I disagree on your third point. First, Blizzard knows that it can't stop gold sellers. Even if they shut down all the big operations, there will always be peo

I disagree on your third point. First, Blizzard knows that it can't stop gold sellers. Even if they shut down all the big operations, there will always be people willing to pay money for virtual items and people willing to sell that can take their activity to some place that Blizzard can't police (like trades on ebay or in person). Second, and more importantly, gold selling is profitable and Blizzard definitely wants a chunk of this revenue. My evidence for this is to point out the real money auction house in Diablo 3, which was created in an attempt to solve these problems. Blizzard will probably introduce the same thing into WoW once they figure out how to do it properly (from what I hear, the D3 AH is having issues with inflation at the moment).