Originally posted by hotwu

don't be a retard, if people didn't enjoy the game they would not only not pay for someone to farm gold, they wouldn't pay the monthly fee to play the game. i probably enjoy the game more then you do.

instead of breaking it down in raw numbers let us try to identify, in a deeper way, what is going on here.

on the one hand you have someone who spends his entire day at home in front of his computer playing WoW. this person actually prefers to rely on other people to pay his bills (90% of the time his/her parents are flipping the bill). this person is, on average, 85% whiter then normal people. this person is 98% more likely to cause physical harm to other people because he becomes unable to destinguish he is not really horde IRL. this person has mad mmo respect, phat lootz and flies purples (these are the people WoW caters to). don't pretend like it's possible to be at the top of the game right now without being one of these people (or relying on gold farming to suppliment your efforts).

on the other hand you have someone who works every day, supports himself and maybe a family. actually socializes with other people, perhaps is lucky enough to have someone to go to bed with at night. maybe goes to a party or a movie from time to time (these are the people blizzard will ban for trying to enjoy its game without becoming a human turd).

then you also have the people who make a living working hour after hour doing the same thing over and over for pennies an hour in order to feed their families. they provide a service to people who simply could not enjoy WoW and maintain a responsible life at the same time (these are the people WoW will not only ban, but count on for continued game purchases and monthly revenues).

i like wow in general (i think the expansion was a really good step in the right direction, the price tag kind of demands that though). i have played wow in extremes and i have played wow in balance... the only part i do not enjoy is extreme farming. i still farm, i grind for rep/gold/mats whatever, but i will buy gold when i need it in cases where i can just not justify the time or risk IRL to get where i want to go.

A very well written post - I agree with you.

However, our personalities may not be normal! I suspect we are high earning acheivers who gladly pay for a 'Rolls Royce' experience.

I suspect many more people don't mind grinding as much as we do. Therefore, they don't empathise with the need to buy gold.

If it does not effect me, then I do not care.

But fact is that it does effect me.

The people who work with gathering virtual currency, in any game, does so with no other objective then to earn as much as possible, regardless of how they come about it.

There is no exploit they would not use, there is nothing they will not do to achieve their goal and if it destroys your gaming experience they do not care.

The problem is that there are people working with the same things you do for leisure, there is no way the different views on the purpose of the game will not clash.

Better then if said companies themself sold the currency, preferably on dedicated servers.

At least that would remove the farmers to a degree.

I'm a white collar worker and have time to play about 1 or 2 nights a week and if i'm lucky i get 1 or 2 full wekends to play WoW. The reason i play is that i want to get to level 70  on my own strenght! i love this game and working to make money to buy better gear is all part of the game for me. Just like in RL you work for you cash!

Someone in our guild put it like this "real life is to much about image and WoW should not be like that. You play to escape RL not to get pulled back in". And if you can't be bothered to earn your own money or do your own grinding, ask yourself "why do i play this game?"

Ofcourse it's hard to earn money when your lvl 20, but it all gets easier as you lvl and there is a very good add-on called auctioneer add-on that helps you set a good but reasonabe price for your stuff and keeps track of offer and demand. it also tells you if an object you want to buy is overpriced, so you can choose to buy or not.

Quote Kyrelan:

Also missing of course is any real discussion why most games are designed to reward people with more time on their hands (like WOW)  to play them vs those who don't. (like GW's).

The way i see it is that everyone get's the same reward; it's just that the person who plays more get's there faster...

Quote Krumb:

Now all I want is a filter for WOW.. stop those who are spamming

'WE selD golD!'  ect, ect

There is also a new add-on to block and report ingame spam and spam-whispers called SpamSentry. The only bug in this is that Blizz only let's you open 1 ticket at a time. Yesterday i had 4 of those messages in 10 mins and had 1 pending ticket.

But i do think that you can't punish the people who buy the gold, but you can bann the people who sell and advertise in game, 'cause that is getting to be a real nuisance!