Buying Money/Pre-Made Toons in MMOs

[Hammer]

Right, as a bit of back ground for those who don't play MMOs, you can see a good BBC report on Goldfarming here.

What's you opinion on farmers and the people who buy gold? Is it something that MMO devs should try and stamp out, or should they be allowed to get away with it?

Different Devs seem take very different approaches - Blizzard are notorious for not dealing with the problem and have been accused of ignoring it countless times, Sony have attempted to remove it by creating in-game economies which are entirely player (ie you can't buy or sell things to NPCs) based and by selling in-game money themselves.

[Ghostsuit]

Games are supposed to be fun. Doing teh same thing over and over and over and over again to get enough cash to buy an epic mount is not fun. So I don't have problems with people buying money to make it easier to play or so they can keep up with other who they don't have the same anmount of free time as.

I don't even have a problem with people paying to level characters though I don't honestly see what the point is in playing the game in the first place if your going to get you character leveled for you.

[Sublimation]

I wouldn't be surprised is Blizzard owns one of the sites which is selling the gold. They could even create characters with available transfers and sell them on without anyone even knowing.

I think it should be allowed because of exactly what Ghostsuit said, it gets a bit boring farming for raids every day. And it can turn the game into a daily job. Just farming the materials for a raid that night. It would be interesting to see if there is any members of one of the top guilds, Nihilum, Forte, Deaths and Taxes etc if there is any member who doesn't buy gold. And if he doesn't; how much time a day does he/she spend farming materials for the up-comming raid. You would probably get some surprising numbers.

There is ways to stamp it out though, and in my opinion it is to make a Guild Economy much more doable, before it was created by allowing guilds to take on random players at the cost of a few hundred gold to instances like Molten Core and Blackwing Lair. But that hasn't been fully established yet since TBC. And it might be a little harder to achieve with the smaller ammounts of teams which are required for each instance. If they could add something in the instance which will allow guilds get large ammounts of gold back for doing certain bosses (Especially the first kill, as it's usually the most costly). Then i'm sure guilds would be able to fund their own members for raids a lot better.

Oh and, they didn't make the Epic Mount 5000G for nothing !