The Best WoW Gold Guide

Gold Farmer Controversy

Because of the time-consuming nature of World of Warcraft, which requires you to spend literally hundreds of hours amassing currency and experience, many players have turned to purchasing WoW gold from other players and from businesses which resell and amass their own gold.

Buying WoW Gold has become a hot-button topic for nearly everyone in the World of Warcraft community. Opinions range from feeling anyone should be able to freely buy and sell WoW gold to the feeling that its negative effects on the in-game economy could destroy the game.

The argument for buying and selling gold run along the lines of this: game economies like WoW’s are deflationary by nature of their design, that is you only have the gold and items in circulation that players are willing to create (by fairly monotonous grinding) and then share with other players through the economy.

The professional gold farmers increase the overall size of the game economy by maintaining a constant flow of gold and items into that realm’s economy; regular players have more choice about what items to purchase and a greater chance of making gold themselves, regardless of whether or not they buy it.

The gold that regular players buy gets dumped into the economy in different ways:

• it trickles down to regular players selling on the auction house,
• it is recirculated back to the pro farmers who make more green, blue and purple items available on the auction house,
• or the gold goes into a money sink like an epic mount which removes it from the game completely.

The argument against buying and selling WoW gold I think is a bit more emotional for players, however, and more pragmatic for Blizzard.

For players who enjoy the game but either do not have the disposable income to purchase extra gold from a third party it becomes a matter of real-world privilege leaking into a fantasy land where supposedly anyone can become the richest or most powerful using only luck and their raw skill. And why should someone who doesn’t have the skill or dedication to amass 5,000 gold be able to get it in a few minutes simply because they have real world affluence? To many players that is tantamount to cheating.

For Blizzard I myself think it is an intellectual property issue. I think they believe that allowing third-party businesses who are not paying licensing or royalties yet commonly use the World of Warcraft name, logo and press art - not to mention using Blizzard servers and software … these businesses are making huge amounts of real-world money and will ultimately compromise the Warcraft brand. I believe that current estimates for the virtual goods industry as a whole puts it in the billions of dollars (US). That’s Billions, not millions.

Blizzard has also officially stated they are against pro farming because it negatively affects the quality of play for the regular players, creating a far steeper entry point for new players who in effect become dependent on purchasing gold to offset an inflated economy.

Whatever opinion you and I might share about selling and buying WoW gold, in the past two years Blizzard has backed up their stance by banning literally tens of thousands of accounts, for offenses such as duping gold and receiving gold in the in-game mail system from accounts of known gold sellers. And as more people buy gold, more accounts will be banned.

More Information about Gold Farming

One more round in the ammo clip of anti-gold-farmers: the fact that 99% of all gold sellers seem to scam their customers, and are often scammed themselves. With no regulation and the international nature of the RMT industry, there is also no real way to combat this. Web of Lies: The Seedy, Startling World of Virtual Economies by Ron Aiken, appearing in the Pittsburgh City Paper on July 19, 2007.

The New York Times ran this article, The Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer by Julian Dibbell, on June 17, 2007. It’s an extremely compelling look at the everyday life of workers in the virtual goods industry, and a great piece of journalistic writing.

Check out this Wikipedia entry for more information about game economies and virtual currencies.

Also from that page, follow this link - a study that seemed to uncover an inequity of Blizzard’s anti-gold policies between the United States and European Union - a very interesting read.

For a really good 2006 discussion about MMO economies that took place on SlashDot in response to an anti-gold editorial by PC Gamer Editor-In-Chief Gary Whitt click here.