Gold Sellers « Rawrcast

You’ve seen it in trade chat a hundred times or in a whisper from an unfamiliar name, “Greetings, pleased you are to buy our gold. www.wowgoldXXX.com! Cheapest gold in WOW! Purchase Now!” Illegal gold sellers are roundly reviled by WOW players but why? Answering this question requires us to examine the evolution of Gold Selling in WOW.

The older, more primitive form of gold selling came from Gold Farmers. No doubt you’ve heard about the hordes of Chinese peasants stuffed into cramped rooms sitting shoulder to shoulder farming mobs and ore? The basic concept goes as follows: the price of gold fluctuates in relation to the US dollar like any other currency. There are some servers where inflation is high and a lot of gold buys very little. Conversely, there are some servers where inflation is low and a lot of gold buys well…a lot. Chinese (or any other ethnicity) gold farmers actually make their living from farming gold in game and selling it to affluent Western gamers (the money they get from selling gold is comparable to or in many cases, more than, the amount of money they could make working a normal job in their own country).

The current form of gold selling is a much more sinister business. Gold sellers found that it was much more profitable to steal gold from players than it was to pay the salaries of actual gold farmers. Key logging programs, and dummy sites that ask you to enter your account information are just two of a myriad of ways that hackers use to get your account information. Once they have your information, they sell everything you own on all characters (in many cases even the gear that you’re wearing), mail or trade the gold to another character, and then leave you standing naked and desolate.

And what does Blizzard do about it you ask? Very little. Blizzard operates under the typical rules of most businesses, buyer beware. This means that they aren’t accountable for third parties preying on their players or for beefing up your account security (although they give you the means to do so yourself with the Account Authenticator, which I STRONGLY advise you to get). In addition, it seems that gold sellers now operate with impunity through trade chat and whispers. There are a number of options Blizzard could take to stop the abuse of their channels (banning accounts and specific IP addresses as well as pursuing legal remedies against third party vendors) but they seem to do very little.

Which brings us back to the central question of why WOW players hate gold farmers. The central premise of WOW is that with enough time and effort, you can achieve anything in game (sometimes you just need the time and effort of 24 other people to do so but the point remains). Shortcuts like buying gold may seem attractive until you realize that the gold you just paid for could have been the gold of that naked level 80 standing in Ironforge.