I’m totally willing to grant that those tactics are uniform for the professional gold farmer (they all make sense if you are viewing the game as a competitive job), but then what you’re objecting to is the behavior of professional gold farming, not the RMT itself. Similarly, I object to assholes who use PvP to grief other players, but have no problem with PvP itself.

You can see the same character on 24 hours a day, but he’s being played by diffferent people. They work that character in shifts, like a store. My experiences involving gold farmers have been overwhelmingly negative. Reading other accounts in the wild wooly web leads me to believe that my experiences are fairly typical.

Yes, it is the tactics I’m objecting too, but those tactics are pretty uniform for the professional gold farmer.

Gold farmers are players too! They’re just playing the game differently. They also are not on 24 hours a day. I mean, they have to eat and sleep irl just like anyone else.

Again, it’s the tactics you are objecting to, not gold farming or RMT, it sounds like.

The “gold farmers” are better behaved because they are willing to distibute the wealth to anyone who will pay for it, but the regular players won’t. The only thing that makes the “gold farmers” worse is the spam.
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While it’s true that players sometimes act like gold farmers, they aren’t on 24 hours a day. Eventually you can get your camp if your competing with “normal” players. When a group of gold farmers decides to monopolize mooncloth, they will stoop to any cheap tactic to control the entire area. Things like using mage AoE’s to “tag” a mob your going after. Normal players may do that, but most won’t.

While we’re on the subject, the spam does sucketh! I think we’re getting a little TOO realistic with our economic sim here!

Each of your examples illustrates behavior of the player base that is not RMT farmers as well. The regular players who are trying to get gold for repair bills or epic mounts do the exact same things you mention. The “gold farmers” are better behaved because they are willing to distibute the wealth to anyone who will pay for it, but the regular players won’t. The only thing that makes the “gold farmers” worse is the spam.

I am sure many (but not all) professional gold farmers engage in behavior that others find objectionable, but then, so do many (but not all) players-who-aren’t-gold-farmers. Witness the prominent WoW guild recently banned en masse for repeatedly cheating in raid dungeons.

The only way to create a world in which there is nothing that provides a real-money cash lure is to create a world in which nothing that is tracked by the game server (social reputation, for instance, is often not tracked by the game server) has any value. It’s possible, but it doesn’t lend itself to gamey worlds.

–matt

Without the lure of other people getting real cash…

Okay. Followup question then: How do we keep the lure cash (RMT) out of the game?

“Thanks BugHunter - my point exactly. What people are objecting to is behavior that SOME people who engage in RMT engage in, not RMT itself.”
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Make no mistake, professional gold farmers are among the worst citizens on your server. To illustrate my point, I’ll use examples from WoW:

1.) I have seen them take a critical item that everybody needs (mana potions), and buy out the entire auction house of that item. They then turn around and re-sell that same item at vastly jacked up prices. They will remain logged in and checking the auction house 24 hours a day to make sure nobody gets a “real” price on mana potions. The 24 hour part is the part that’s hard for a “real” player to duplicate.

2.) Teleport hacks and “reset” workarounds in Dire Maul. These guys used them en-masse to warp to the boss mobs, get a quick kill, and then reset the instance to get another boss mob kill in 10 minutes. Definately threw WoW’s economy out of whack.

3.) Farming Mooncloth. Here is a resource needed by tons of players, that could only be farmed in certain spots. The gold farmers were doing anything they could to monopolize those spots. Once again, they were there 24 hours a day, doing everything they could to make sure they had ALL the spawns.

Simply put, our virtual world would be a better place without the lure of cash in it.