Massively

Well, lets be honest.... It's my enjoyment, which proviceds me with more fun. Thus, my game is more important.

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The international drug trade also provides employment for many people who would otherwise be jobless or have to find employment in legitimate industries. Does that make it 'okay'?

And that's not including all the people who have been directly harmed by the RMT industry by having their accounts hijacked, identities stolen and credit cards maxed out by the more disreputable companies.

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Gold farming might look like an innocent, if frustrating for many, way of making an extra few bucks for somebody somewhere, but those games have been set up with a particular purpose in mind, and those people are exploiting and damaging the games they're moving into, and lessening the experience of the people who are actually paying to keep those servers up.

Let me ask you this:

If those same group of people were wandering around Vegas fixing card games and ripping off casinos, and then saying "But it's only a game for you people, for us it's a good way to make a living", would that be any better?

Hmmm, maybe that's a bad example... ;)

How about if they were fixing the results of the olympics, and placing large bets on the winners they'd selected? I mean, that's only a game, right, there'd be no harm in fiddling a few results here and there if somebody could make some money out of it somewhere...

These people are leeches, and at the moment, MMO's are easy targets for those who want to make a little cash by sitting in a room and grinding away for hours on end.

I'd say that there are two obvious solutions:

1) More vigilance on the people who run those MMOs, and stiff penalties (ie lifetime bans) for anybody who is caught buying.

2) Fix the world economy so that virtual currencies are properly devalued, and it's not worth anybody's time to farm gold for RMT anymore. (A little harder.)

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I'd have to disagree there, Angel. The comparisons may seem wide, but I'd have to say they're in the same ballpark..that being, it's an illegal activity which employees large amounts of people in order to complete the objective. Same thing goes for large scale electronics theft. Think of the first TMNT movie and all the kids that were stealing. It gave them a "job" and a place to stay, but that doesn't make it suddenly legal.

I'd also have to disagree with the idea that gold farming gives job skills to these people. We're not talking about using the different apps in MS Office or some such. All they are doing is logging in (unless that's done by supervisors), and then clicking through the game making money. The amount of job skills and real computer experience they are getting is just like in Big when Tom Hanks goes to get the job at the toy company he puts down "four years" worth of experience on computers. Four years that was spent playing games when he was a kid.

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If I gave a damn about the economic condition of China and the third world, I'd be paying monthly fees to global charities. But Im not! I'm paying to play and enjoy a game. A game and enjoyment that RMT perpetually ruin.

If they can't build the foundations of a stable economy by means of a tangible service or commodity then they deserve to starve and fade away. They are not helping their local economies, they are only sponging off our own.

I work hard for my money so that I can enjoy video games. I dont play video games so I can enjoy money. If that is too much to ask, then to hell with them all.

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I dont pay for this RTM shit. If they want to make money maybe those Chinese bastards can get a real job in a factory.

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It's astonishing how people run wild with their analogies.
gold farming and drug trade, fixing olympics... what's next? compare dl-ing a song to child rape? please, stop the madness. If you want to make a point then make a concrete point instead of making dumbass analogies. For example a point would be: "It pisses me off when i spend 3 weeks grinding for _, and this Joe Shmoe got _ instantly for 5 bucks".
My point is this: time is a commodity and so is money. You may have one or the other or both.
You are poor (or extremely honest) but can play 40 hrs a week, great. Or maybe you can't play more than 2 hrs a week but don't mind spending some extra green for an item, that's also great.
You use what you got to make up for what you dont have.
One way to fight crime is to partially legalize it and bring it under control.
Yes I mean microtransactions.

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I think the "press" should stop perpetuating the pleasant lie that players hate gold farmers. Players pretend to hate gold farmers but in reality many (and I'd even go so far as to say vast majority) buy gold. The numbers just don't add up if only a few players actually partake in this business. Have you seen the sheer amount of gold selling sites with some traded as public companies? Have you seen how easy it is to get BIG bucks for MMO related items even on ebay? The reality is that the norm is for players these days to buy things with cash all the while saying the hate the fuckers who do that.

It's like sex and masturbation. Society's public image of it all stands in stark contrast with what happens in private.

But hey, if it makes us all feel better (made especially easy btw since they are just chinese right) pretending to all be righteously against the gold farmer market...well, that's our right I suppose.

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Please get back with your full address.


Regards.
Mr. Kufuor Johnson.
Accra Ghana.
West Africa

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