Real Cash for Game Cash

An article from the Philadelphia Inquirer recently explored the issue of people spending money in order to purchase gold in World of Warcraft. Most of this gold comes from companies based in China using cheap labor and in game exploits to farm large amount of gold and items.

The main benefit to purchasing fake gold with real money is that it lessens the amount of time players have to spend gaining money. For $60 a player could by 500 gold pieces, which would probably take them a couple weeks to get on their own. This time can be spent doing less tedious actions and having more fun. Items and accounts are also for sale on the IGE website, which makes the amount of time spent on getting the best items cut drastically.

A major flaw in purchasing fake gold is that part of the fun of the games is getting to the higher levels on the player's time spent. Being able to purchase anything makes it easy to get into groups or guilds because of having super items. This is a problem for guilds with players using purchased accounts because the player might not know fully how the game operates. The most striking flaw is the amount of inflation that will occur because of this system. Because very large amounts of gold are being sold and entering the system, with very few outlets for the money, prices will rise dramatically over short periods of time, causing the entire economy to be hurt.

With all things considered, purchasing gold is a part of online gaming that will be impossible to remove and in game economies will have to find ways to adjust to the rapid item and monetary inflation.