The effect of gold farming

In December 2006 an important event happened to me when my older brother insisted that I open my Christmas present early and discovered that he'd bought me a copy of World of Warcraft and a game membership card.

In a couple of hours the game was installed on our computers and we were frolicking around Northshire Abbey slaughtering, and getting slaughtered ourselves, by the various locals and native fauna. There was just one fly in the ointment which stopped this from being a totally fun experience, when a gold farmer whispered to me about a site which offered cheap WoW gold.

Over the next couple of months both of us were bombarded with advertisements for gold farmers every single time we logged on luckily though we only had to wait until midway through 2007 for various companies to get their act together.

eBay started off by banning the sale of virtual in-game items while Blizzard not only released a patch in May that allowed players to report spam, such as gold farmer ads, but also filed a federal lawsuit against one of the gold farmers for the prolific spamming of the players. A number of World of Warcraft players had also joined in by June 2007 when they hired a Florida law firm to sue IGE, one of the biggest gold farming companies around, a case which is still going on today.

I play World of Warcraft because it's fun and, among other things, allows me to build the sorts of things with my engineering skill which would probably result in the police knocking on my door if I tried making them in real life; furthermore I wanted to be bombarded by mindless advertising then I'd switch off the computer and turn on the TV instead.

With that in mind it comforted me when fellow Screen Player Darryn told me Mythic Entertainment wouldn't tolerate that behavior on Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning and Mark Jacobs, the company president, confirmed this in a blog post on September 21 particularly when he wrote and I quote "I HATE GOLD SELLERS WITH EVERY FIBER OF MY BEING." They're even keeping a tally of the amount of gold sellers banned on their website which, at the time of writing this, currently numbered at 5,285.

There is an even more insidious side about gold farming though because once virtual trade, such as leveling, gold or rare items in Warcraft, gets tied in with real world money then how long will it be before the ATO steps in to charge you X amount of real dollars for that Sword of +1 Awesomeness you picked up at the auction house in Undercity?

And before anybody asks yes that is a real possibility because at the start of 2007 an ATO spokeswoman confirmed this with The Age and even hinted that the normal virtual trade that goes on in online games might also be taxable as well.

What is your opinion on gold farming and what do you think of the possibility that you might end up being taxed for a virtual item which you bought in-game?