Quote Originally Posted by Ualaa View Post
I know two friends out of the fifteen or so who play wow, who regularly buy gold.. Their logic is sound, can work for 2 hours a month and supply themselves with a week worth of farming in gold, and its "entertainment" money. If Blizzard were to ban the buyers, instead of just the sellers (ie go after the "Johns"), I wonder how many would continue to buy gold.
There is an easy solution if Blizzard wants to solve really the problem.

1 ) Mandatory authenticators or whatever that makes account hacking very difficult or practically impossible, but still not annoying to the final user.
2 ) Ban all the gold sellers and bot users.
3 ) Blizzard start selling ingame gold as they sell character name changes and realm migrations.
4 ) Make a strict policy like "yuou buy gold from a gold seller... you get banned too... but buying gold from the Blizzard official store is ok"
5 ) Make some way for players that have much gold to redeem that gold for prizes. Expensive pets, free game time, special mounts, etc...

Lots of other games allow you to buy ingame currency directly from the company that suplies the game. They have practically no gold selling problems nor spam. Some even allow you to "buy" game play time with ingame currency. EVE Online is just one example, but there are many others.

From the perspective of a player that has a job and some real life, a couple of hours working to buy ingame currency (fun) is quire more rewarding than farming that same ingame currency into the game spending lots of more time than 2 hours.

When an account gets hacked and sends 5k gold to another account then it's more than obvious that something fishy has been happening. Also there are lots of ways to detect bots usage. Unfortunately, gold sellers are a neeeded evil. If they stop the ways to get ingame currency and make everyone farm his gold, lots of people will leave the game because they will have no will or time to farm all the gold needed to craft the epic items they want in order to have fun raiding or oneshoting helpless squirrels with their rogue.

For all those that say "Nooo, that's bad. Blizzard should not sell ingame currency for real life money", think about ingame pets they sell for real life money. In my book this is exactly the same. the player that has no real life money to buy a fancy drunken panda pet will be aunable to buy ingame gold too, but he will be able to farm it if he needs it.

In conclusion, I think that the mandatory authenticator is not that bad, but they should also fix some other things too.
Personally, if that authenticator doesn't allow me to log with all my toons at once and requires me 5 minutes to login I will just cancel my wow subscriptions. This is just a personal choice because I am that much lazy to wait for authenticator to generate new tokens.