first guides on how to effectively sell a World of Warcraft account for more money, and also pioneered methods of using armory character profile services in a way which changed the character name. I made the very first anonymous armory profiles in existence and used this extensively to protect my account trade customers. Previously, this had to be done manually. Now there are services which do it for you automatically after you give them your armory link.

I was the world's leading researcher and writer about RMT trade methods to improve security and effectiveness, a position I still told. Today, I have literally thousands of guides and topics including everything from web design to safe gold deliveries. I have been read by world leaders in RMT and have worked with them to develop their businesses and business platforms. Rpgreseller.com is essentially an online library about RMT.

First anonymous armory profile website: armoryclone.com



Armoryclone.com 2008-01-10
The first website which allowed you to provide details about a game character in order for the site to locate the character in the publisher's official armory, and then make a clone of said armory profile (sans name!).
With no name, no guild, etc. it's impossible to REALLY know who a certain character is, but you can sure see the equipment.

The armoryclone domain name now belongs to PlayerAuctions and redirects there. Due to non-compete, the domain was abandoned in order to start up a new name and service, armoryx.com

Mywowarmory.com 2008-04-23 (just a few months later!)

Today, there's a lot of armory clones competing for a slice of the pie, and they collectively have DEFEATED another part of the industry, services like magelo.com

First third party armory profiles: Magelo.com 2001-04-06

Magelo.com was the first third party service to offer character profiles, AKA armory profiles. They first served Everquest 1. This game did not have character profiles. For a small monthly fee, you could profile a set of characters. All you needed to do was log in to the game, run a javascript program, and then log out. Bingo, character done. - This was incidentally VERY useful to anyone that wanted to sell a game account because providing a character profile that shows attributes and equipment could increase the selling price by hundreds of dollars.

I contacted Magelo on several occasions with the opportunity to make millions by aligning and participating within the industry. They respectfully declined. Same with rpgoutfitter, and others that provided a profiling service.

The success of the anonymous profile services marks the downfall of non-anonymous services and is a major change for character profiling businesses. To make it financially, they must bend to the law of supply and demand by giving gamers what they really want from profiles (the majority of the demand is using them for sales purposes.)

Askkuz.com was developed by Daman (Kuz) Kirklin, a power seller in account trade forums. The website is the first website to automatically:

1. Give players an appraisal of the player to player value of their account.
2. Give players a professional description to use in forums.

A sample description is posted here.

This thread will be updated with a video as soon as youtube starts cooperating.

Daman's site also gives you an anonymous armory profile at the same time that it accomplishes the other two feats, both of which are industry FIRSTS!

cool that armoryclone is listed. nice list