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For all the great depth and anecdotal insight provided in the article, not one mention of the number one means of "inventory acquisition"? I'm talking about ac

For all the great depth and anecdotal insight provided in the article, not one mention of the number one means of "inventory acquisition"? I'm talking about account compromises: stealing passwords, logging on to another player's account, selling (and trading) off all their virtual possessions for gold, then selling that gold to other players. The article makes it sound like there's a hint of legitimacy, as if these gold farms really just go around earning gold in the game worlds to sell it; by and large they don't, especially not in the behemoth that's WoW. And it's the reason why there are seemingly more options available to you for securing your World of Warcraft account than your bank account. Is it any wonder why Blizzard is quoted as hating them (IGE specifically, and all gold sellers in general)?

plorkyeran 16y ago
That's a relatively recent development. In the time period talked about in the article, they did earn the gold, sometimes even entirely legitimately (other than the account sharing). In Vanilla WoW, the main problem caused by RMT was that on larger servers every single non-instanced good farming spot would be saturated with Chinese farmers 24/7. The transition over to hacking accounts to acquire gold didn't happen until late 2006-2007. I don't remember account hacking being any real concern at any point in EQ.