In defense of the gold farmers?

Friggingawesome.com has an article written by an author who, strangely enough, advocates buying gold. He first tries to justify the advantage gained by buying gold:

It's unfair for those players who does not have the extra cash to spare or would prefer to play it the old fashion way. But for example, we all know what Nintendo is right? Well when game shark came out did Nintendo try to stop or prevent them from selling? No, they didn't.

Although Nintendo did temporarily shut down the sales of Game Shark's precessor, the Game Genie, let's allow him to refute his own arguments:

But of course, for those who chose to cheat the game was not required to play with others that didn't want to cheat.

Incidentally, this is the same reason why game verification addons were very popular emong FPS gamers before they were integrated into the game engines themselves. Nobody wants to play at a clear disadvantage and lose.

Let's move on to the distruption caused by farmbots stealing all the kills. Let's allow him to describe the problem:

Yes I'm sure we've all experienced that farming now a days have been a little difficult due to the overwhelming population of WoW gold farmers. If gold wasn't able to be sold using real money the farmers wouldn't exist and players would probably be able to enjoy the game more.

Shock and horror, players being able to enjoy the game more? We can't have that.

Perhaps blizzard should enforce a law to farming? Or allow players to tag a mob and allow them preparation time to kill the mob they were targeting? Well, Blizzard is not a government and even if so, the government today isn't perfect either.

Fortunately, we don't have to rely on the big bad government. All you need to do is to contact a helpful player on the opposite faction. Tell him where the farmbot is and he'll take care of it. You'll be able to resume your farming and he'll get some free honor. Win-win. Unfortunately this doesn't work on PvE servers, so you'll just have to tag mobs just before the farmbot attacks them.

Let's move to economic effects, shall we?

Another reason why I can understand players hate the idea of buying/selling gold is because it disrupts the economy. If there is excess gold, then the value of gold drops and the value of the item will rise causing players to spend more gold on the item than what they would normally need to pay. Basic economics 101, inflation and deflation. A player can only farm an X amount of gold over a given period of time. The more gold there is, the more the item will cost, the more a player will have to farm unless they purchase the gold of course.

In other words, goldfarming results in a vicious circle that requires you to keep buying more gold. Surprisingly he doesn't want to refute his own arguments, and instead blames the almighty Blizzard:

Well with all these problems involving selling gold, why hasn't Blizzard done something? I believe they probably are working on a solution but believe it not, farmers do make up about 30% of their population. Somewhere in the back of their mind I'm sure they don't want to get rid of all subscribers. What they do instead is ban a few at a time and they would be required to buy a new world of warcraft cd key. Extra cash flow for the mighty O Blizzard. Yes farmers and sellers do get their accounts banned. But have not heard of any buyers getting banned however. Lucky for us?

While the buyers can be tracked, it might not be worth the trouble. Cutting the gold supply and making goldfarming unprofitable is most likely more effective.

He then moves on the topic of developer-sanctioned gold selling:

The Sony Exchange is a secure market place for players to auction their currencies and items to other players for real cash. In return SOE of course takes in a small fee for themselves. Charming isn't it?

Of course Sony can do whatever they want with their own games. Of course, it might have some consequences:

Believe it or not, but World of Warcraft subscriber base more than quadruples what SOE has in total.

I'm not saying that Blizzard's gold selling policy is the sole reason to WoW's success, but reactions to the Station Exchange weren't exactly favorable.

As you can see SOE is accepting the new trend and making a huge load of profit, I'm sure Blizzard would follow up on the idea as well. EverQuest was the first mmorpg hit ever, Blizzard known for their real time strategy games now has the most popular mmorpg as well. I wouldn't see why they won't follow and collect some of the cash themselves.

How about not wanting to kill the golden goose? Blizzard's competitors are already lining up and promising not to repeat their precedessors' mistakes. While the network effect might provide WoW some protection, customer goodwill can only go so far. Blizzard does need to keep their customer base happy, even if it means passing on some short-term profits.