Time for MMO companies to collaborate against RMT/gold-selling (for Anet!)

Agreed, I'd be in support of having 2 separate server farms which I can't traverse, one allowing RTM, one not. Shouldn't even be that hard to implement.
I just feel it's the quickest and most cost effective way to kill off the whole blackmarket gold trade in GW or GW2. Anything to stop those annoying PMs

First: It is NOT illigal to sell game gold, it is against the EULA, so the law enforcment can not get involved. However, IRS(or each countrys equvilant) can go after the organized gold selling companys.(not enough money for them to collect compared to cost)

Second: Any player based moderation system is going to fail because of the same kind of people/players we want to have banned will manage to get them selfs appointed sooner or later and all it takes is one (1) person doing a mass ban just because it's fun (and all he/she will lose on it is an account).

I'd wager that it's more of a question of "Would such a system work for the overall benefit of Guild Wars, not just as a company, but for the majority of the community?".

It's a fair statement to make that what works for one game, or game company, might not work well in another. Different systems of trade, supply of xItem, and demands would factor in.

The question I would ask, which I hope isn't too silly because I've not been a part of Station; Does their system rid the games of the spamming and botting, which is really one of the core issues and concerns here in Guild Wars? If I was an RMT'er who did business in Guild Wars, which I'm NOT, but if I was, I would simply change my prices to compete against the legit services and continuing with spamming as many users as my many bots can.

I think RMT needs to go out the window. The only way to stop RMT is like in RUNESCAPE, where everything has set prices. If this happened in Guild Wars that would also mean no more mules and storage accounts. It would also mean no ripping people off though, which is good, I guess. It would really hurt all the "merchanters" though. But since this is a game and no real life, I think it's alright. That would also mean the only way to get rich is through playing the game like you're suppose to, which is also a good thing.

It would never fly. Too many people enjoy, at least occasionally, the capitalist aspect of these sorts of games. I include myself. The earliest I remember truly being "into" Guild Wars involved standing in Pre-Searing selling iron and wood (salvaged from the ubiquitous 1g items) to people.

Unlikely. If you pick your moderators carefully you'll tend to wind up with people who are at least marginally responsible and well-adjusted. They may or may not be jerks, but, generally, they will at least have a neutral sense of duty and, even if they're very vocal about it, will set aside personal differences in order to maintain the integrity of the system as a whole. They may become fed up with what they perceive as "hand-tying" or favoritism, but, generally, you'll just see them (sometimes very vocally) renounce their moderation status rather than act out some sort of retribution.

Player based moderation wont fail if it's done right.
Let me think a min... hmmmm
OK.
A volunteer (not everyone, you need an inscription) can ban a gold spammer a day. No more. Thats enought, since there are maybe 20 or 50 volunteers on gw.
2nd. At the end of the day, an Anet employee quickly have a look on server logs (they do it anyway right ?). Hes job is fastest, he just have to clic on the ban button, while reading the log (**pay attention to www.xxxxx.com**)

Volunteers will have the ability to ban for a day, immediatly. One bot only. So, they just cant do any serious dmg.

This will fail ? I really dont think so. I trust people, maybe I shouldnt...

QFT! Anet should be selling them <_<

Then there is no need for in game moderation. We need moderation because some people can not be trusted to do the right thing, and in the next sentence you say that you trust the same players to moderate the game?????

While rhetorically appealing, this is dead wrong. People only buy gold because it is cheap enough that they can get an amount that yields a substantial in-game benefit for a trivial portion of their disposable assets. If gold prices rose above such "pocket change" levels, demand for it would plummet. Certainly there would be a few wealthy people who would still like to buy, but there would not be a big enough clientèle to support an organized gold-selling business.

In short, imagine what would happen if a-net were able to impose barriers that raised the cost of gold to $100 per 1k, and you can see why the claim that "as long as there is people who will buy the gold..." is false.

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@ Legalization.

It's a very bad idea. You get the same inflation as with the illegal version, only it's worse because it draws in new gold-buyers because it's cheaper and risk-of-ban-free.

Thanks to max-stat collectors' items, at least GW wouldn't end up like other games where there's a serious power differential between those cough up cash for in-game benefits and those who don't:

(I think Bilateralope summed it up pretty well, but Penny Arcade is funnier.)

You are failing to count the cost of ruining their own in-game economy to do it.

-----

Indeed it is. It is a very good analogy and I'm frankly disturbed by some of the posts bashing it. When people fail to "get" an analogy that straightforward, I feel very bad about the quality of the education in logical reasoning available today...

This is absolutely correct.

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It certainly does. A-net would stand to make money by pushing the gold-sellers right to the brink of unprofitability by banning their bots and cashing in every time the gold-sellers bought a new account to replaced a banned one.
The questions are: (1) Could a-net make more money than they could in the above manner by eliminating the gold-sellers altogether and promoting a gold-seller-free game that drew in more legitimate customers? (2) Does a-net, out of principle or animus towards the gold-sellers, want to eliminate them even if symbiotic relationship would be more profitable?

---------

In which case a WoW-style informational campaign would be a good idea.

