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

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.