Cheap WoW gold 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 Cheap WoW gold from other players and from businesses which resell and amass their own Cheap WoW gold.

Buying Cheap 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 Cheap WoW gold to the feeling that its negative effects on the in-game economy could destroy the game.

The argument for buying and selling Cheap WoW 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 Cheap WoW gold and items in circulation that players are willing to create (by fairly monotonous grinding) and then share with other players through the Cheap WoW gold.

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

The Cheap WoW 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 Cheap WoW gold goes into a money sink like an epic mount which removes it from the game completely.
The argument against buying and selling Cheap 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 Cheap WoW 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 Cheap WoW 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.

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 Cheap WoW gold to offset an inflated economy.

Whatever opinion you and I might share about selling and buying Cheap 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 Cheap WoW gold and receiving Cheap WoW gold in the in-game mail system from accounts of known gold sellers. And as more people buy Cheap WoW gold, more accounts will be banned.

More Information about Cheap WoW gold Farming
One more round in the ammo clip of anti-Cheap WoW 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 Cheap WoW 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.