1. Your point about the EULA not being a law is correct; gold-selling qua EULA-vioaltion is "unlawful" not "illegal," and results only in a-net having a right to sue violators. (Even in jurisdictions where the EULA does not hold, there tends to be an underlying IP right that's getting violated and establishes a similar basis for a suit.)
2. Depending on a given jurisdiction's conceptions of intellectual property, gold-selling may qualify as plain old theft, and be criminally punishable.
3. Depending on how loosely drafted a given jurisdiction's computer crimes laws are, gold-selling may be criminally punishable as "hacking." (I consider this bad legal drafting, since it's not hacking by any common-sense definition and clearly not what was intended when such laws were written, but the result is the same regardless of my opinion on it.)

Oh how I would want there to be no RMT! But alas, now that its here, it's here to stay.
So what to do now? Legalizing it I think is the only viable solution.

Here's what would happen. ANet will delete every bot (I'm pretty sure they have a good idea on who all the bots are), and begin selling 100k at USD 7. Then the economy would go crazy for about a month with people wanting to buy stuff w/ their 100k, but it would finally settle down, probably with some items plunging in value a bit. Then, slowly but surely, people would stop buying gold at all. I would compare this to alcohol laws in the US and Europe. 16-Year-Olds in Europe are responsible when they drink because the element of "illegal"-ness that teens feel in the US when they drink is missing. Same with weed legalization in the Netherlands. Legalization eventually teaches responsibilty, but that takes time. Time that GW doesn't have, so I don't support ANet selling gold in GW1 because it is too late.

So what about GW2? Now that ANet knows that RMT's will be a problem, they will anticipate a solution that will knock our socks off: either something that will prevent RMTs from being started, or legalization. I'd prefer the former, but the latter will be fine too.

Wow, seems to me like it another blame why the economy is f'ed in guildwars thread.
To be honest, I believe gold selling seem to be the least impact of the economy, because the gold is actually being farmed, not magically appearing or disappearing. I think the real economy breaker is the combination of two events, Loot-scaling and the crappy handling of the duping fiasco. Loot scaling has caused the deflation of 90% of the games market. I read many time in this thread that gold selling causes inflation, but the market has clearly deflated. Now what has really inflated in price in this game, it is the high end market. And when did this happen, when the duping was happening. And many people were willing to trade their rare items for rediculous amount of armbraces without a thought in the world. Because A-net didn't roll back these trades, we have the highend market we have today. Ursan is the perfect remedy for this, it is causing the crash of this item, and the sooner it does it the better.
So now we have our current economy, nothing sell for much in the low end, but the high end just grows higher and higher. The poor are gettign poorer and the rich are gettign richer.

First of all, you're patently wrong about the high end market. When Sorrow's Furnace came out greens from it were being sold for egregiously high prices. When Factions came out, greens from it were being sold for egregiously high prices. When Nightfall came out.... you get the picture. The high end economy has always been insanely overpriced. It was no different before loot scaling even without greens because farmers constantly exploited AI weaknesses and collected enormous amounts of merch fodder to shore up their storage. Many of the people that are still wealthy are wealthy from these early days when farming two or three SF greens meant you had your ecto slot half filled (well... there was no material storage then, but that's beside the point) and you were a third of the way to maxing your gold storage.

In fact, if you think the market's bad now - at one time there was a regular COLLECTOR stance shield from Crystal Desert that commonly sold for 40k-50k easily in Lion's Arch.

Furthermore, most of the things you actually can use are much, MUCH more affordable now. Superior Vigors are at less than 1/5 of what they were at one time. Black dyes are down and so are ectos.

Finally, as I previously mentioned, if you want to see what happens to a game that has a rampant problem with goldbots, check out Lord of the Rings. On many servers, prices are so hyper-inflated by the unchecked RMTs (Turbine keeps promising to do something, but for months hasn't) that many players can't even afford to keep their avatars equipped at a level appropriate for their current quest needs. And it's certainly not a rarity issue, because the same items are constantly listed - sometimes they don't even sell - they're just listed at ridiculous prices.

I've SEEN what happens when a company doesn't fix gold botting problems. I have yet to see any serious consequences related to loot scaling, save the isolated problems it caused for a tiny minority of very dedicated farmers.

The only good thing about Hellgate London is that it's very existance seems to provide a ceaseless trove of examples of how NOT to do basically anything you conceivably COULD do in a game.

Seriously... I was in beta so maybe it's better now, but I'm thinking that if you're art department's contribution is going to cause enough clipping issues that every freaking map can trap you in a dozen different places, you could at least implement a /stuck command... or at the least not require the entire game to be shutdown and reloaded to get unstuck o_0

These "barriers" are too hypothetical. How on earth should this work without ruining the game for players as well.

If 1000 Gold would cost $100:
- It must be extremely hard to get gold ingame.
- prices would reflect that. Stuff would cost less, as people would have less money. And 1000 Gold would be worth a lot.
- gold sellers would probably be in paradise. Just one bot would net them extreme income.


The inflation thing is also something you have to prove. It does not exist, WoW would be DOWN if gold selling would cause massive inflation. World of Warcraft has extreme gold-selling and farming.

