When you’re getting involved with a game like World of Warcraft, the importance of making gold and setting yourself up for success is paramount. Unfortunately, one of the most important things you can do is also one of the most boring at times. Constantly farming and killing monsters or searching for items throughout the countryside are not the most entertaining ways to enjoy your video gaming time. So, many people have taken to producing and selling and others to buying gold as a real world commodity. Unfortunately, it’s not all good times with buying and selling gold offline. There are both real world and game world consequences for doing so.

The Gold Farmers

The gold farmers, as they’re called in the game world, are often working in foreign countries on a full time basis, building up characters and their gold stash for resale on websites and up until recently on eBay. They’ll work 24-hours a day, every day of the week building gold stashes to be resold. Gold farmers can be anyone though and if you’re considering farming or buying farmed gold, the risks are plentiful.

Why Buy Gold?

Buying gold with real world money for a virtual world may seem counterintuitive to most people, but it’s not completely baseless. There are numerous reasons why someone might turn to a website and their credit card to get ahead in game. First off, the entire game is made up of the gathering of items and gold.

There is ridiculously high demand for rare and epic items and no one quite has enough time to build up the bank to buy them. So, with so many players in the game and so much demand for items in a limited space, players can charge as much gold as they want. For those that would rather enjoy the game and not spend their time farming gold, it might seem easier to simply buy 100 gold offline and use it to buy what you need in gold.

The Risks

Blizzard doesn’t like some things in their games. One of the main things they dislike and is highlighted in numerous places throughout their Terms of Service is the real world buying of gold from offline vendors. So, they reserve the right (and often use it) to delete the account of anyone caught doing so. Hours of your life go into building up your account. It has both time and money invested into it and if you get your account deleted, you’re losing a lot of your game life. You’ll need to buy a new one. Not only that, but you’re giving your credit card number away to an unknown entity who will supposedly deliver gold to you in game. Identity theft is a major risk.

Most of all, you’re risking the compromise of the entire game by buying gold from farmers that destroy the economy by overharvesting. Throughout the game world you might notice mass extinction and a dearth of items. This is because of the characters who are only online to build up their gold stash and resell it elsewhere.