GameRates Full Review

WoWMine was founded in mid-2005 in an attempt to eliminate the middleman from the virtual currency market. Instead of a North American company purchasing gold from a farming company (base in a developing country with minimum relative labor costs) and reselling it, WoWMine was a team of united Chinese farmers (Super Continental US LLC) who attempted to sell the gold directly. The company is owned by Gordon Lam who also owns: mmospa.com, gwmine.com, ffmine, ddomine, (mmo game acronym)mine.com, mmoinn.com, wowspa.com and wowrex.com.

MMOinn.com is a known in-game gold spammer. They send a ton of mail and whispers from countless bots advertising the site. In fact, MMOinn.com is the most well known spammer in World of Warcarft(besides the infamous peons4hire.com which has since legally been shut down by blizzard). MMOinn.com and WoWmine.com have the same owner, site design, customer service, and delivery network.

It seems WoWMine didn’t want to tarnish its “image” with in-game gold spamming so they took a bunch of images from IGE’s site and hacked their mainframe onto it and called it MMOinn.com. Not to mention WoWMine spams as well and is proud of it. In fact they created a promotional video where they took a bunch of gnomes and had them killed over and over again so that their corpses spelled out WoWMine.com. It lagged out an entire area of Ironforge and we here at GameRates consider that (creative) spam and a hassle to those trying to play (much more so than a whisper or random inbox message).

WowMine is a Chinese company trying to look like a Canadian company probably because they thought the US was too offensive. And who knows, maybe the broken English could be mistaken online as a French accent? WoWMine is generally regarded as a pretty poor source of World of Warcraft gold.

I guess assuming a Chinese wholesale company could actually provide a quality service is already setting myself up for a massive disappointment, but WoWMine goes the extra mile (kilometer?).

WoWMine claims to donate to Direct Relief International, but do they actually? Should you trust a Chinese company trying to look Canadian to donate to an American charity? Do you think Direct Relief International authorized their logo to be sitting right next to “wowmine.com” pasted over photos of disadvantaged people ripped from their own website? They didn’t even put a link to the charity directly. Dirty. (Editor’s Note: Since we wrote this article the charity claim has disappeared, I guess they were embarrassed that someone pointed out their generous “good” work and decided not to advertise it anymore...)

Purchasing

Purchasing is rather standard for WoWMine. You first select your game, server, and faction of the virtual currency you wish to purchase. At this point a quote comes up with the amount of currency updated to the hour that they currently stock (read the delivery section below and you will find out that these numbers mean nothing). You then fill in the typical order information such as your character name, address and phone number and choose a payment option.

WoWMine offers the following payment options: PayPal (with credit card processing), Google Checkout, and Moneybookers.

Once you enter in your payment information you will receive a keycode that you will need to enter when you receive an automatic phone call from a computer to verify your order. When WoWMine has your gold ready they will call you and instruct to go to a specific mailbox in the game. You then login to the WoWMine website to pull up your order and click the button that you are ready for it to be delivered. At this point an automatic script will log in a character at the mailbox and automatically initiate the trade with you. This is a creative cost cutting system, but forces you to set everything up and log into the game to receive the gold instead of having it sent to your mail box in game which is much preferable.

Customer Service

On average it took us seven minutes to connect with a customer service agent. At least they told us our position in the queue were kind even to offer us ads for the “Exploits, Cheats, and Bots” pay forum they seem to run. It was nice watching those ads for seven minutes before anyone would talk to us.Luckily we were greeted with this friendly hello:

I am actually handling many customers at the same time for a prolong period. Response time is slower than usual. Just bear with me here. I will use Canned Responses (CR) to increase chat efficiency.

Not only were all of the customer service agents chat responses canned, he didn’t even read my questions. Once they got an inch away from their nonsensical canned responses it became very clear that they had minimal understanding of the English language and were ill qualified to answer my simple questions. This combined with the fact that it would often take three or more minutes just to receive a canned response. WoWMine has absolutely terrible customer service, but being a cheap wholesaler that is sort of what we expected.

Delivery

WoWMine claims delivery in under five minutes. They also advertise all over the internet that they offer 1,000 gold for $5 although on their website they say that they do this seasonally. We’ve never seen this offer materialize. One thing we do like about WoWMine is that they post a table which gives the average delivery times over the past ten days. Well, we liked it until we found out the chat was obviously a lie. Sure, we imagine there is some truth to it, but from our test orders and hundreds of customer reports we have read online it is impossible that as the table claims every order is delivered within 72 hours. It simply isn’t true, which leads us to believe that the table data has been altered in some way.

When talking to customer service we asked about the under five minute delivery estimate. The customer service agent notified us that the estimate only applied to orders which they had the currency in stock. The customer service agent notified us that they suffered constant bannings (that makes us feel safe, especially after watching all those ads for bots, cheats, and exploits) and estimated that we should receive our gold within three days if they were out of stock on our server. Well this didn’t seem like a problem because WoWMine provides a quote before you order on how much currency they have stocked on every server. Incidentally enough they had over 15,000 gold on every server when we checked! Just to play it safe we decided to pick a server where they were quoted (which they claim is updated hourly and 90% accurate) as having over 45,000 gold on stock. Surely, that should qualify for the five minute delivery? We checked with our customer service agent and after a fifteen minute ordeal to answer a “five second” question we were told that in fact there wasn’t any currency in stock on that server for us and that all of that gold the website said they had in stock was already “saved” for other customers.

We tried this routine again on a few other servers and found the same response. It seems that those “stock” numbers mean absolutely nothing! Probably just like the claim that they deliver in five minutes (if they are in “stock” and by “stock” they mean not what the website says is the “stock” but the stock number you are quoted after if you wait fifteen minutes to talk to a customer service agent. However in our experience they always tell you they are out of “stock”, therefore the five minute claim never applies! What a creative Marketing Catch-22!). This claim is probably just as “true” as their old claim that they donate a percent of your sales to charity (although we have no evidence for this either way, just a hunch and a refusal of them upon request to provide evidence of the said past donations).

Conclusion

The owners of WoWMine spam using other site names. The owners of WoWMine have in the past tried to pretend that they were associated with Direct Relief International Charity despite not even linking to the site or providing any evidence whatsoever that they were making donations. Interesting enough since this article attempted to expose the charity claim the button and claim has disappeared from their website. WoWMine claims to have stock that they do not have. WoWMine advertises prices online which they do not have. WoWMine claims and advertises a five minute delivery time if they are in “stock” (which they then lie to you about as they are never really in.

At one point WoWMine used to be much better (not great, but much better than what they have become). It seems a year or so ago they managed to actually fulfilled half of the claims they made instead of the current zero. It appears they are having an enormous problem managing supply and acquiring gold that doesn’t get them banned. However, this doesn’t surprise us that much as they have advertisements all over their group of sites advertising a “Cheat, bot, and exploit” pay forum, are one of the largest spammers in the game, and seem to buy the cheapest gold they can find (regardless of the possibly dubious methods used to generate it). This can create some serious supply problems.

Then again they do fulfill the vast majority of their orders, and try their best to fulfill them as quickly as possible. The problem is that they lie to you every step of the way. If they were just honest and gave us real delivery times, real stock levels, and real claims (and stopped the spam) they would receive a mediocre review. They try to be something that they are not and are openly deceitful about their services. There are other inexpensive suppliers out there who do not engage in these tactics and as such we cannot recommend a WoWMine.