[GI] 30% of MMO players buy gold

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Not if you are trying to catch up with poeple. I played WoW because some people convinced me to join and play with them. They were all in college with no jobs so I had to buy gold just to keep up with them (which I was never able to do).

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Alot of people do not play these games to be able to spend hour upon hour mining a none-existent resource, as one example. I'm not too sure why game developers bother involving menial, boring tasks for money, as a gameplay feature. That's what most people spend their lives doing, where they can make real money out of it which is more valuable than game time. Why would they want to live their virtual lives like that? If then the real life boring menial job gets them what would cost them 100 hours of their own time 'virtually', in an hour, where they are only after the money to complete quests, pvp etc. then why not?

Gold farmers not only take up space where normal players may want to enjoy there time farming items on a specific mob of sorts and making it harder for average people to obtain these items.

Also when people buy gold it tends to destroy the games internal Economy. Because of this presence of Gold Farmers and poeple who purchase large sums of Gold Online, 9/10 times an item that I might want, will be put up for sale by players for very very high price. Mostly because they know, if someone really wants it they will buy it, even if they have to buy Gold online.. This mentality makes it much mroe difficult for normal players to afford good items.

Luckily, games like Warhammer Online, and Lord of the Rings Online, Incorporate a few things into the game itself making it harder for gold farmers to hurt the internal economy. With many items and gear being "Bind on Equip" or "Bind on Pickup", where it makes it so you cannot use the items, and resell them, or hand me down twink toons. Both of these games are also have reletively less "grinding" sessions in order to find good items. On average, high level players, have more Gold in game than they can actually spend with very few items that anyone would even need to buy.

High level Armor Set pieces generally have only 1 piece of the gear that is Purchasable from other players, the rest you have to work for with either Keep sieges, Public Quests and world boss kills(Warhammer). These actions are non time consuming, but may require more than a few tries befor eyou get what you want =)

Overall, i think Gold Farmers are bad, the idea of a company paying people to Bot and Farm items / Gold all day is rediculous, and does nothing but hurt the normal players in the game. DAOC was somewhat crazy with this as you would see new players with Decked out Player made gear and would make RvR element unfair.

Warhammer FTW! Because I gain more than enough gold for anythign I have ever wanted to do, or buy.

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You can't do better than estimates because Gold Buying is like Crack Buying. You can't just start polling people and asking if they smoke crack, they're going to lie to you and say no. MMO companies want to artificially buff up the numbers to make it look like they're suffering huge losses from gold buying, and the gold buying sites want to minimize the numbers so it looks like you can't make any money running a Gold Selling business. Much like the crack industry, the gold industry is simply filled with nothing but liars.

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This. There would be no need to farm as much if the economy set itself the proper way. It is self-perpetuating. the more farmers there are, the worse (or better, depending on your pov) the in-game economy becomes. You wouldn't need to spend as much time farming/saving if the items you wanted were not priced so high due to the ease of getting gold.

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QFT.

BoP and having the best gear earned and not farmed is the best way to combat this IMO, not RMT.

If the MMO companies enable you to buy everything with real money it would create different classes of players in the game. Those that have the money to buy the best gear, and those who can't afford it.
This is not the answer.

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This

So many people freak out over someone buying in game currency. They accuse you of having no life and wasting real money on something you get in a game. Well you can spend an hour in game and earn 1,000 gold, or you could put in an extra hour at work and earn like 10,000 gold. Just an example, but you get my point. Farming isn't fun, working isn't fun, but guess which one takes longer

And in most games it's not like you can actually buy uber gear with real money. Take WoW for example, the best gear is gotten in game, and only you can get this gear through raiding or PvP or what have you. Sure, you can buy generic bind on equip gear from a company, or buy currency to buy said gear in game, but the best gear isn't gotten this way.

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I find that hard to believe... you aren't going to catch up to them just by buying gold. The only thing you'd get out of that is faster mounts and maybe some crafted gear, but I imagine their main advantage was gear from instances. That takes time, not money.

I sold xbox gamerscore (by cheating for it) and made £2500 in 5 months doing 1 hour a day.

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False. If there were no gold farmers, there would still be players that log 60+ hours into the game to raise their character's status above those around them. At the very best, removing gold farmers would delay the inevitable. Like the above poster said, if somebody works to make real money, there is no reason for them not to spend it on something they enjoy doing. A lot of games address this issue by making the very best items bind on pickup which makes sense because if you could actually buy anything in the game there would be no point and no challenge.

Buying mundane items like medium-strength weapons and armor, mounts, toys, or whatever else adds to the enjoyment of the game should be allowed. If someone wants to grind the same mobs over and over again than that is their prerogative, but that gameplay is not fun for everyone.

Ive paid for people to level characters for me in WoW because i do not enjoy grinding in the same world, doing the same quests, killing the same creatures over and over again. If anything, i think it is the fault of the game developers for creating a broken environment in which players cannot have fun the way they want to.

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I too find the same statement not to be true. Because to catch up, you still have to lvl up your character, and that takes time, not gold. Not only that, are you really saying that your friends who may be a lvl 60, 70, or even 80 are not willing to shell out some gold or some armor/weapon drops they find? Not very courteous...

As for allowing gold to be bought with money, I too feel that it going to allow people who can afford it, buy alot, and those who can't will work for it. But it really isn't necessary. Buy the best gear when you're at level ten, but when you're twenty, it's worthless... buy something else? Should be finding good items dropping while you're leveling up.

As for farming/buying the best item in the game is a waste of time/money. You get no rewards out of it and it doesn't change your style of playing.

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And not all of us have 10 hours a day to level so many stats up and make so much gold.

Some just want to chip in a few hundred and have some fun, albeit not a really good idea. But hay, there are those out there who spend a lot on jewelery, many times more than anything these players can spend on MMOs.