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It's a buy cheap wow gold multi billion dollar trade, yet denied in cheap wow gold public by most players. In the first of a four part weekly feature series, Nick Ryan reports on the current state of cheapest wow gold the thriving grey market in MMO currencies, characters and items. Future instalments will look at this shady virtual business from the cheap wow gold fast perspectives of cheap world of warcraft gold the aion gold gold traders themselves, the games' players, and the developers who make and run MMO games. This week, we offer an overview of this burgeoning and controversial market and wonder why, if it's such big business, so few admit to doing it. Is gold selling like pornography: something more of us do than admit? A shameful secret, something indulged alone and at night, in front of the screen; or during a lunchbreak, safely away from a partner, when a quick credit card or PayPal transaction will go unnoticed by others in game? Secret or not, we all hate 'gold sellers'. Apparently. Despise them, even. Ask your friends or colleagues: how many will openly admit to buying services from a gold farmer? Not many. And the ones that do probably harp on just as loudly against them as the next person. But just who are these scourges of the gaming world? You probably know them as the anonymous figures plaguing your trade chat, offering great deals for game currency, power levelling services, or the sale of rare items and recipes. In games such as World of Warcraft, the infamous random whisper from a level 1 "Hello, are you there?" quickly leads to a macroed advert if you bother to reply. With the well known 'grind' present in most massively multiplayer online games, how many of us have been tempted to take that short cut? The received wisdom, as we'll see later from the major games companies, is that such outfits are as good as organised crime: they support and promote hacking and stolen accounts and credit cards. They are not merely a nuisance and headache, but a plague to be stamped out which costs us all millions of greenbacks.Warhammer Online doesn't just ban gold sellers, it publicly humiliates them in the chat channel. Yet if there was no demand, there'd be no market, and no gold sellers. On the contrary, gold selling or "real money trading" (RMT) to give it its emasculated, industry name, defined as the real world sale of virtual goods and services produced in online games is now worth an estimated USD 2 billion annually. And that figure is growing. |