WOW Gold Best

Buying gold

A secondary gold market has sprung up quickly within Azeroth, offering players the ability to use real world earnings to endow their characters with virtual gold, and it’s now flourishing. There are two sides to this business — buying and selling — and we’ll leave discussion of the farming aspect for a future article, concentrating for the moment on the activity players either love or loathe: buying gold.

Our recent survey of readers showed that a surprisingly large percentage of you have bought gold or are considering doing so. Especially for the casual player, without spare hours every day to dedicate to endgame raids or grinding for mount money, buying other people’s hard-farmed gold may seem like an easy option which enables you to keep up with your guildmates and friends. The benefits for your character are immediate: you can shop in the AH to your heart’s content, buy that epic mount, and have some cash to flash when twinking an alt.

However, let’s look outside your own personal gain for a moment. Gold buying can have a seriously negative impact on the server economy and on the game in general. A fairly stable auction house can be destabilised by the introduction of people with a lot of money to burn, leading to a form of hyper-inflation where prices rise and rise because money is, quite literally, cheap. People start listing items at incredibly high prices because they know the gold buyers won’t think twice about buying them, and those who cannot afford to buy gold — or who choose not to — have to work twice as hard for their loot. Additionally, the gold farmers supplying the industry don’t buy items, but hoard their cash–breaking the game economy which is designed for gold to be spent as much as it’s obtained. continue reading »

Ban Gold Farming

Gold farmers! They’re everywhere, right? We get spammed by them, we run into them farming Dire Maul, we put them on ignore. Lazy people with too much disposable income buy gold from them in a show of crass consumerism. Blizzard has done their best to stamp out gold-farming services, but litigation is difficult due to the fact that most of the major gold-farming companies are based in China or other parts of Asia. They’ve instead opted to try to control and stop gold farmers from being able to complete transactions via other methods.

This time, though, it looks like Blizzard may have an unlikely ally in, of all things, the Chinese government. They announced today that the trading of virtual goods for real money is now illegal in China. This ruling reaches farther than just gold farming, though. It also bans the sale of prepaid time cards for MMOs or other online games, as well as numerous technicalities we’re sure to hear about in the weeks to come.

To give you an idea of how much an economic impact this will have on China, gold farming alone generates nearly one billion dollars a year worldwide, with China’s specific numbers growing at a reported rate of 20% per year. It’s estimated that 80 to 85 percent of gold farmers reside in China, so this ruling is massive and, to be frank, pretty troubling.

From a gamer’s perspective, yes, it’ll be nice to worry about this kind of service a little less, but from a human perspective this places hundreds of thousands of Chinese people in one of two kinds of serious trouble: the first is financial hardship from the “honest” gold-farming companies that will close down after this ban, and the second is legal issues from the companies who don’t close down because they can’t afford not to do what they’ve been doing. continue reading »