The Golden Rule

About four or five years ago, I played with a regular small group of people on a RP-PVP server in World of Warcraft. Despite the constant, soul-rending gankage, I thrilled to log in, because almost always I was instantly invited into that little group and continued our daily adventures together. Questing, dungeon runs, PvP revenge fests, you name it. They quickly became close friends, and it was hard to remember how I even liked the game before I met them.

One night brought all of that freewheeling fun to a screeching halt, however. As our characters fought in deadly combat, we chatted up vent about all sorts of subjects. That night, the topic of gold selling and buying came up. Now this was pre-Burning Crusade, when gold actually meant something, and to have 100 of it meant you were a very wealthy person indeed. I said something disparaging about the gold sellers (who were then only beginning to infiltrate the game in any serious numbers), when one of my friends -- let's call him Mike -- when Mike told me very matter-of-factly that he'd decked out his character with gold purchased from an online vendor, as well as the gear of his wife and the other guy in our group. Suddenly, I was alone in my convictions, and I felt a queasy twist of my stomach as I processed this new info.

Sure, Mike tried to defend his actions, using the now-standard justification of "I don't have lots of time to play, and if paying real money for pretend gold is the way to get the gear I need in order to enjoy the game more, then why not?" It's hard to immediately attack such reasoning, because you really have to deal with virtual property as having worth, and counter an argument that most non-gamers wouldn't even blink at. We live in a capitalistic society, after all: if you want something and have worked for the money to buy it, you should be able to buy it.

But even with his unabashed twisted logic, that was it for me and that group. A little while after, I simply stopped playing WoW for six months, until I came back and restarted the game as a level 1 gnome named Syp. He had no problem bypassing Blizzard's EULA and essentially using his dollars to gain an unfair in-game advantage, whereas I earned everything the hard way, but the morally right way. It was as if you'd discovered that your friend was mainlining heroin, or shoplifting on a regular basis, or plagiarizing on a paper. He might argue it doesn't do anything to hurt you, personally, but it does, because it damages your perception of that person and your relationship with them.

I'm not here to sermonize why gold selling and buying is wrong -- you should know it is, if for no other reason than how far out of the way people have to go to do it. It enables gold spamming in chat channels, which is annoying. It employs farmers to push legit players out of prime gathering locations, effectively cutting content. It imbalances the economy by flooding it with far more cash than would ordinarily be there if people just played the game regularly instead of as a gold-gathering job. It provides an unfair advantage for some to dominate other players with gear they did not earn. And it pushes gold farmers/sellers to even darker depths of illegality: identity and credit card theft, account hacking, keylogging and so on.

Mike didn't think he was hurting anyone, but he was. He was helping to establish demand of an industry that is so abhorrent to most players these days (to the players' credit) that websites and magazines are boycotted if they take money from these companies to advertise their services.

It'd sad and disheartening that here we are, a week into the fun of launch, and we're already being assaulted with gold selling ads in chats and tells. It's of little surprise to me how much the community has championed Mark Jacobs and the Mythic team after their very public denouncing of gold selling and their unique method of dealing with it. And as we cheer the "strike team" on, I think the more realistic of us know that it's partially futile. Necessary, yes, but with no clear path of permanent success.

The problem doesn't lie with the gold selling companies -- they suck, yes, and they're going against the EUALA, yes, but they're providing a service that is in demand. Let's re-read that sentence, okay? They're providing a service that's in demand. If the potential for pay is high enough, shadowy forces will weigh that against the risk and take their chances. The problem lies with Mike, and people like him. People who have no sense of morality or honor in online games. People who go ahead and buy gold to be instantly gratified, and a lesser extent, friends that see them do this and say nothing.

The strike team is going after the gold spammers -- good. But if the demand stays, so will the spammers. It's a fact of human nature. You can try to combat drug use by going after the suppliers, but as long as there is demand at home and nothing is being done to lessen that demand, jerks are going to take the risk to provide what people want.

Addendum and Edit: It's been an interesting past 24 hours on this here blog, particularly in reading responses to this and talking with folks about it.  Obviously, I feel pretty passionate about the subject, in particular that I feel there's a lot of tolerance and sympathy for gold buyers, yet people complain about the gold sellers in the next breath.  But there's passion about a subject and taking it a bit too far, particularly when friendships come into play.  It's not my place to say or advise how you should act in these situations, but just to discuss the situation in question.  I should've posed a question to the community instead of a command, and I've learned from that.  So, I took out the last paragraph, but will let my argument stand and move on.