Purchasing Gold Screws up a Server's Economy

By Hailey Krebel


World of Warcraft economies routinely have gold being generated and destroyed. Gold is generated by looting this from mobs and vendoring items, destroyed by repairing equipment, buying items from vendors, and auction house fees. One could also argue that gold is actually destroyed by being held on to by characters who don't use it -- my death knight, who I haven't played in over a year features a couple hundred gold on him. Although that gold still exists, it's not doing anything and likely never will.

Anyways, if you're thinking of purchasing gold, please read this guide. If you know someone who is thinking of buying gold, feel free to refer them here as well. There was a time that the gold which was sold came from warehouses full of people in the third world playing Wow for inhuman amounts of time, but those days are over.

By flooding a server's economy with cheap gold, gold farmers drive the prices on the auction house way up. This works on their behalf--they want high prices as it means you'll be more likely to buy Wow gold instead of farm it yourself. Throughout us, though, it sucks.

If you've been playing World of Warcraft for any period of time, you've almost certainly obtained gold spam. It may have been in trade chat, an in game mail, or a whisper from a level 1 character with a random name. You have have seen corpses arranged outside an auction house spelling out a gold sellers domain, or for a brief period you may have even gotten an invite from a random level 1 character who then proceeded to spam /raid with broken engrish about how they have best price offer number one.

Gold, of course, did not get prohibitively expensive--if it did, no one would be asking if it's a good idea to buy it. What happened is that the farmers became hackers. They would use keyloggers, phishing attempts, and any other means that would work to get people's passwords. Once they had the password, they'd quickly sell everything in the character's inventory and deliver the gold to paying customers.




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