Is buying WoW gold that bad?

Many often wonder what effects the farming and reselling of WoW gold does to the over all World of Warcraft gaming experience. Before I get into my rants, raves, preaching and educated opinion sharing, I would like to take a moment to educate those of you non-geeks out there on a bit of vocabulary.

WoW: World of Warcraft

Gold, WoW Gold: basic currency used in WoW

Farming: Spending countless hours utilizing ones online game time in the pursuit of gathering as much of this gold into ones account.

Chinese Gold Farmer: A Chinese person (still residing in China) who acquires multiple accounts and runs them around the clock for the sole purpose of farming gold for resale.

Hacking: to illegally and unethically acquire access to another players account for any number of reasons.

Bot: an automated computer program designed and written to run the WoW game in a specific pre-determined manner in the absence of the account holder.

Now that we have that cleared up, I would like to share with you the reason why our purchasing gold is having an adverse effect on the WoW virtual economy. There are only a few ways to create money on WoW. I do not in any way mean “make” or “earn” money. I literally mean, “create”. When we all get started on the game, the first thing we learn after moving our character and attacking is usually that finishing off an adversary and looting its corpse provides us with a bit of pocket change. It is not long after that we learn where we can and have to spend this wealth. Another thing we quickly learn is how to complete quests so as to earn a greater amount of currency.

All of the currency earned in these two manners account for 100% of all of the gold “created” in WoW. A server will literally generate money out of no where to pay you for your services to a quest giver and also make sure that a majority of the victims of your fighting skills, especially humanoids grant you a bit of their pocket change upon their death when you loot them. Now some may say, “Geek, there is a third way to generate gold: sell the items you loot back to a vendor.” In this you are partially right. Yes you can do this and get gold from an item that is unneeded by selling it to a vendor but it still comes from looting the dead for financial gain.

Now, for how gold disappears… it is done by repairing, training, buying reagents food and crap we do not need like extra mounts and pets. Basically if  you walk up to a vendor and hand over money in any way, you are making the gold vanish forever. “But Geek, I just spent several thousand in the AH (auction house) over the last several weeks on gear, mats and an over-priced haunted memento. I will never see that again.” You may not see it again but Banktoon of <Bank Alts R Us> who sold you most of that is still enjoying the fruits of his sales ventures. That money all went to him (minus the small amount taken by the AH as their cut which forever disappears). The money never really went away.

Now that we have all of THAT covered, here is how the reselling of gold works. Chinese gold farmers purchase several accounts to run non-stop to generate this gold, they farm it through killing/looting, a bit through questing, but mostly through farming various natural mats and selling them on the AH. This money is in turn gathered into a single or few control accounts and distributed to paying customers. Now when I say Chinese I mean not to be racist, it is just the truth that many of these unethical farmers are in fact Chinese nationals.

Now recently some have taken to hacking accounts. This is because the work of leveling a toon has been done already by you and I; therefore opening up many more places for that toon to farm. The time investment that the farmer needs to make ready the toon for farming is minimized. Also, you may have things of value in your bags and banks ready to be looted. Your toon looks legit, your guildies and friends know you, you are generally geared and your professions are of a higher maintained level. Your account is perfect.

Now to further streamline their time investment, (new term) Hack&Farmers are now using bots to control our hacked accounts and kill/loot or resource farm their way to financial success. While these bots are running rampant around Azeroth, the actual people themselves are busy setting up guest accounts to advertize their business of selling gold to you.

“Slow down Geek. I have never bought gold nor had my account hacked. I have the authenticator.” That is good. However, you are still affected. Here is where it affects us as a total MMORPG population. Blizzard Entertainment is a company that makes money and provides jobs to people. They have hired many mathematicians and theorists to sit down and brain storm and work up an online system that will maintain a balance as we play it from week to week. You cannot fault them for their primary goal of making money. The more time it takes us to reach our own virtual goals in their world, the more months of subscription we pay. If we are hacked and set back, we owe more money to get things fixed and back on track. Also, their formulas do not take into account several dozen bots or more per realm running around and spending hours or days generating and hording money. It can and will ultimately upset the virtual economy of WoW by distributing resources (money, gear, mats) to those who pay real tangible cash for it all the while robbing some of game time they have paid real money for.

It falls upon us geeks, the off-time citizens of Azeroth to check ourselves. If we do not want our virtual economy to go to the Harpies, we need never to purchase WoW gold anywhere. If you do, you can never complain of the demand for others to hack your account and those of your friends and guildies. You can never again bawk at a bot racing to a titanium vein that you are fighting next to and steal it before you get to mine it. It is these and other problems that stem from purchasing WoW gold that through our greed we allow to happen.