ibia is a free MMORPG. For us, the term "free" is not only a marketing expression but a commitment to deliver quality content to all of our players. Tibia offers extensive free content, more than many other games out there, and we invest a fair amount of time and money in its enhancements. In addition, Tibia offers a vast amount of premium content for all of those players who want to experience the whole of Tibia with all its exciting territories, islands and creatures. It is no secret that our well being as a company depends to a large extent on our ability to attract new premium players, to please them with our premium content and to convince them that our game is worth the money they are about to spend. We are very proud that around 100,000 of our players really seem to like what we are doing and therefore decided to buy premium time. This not only puts us in the position to invest money in the further development of Tibia. It is also a sort of confirmation for being on the right track.

Over the last few years, we have received much feedback and gathered a lot of information concerning the possibility to purchase premium time in different countries. What we have found out is that many of you are not able to buy your premium time directly from us but are forced to purchase it through highly risky and untrustworthy sources. We know that there are many unofficial resellers out there, some of them are doing a great job and others unfortunately do not. What are the most unpleasant issues that we have come across? Well, in general it looks like this:

The current situation
Imagine, a free account player would like to upgrade his account to premium status. In order to do so, he enters his account page and clicks the "Add Premium Time" button. Unfortunately, he is too young to have a credit card for himself and the wire transfer option just seems too expensive for him. What to do? He takes a look at some internet sites and quickly seems to have found a handy solution to his problem. Some website offers "Tibia Premium Time - No credit card required". Sounds promising, doesn't it? Well, the truth is, he might either be very lucky and has found one of the few responsible and trustworthy, but still unofficial resellers, or ? and that is the more likely situation ? he has to face the following problem: "Am I willing to pay up to thrice the amount of money that is published on Tibia.com in advance to some person I have never seen before without any guarantee that I will ever get my premium time? In addition, I have to go to some untrustworthy website, where I might have to enter some private and / or account data, which CipSoft keeps telling me all the time NOT TO DO!!! So, all in all, do I want to pay too much money for the risk of losing both my money and my account?" We suppose the answer to this is quite easy.

Official resellers
We have now decided to get rid of this unpleasant situation and to come to a solution which helps all parties involved. We have taken a look around and we were able to identify some professional partners that are willing and able to help us in distributing our premium time in a secure and cost efficient way. Some of them you might already know, some of them will be completely new to the Tibian community. Please rest assured that we have taken a very close look on all of our potential partners in order to make absolutely sure they will provide you with the best service, best prices and best support possible. Moreover, the evaluation of our resellers is an ongoing process. If we should receive substantial evidence that one of our partners does not perform as promised, he will be excluded permanently from our network.

So to conclude this introduction: In the near future, most of you will be able to buy your premium time from our trusted official resellers. All of our official resellers will be published on our websites.

What is the advantage for our players?
Obviously, the introduction of a network of official resellers will have many advantages for our community in the long run, for example:

• Purchase your premium time from a secure website.
• Use alternative payment methods for your country.
• Use a secure payment method.
• Get your premium time by just giving away your character name, and not your private account data.
• A professional customer service in your mother tongue.
• and many more...

Some of our new partners even distribute our products in various local stores, which means you can literally get your premium time at the same place where you usually buy your chewing gum or favourite magazine. And there is one more thing: We realised that the prices for premium time are significantly higher on the "black market". With the introduction of official resellers, we are willing to fight this problem as well. We cannot promise to completely eliminate all differences in pricing, as we cannot control all influencing market factors. However, we are determined to gain more control over the end consumer price. We will hardly interfere with our resellers' pricing policy, however, we have taken some measures which should enable our resellers to significantly lower the prices for you.

Well, to summarise all this we could say: With the introduction of official resellers you get a secure and reliable alternative to buying premium time from our own website.

Who can become an official reseller?
As we have just begun to build up our network of official resellers, please do not expect us to have partners for each and every country in the world right from the start, but we are constantly looking to expand our network. Our minimum requirements for becoming an official reseller include, but are not limited to:

• You have to be a registered company.
• You have to sign our reseller agreement.
• You have to buy a certain minimum amount of premium time.

We are only looking for highly professional partners who are able to provide excellent service to our players. Further information can be found in the business shop section on our company's website.

Next steps
As mentioned above, we are constantly looking to expand our network of official resellers. However, we really try to only team up with reliable and trustworthy partners, therefore the recruiting process takes some time. Nevertheless we will expand our network on a regular basis in order to cover our most important markets. Some countries do have quite rigid regulations if it comes down to doing internet business, which makes it hard to come to a solution suitable for all parties involved. We are still determined to address all those issues and to be able to offer each of our players the best solution.

At the beginning, our official resellers will only be able to sell premium time to you. In future, it might also be possible for them to offer additional services like recovery keys and such.

With the introduction of official resellers, it makes sense to rethink our ways of adding premium time to a player's account. At the moment, our resellers only have the option to transfer premium time directly to your account. The moment our resellers receive your payment (in whatever way, depending on the payment methods they accept), you will receive your premium time. In the near future, we plan to add another option which can be compared to game time codes. Resellers would be able to either transfer the premium time directly to your account or to send you an email with an alphanumeric code which you are able to enter at your account page in order to charge it with premium time.

In a nutshell
The introduction of official resellers offers multiple advantages to both our community and ourselves. We really hope that the possibility to purchase premium time from a trusted and secure source will significantly reduce multiple risks for our premium players.

At this point, we would like to take the opportunity to thank all of our resellers who have done a marvellous job over many years. They did not only help us in making our community grow, but at the same time have been a great help and source of information for us. In addition they acted as advisors and consultants during the development of this reseller network. Thank you very much.

So, if you are a professional reseller and would like to become a part of Tibia's success story, do not hesitate to contact us. And if you are a premium player already or are thinking about becoming one, please take a look at our list of official resellers which we are about to publish very soon. They have been hand-selected and might be able to have just the right offer for you.

See you in Tibia!
Your Community Managers