At one time in the history of MMOs, gold and item promoting was a quaint notion. We had not yet been introduced to a planet of horse armor and new mission DLC. This was a young planet, a planet that was still putting out its feelers about what was good and acceptable and what was dangerous and asking too much of people. A monthly fee was a new concept to a video game, at least towards the average player, along with the idea that you could pay real money for advancement in a persistent World was even much more foreign.

Gold promoting in World of Warcraft began as quaintly as it could have. Farmers would grind and fight, taking over the finest spots in places like Tyr's Hand or those elves in Azshara and making money the old-fashioned way, the same way we players did. That gold was then sold to players on what seemed to be an open market. It was shady but shallow, only running as deep as the farmers, the gold they made, along with the company that hired them.

Over time, however, the unfortunate drawback to Blizzard's rightful actions against gold sellers had turned this seemingly cut-and-dry industry into one of consequences, theft, and illegality. When Blizzard began to ban thousands of accounts for gold selling, these sellers bought a lot more accounts and hid, still completing their transactions. When Blizzard hunted them down, they moved inwards to dungeons and instances, making tweaks towards the WoW client to fool the server into thinking they were in another position, easily hacking chests in said dungeons. When Blizzard removed chests from dungeons, the gold sellers began to troll the auction houses in the servers, playing a gold game unlike anything anyone had seen before. Before long, it became far more profitable to steal gold than to farm it, from the very players who bought it.

Gold selling has become WOW Gold hacking in World of Warcraft. Many other MMOs do not have this problem because they either sell their own items and currency, making it just plain not profitable to sell gold, or they don't have the issues of scale that WoW does. Either way, WoW's gold selling issue is a problem of a scale never before seen in a virtual world before, and something -- nay, everything -- needs to change. Blizzard's reputation, as well as the safety of its consumers, is at stake.