An Interview with David Schikor, one of the owners of www.randyrun.com

- How did you come up with the idea of opening a Wow gold shop?
This is a pretty long story: We were the first in Europe who started selling virtual items. I started up this business with my two brothers Dan-Micha and Daniel in our parent's basement. We were fantastic Diablo 2 players and spent our entire free time collecting the best items. One day we found out that there were a few suppliers who sold their items that they had found on eBay. We picked up this idea and improved it. We always had a good sense of doing business and finally it worked out with a hobby and an idea and without any seed capital.
We only had one computer on which we played working in shifts, nothing else. Soon we had a second and third and after a short period of time the room was filled with computers so that we could play lots of characters at the same time. We earned money with our homepage www.3dsvs.com, with the auctioning of items on eBay and also there was trading in the channels like in a Turkish bazaar.
The Diablo business went on for quite long but we kind of missed out on the catching up of other games such as EverQuest, Lineage 2 etc... That is why we decided to do a parallel project to the Diablo business and founded the first German WoW gold shop on our website www.ingameservice.com, with a business student as manager of the company. The business was developing quite well and that is why we decided to create a real brand about six months ago: the online servant Randy Run with the slogan "No work. Just fun. With Randy Run." and the homepage on www.randyrun.com.
With Randy we are trying to finally get the business out of the grey zone. Unfortunately people still think it would be illegal to do business with services for online role playing games. More concerning this later.

- How many staff do you have in your company?
At the moment we have about 10 co-workers and we are always looking for ambitious workers in the areas where we need someone- for example in the search engine optimization. The manager of our site is now Andreas Herken. He´s very experienced and knows a lot about computers. Beside him we have a salaried software engineer and supporters in different languages to keep up contact with our customers from all over the world. My job is to supervise the whole thing and to steer the company into the right direction. Our goal is to revolutionize the whole business by being ahead of the game in technical areas. This way we can offer the best prices and the best service. No more price agreements with the competition!

- How many customers do you have?
We have about 80.000 registered, served and satisfied customers on our 3 projects (www.3dsvs.com, www.ingameservice.com, www.randyrun.com) combined. It is now completely normal to buy WoW Gold or articles of equipment for online role playing games. We simply want the players to be satisfied with their needs without having to have a guilty conscience. In which part of the real world can´t you buy what you need? If you would work in the real world for an hour instead of farming WoW Gold you could buy 10 times as much gold at our shop rather than if you yourself had to farm it in an hour. As you can see buying gold is smart: You can focus on things in the game that are challenging and fun.

- How long have you sold virtual products such as gold, items and other objects?
Since 2000 for Diablo 2 and since 2005 for World of Warcraft

- How do you deal with the „dumping" prices of others, especially of foreign companies?
In the long run there is no other possibility than going along. And this is exactly what we are doing. On more than 80 percent of all servers we are the cheapest. And according to our promise "No work. Just fun. With Randy Run." our customers still don´t have to miss out on good support and service. Otherwise one can be sure that we don´t do anything illegal and everyone receives what he or she ordered. Or he or she receives their money back. This was only possible by intensive negotiations and by the reaching of price agreements with big Chinese farmers thanks to a quite individual business idea.

- Why does 1000 WoW Gold cost € 30 today and tomorrow € 50?
The reason for this is because the manufacturers of the games sometimes ban a lot of accounts from the gold farmers and this is why the offer splits in half from one day to another. The demand remains the same though and this is why the prices jump. It takes a while for the farmers to catch up collecting all the gold because of having to level up the farm accounts. In the past the price fluctuations were not so high because the Chinese had such great profit margins and simply made more profit when there were not so many bannings. This is also what I meant with the above question and price arrangements.

- Where do you get the WoW Gold from? Do you farm it yourself? Or do you get the WoW gold from a "gold distributor"?
The WoW Gold comes from different farmers in China and we are always looking for the cheapest farmers with the best service.

- Have you already had problems with Blizzard concerning the accounts and the WoW Gold?
Up to now we have hardly had any problems with this. The only ones that have to deal with regular account bans are the Chinese farmers. If you buy WoW gold you don´t have to worry about your account. If something like this happens though there´s always the right compensation from us, even if it isn´t our fault but the games´ producer.

- How much WoW Gold do you send per day in Germany?
I can´t say, unfortunately, but it´s no small amount.

- Are there any German WoW Gold farmers? If so, how much percent WoW gold would you say is farmed by German players and how much by foreign players?
There are no German gold farmers because the wages are too high here in comparison to China.

- Could you tell me why it's written on gold shop sites for WoW: „It is a mistake to believe that WoW gold selling is illegal. But we guarantee you, with us it is 100% legal." Although this is obviously a lie if you want to believe Blizzard's current F.A.Q.
Something that is illegal is forbidden according to the law and this is definately not the case. The general terms and conditions of a game producer are not law and we have the confirmation of our lawyers that everything that we do is perfectly legal. In my opinion the game producers with their general terms and conditions shouldn´t put themselves above the law and I think that the banning of 100.000 accounts is not ok. That's expressing it quite mildly.

- What can you say about operators from abroad who send advertisements to gamers or spam their mailboxes?
I am no fan of those operators and neither are the gamers.