As in world economic history, inflation was the easy villain, and the Red Gold Menace was generally agreed upon by the loud, angry, failed-virtual tycoon class as the cause.Ĭhinese farmers were not only hunted by Blizzard, third party gold sales being banned under the Terms of Service, but by players. It was never made clear what exactly sucked about it, aside from the fact that it was a pain in the butt to make enough money to buy skills and gear up for raiding. I never played on a server where the server economy didn’t suck according to the people who played there whether new or well established, highly populated or virtual wasteland. In an odd precursor to the kind of received wisdom surrounding the Great Recession, inflation was the oft-cited reason the “server economy sucked”. Figuring out who was a gold farmer, and discussion over whether (and if so, exactly how) they were ruining the game, was parlour chatter in guilds across the game, from server to server. When I started playing World of Warcraft in 2004, it was the heyday of the Chinese gold farmer.

Questioning the “Red Gold Menace” theory of WoW economics