I reported a farming bot, after 3 days the guy was still running in circles in Un'Goro crater. After the fourth report to three different GMs. He might be still running around there. And this was not the only bot. You can even see bots washing money by dropping stuff for other bots to pick up and similar things.

Blizzard is making good PR by fighting gold sellers, but which of the many gold sellers becaome their first target? One of the most notorious gold spammers, that really spam permanently all channels, pm people and so on.


I would welcome a world without gold selling.
Still people have not found a way to combat gold sellers or make people buy less gold.
But WoW has a nice way to restrict the impact on the economy, some things (epic gear) must be earned through fighting and questing, and no gold seller bot can help you with that. And even for that arena grinder services for fame exist. At least for pvp gear. Now tell me people are not bad as hell!

While I have no idea how the EQ system works, I'm guessing that the gold sinks counter the inflation from the gold farmers. Though I wonder how the sinks are designed so that they don't hit the players who don't buy gold too hard.
So instead of grinding in whichever farming spot you enjoy most, you have to grind one specific area over and over ?
I don't like a bind on pickup system unless the drop is guaranteed for each player who can use it the first time they do that run.
This solution to the RMT problem kills of player to player trading for items that players would actually want, along with preventing players being kind to each other by giving away items they don't need.

Drunkard and Sweet tooth aren't really a problem because they pull gold out of the economy (reducing inflation). The worst case is if a player buys/farms gold then trades with other players for the items, because that gold is left in the economy. However wouldn't most gold buyers be wanting to get the title quicker, meaning they buy directly from NPCs (leaving a net inflation of 0) ?
For the non-farmers these titles provide a gold sink. So they aren't a problem.

However Party Animal requires player to player trading, meaning the bought gold is left floating around to cause inflation.


Which articles mention the kick-backs ?
So NPC's selling unlimited amounts of every item at set prices ? (maybe with a condition that must be met before they sell the item, like a title)

The only problem I can see here is that it would kill player to player trading. But given that every item would still be available to everyone (either farm or but the gold), I can't see the harm there as long as the trading system is left in so people can be kind to each other.

This system would still have the gold sellers spamming and using more resources (bandwidth, server load and moderating) than the average player. But to prevent this ANET just needs to sell gold at a price lower than the gold sellers do, forcing them out of business.
Can you provide links to any of these "unbiased" articles ?
Just report them for spamming, then ANET will check the logs and hit them for the spamming and the gold selling.

CTB posted some more about it some postings earlier in this thread.

You would like a guaranteed green every time from a dungeon chest, too?
We already have the dungeon chests, and they only sometimes guarantee an onyx or lockpick, but never a green item.

I deem it much better gameplay and more of an achievement and enjoyable to "grind" a whole dungeon over and over than to grind a farmspot and buy the item. Which would bring GOLD you can buy into the equation.

Your assumption is this "inflation" you fear. People buy all the things you mentioned cheaper from players, but I will agree on your point and say it does not cause inflation. I say this inflation would not exist anyways, though.

Some people might post reports of LOTRO, the only game that really suffers from massive inflation, as Ctb reported. I would like to know how the LOTRO economy is that this can happen. I do not play it, so I won't talk more about it.

Back to GW, this does not make this kind of gold buying better. It takes away from the grind achievement if you can buy titles. Gold buying has influence on them. It makes them even "cheaper" and even sillier than such grind titles are anyways.


The idea behind bind on pickup restrictions and removing gold based titles are that gold gets less meaningful. If you cannot get things by gold, but only by your personal effort, gold selling is no problem anymore.

As far as the WoW campaign is concerned, I don't think I'd care about ruining the game for other people if it got to the point where I wanted to buy gold.

For a suggestion, just get rid of gold trading all together. Gold would be used on NPC's only. Kinda something like D2. Gold is essentially worthless, but needed to buy essentials such as potions and scrolls. Only items could be traded between players.

True, an item would arise to take the place of gold (the soj/runes in d2, ecto in GW), but it would slow down the process considerably, as farming items is much more time consuming than farming gold.

So your saying then in short. That if it cost $100 to buy 1k and people were willing to pay that then nobody would sell it to them?

I say again, as long as people are willing to buy it, and by willing to buy it they are willing to pay the requested amount (otherwise they wouldn't be willing to buy it would they...) then somebody will sell it to them. Sure, selling gold at that amount would greatly reduce the amount of people willing to buy it. However if somebody still was willing to pay that much money for 1k then somebody would be ready to sell it to them.

You also could not use laws to stop Gold Sellers. Say it was made Law in the USA that selling gold for real money inside of games was illegal. How would that affect the person selling it in China? It wouldn't. The only real option for A Net if they want to stop other people making money off of their game, is simple. Sell the gold them selves from the in game store at a much lower rate than the gold sellers can do it while making a profit or even breaking even. They would then no longer have the ability to compete in the market and would be gone.

problem is prices are dropping not rising. I.E. armbrace is now down to 100k+15e so your inflation theory can't be true ;P

I really dont care because I used to play Runescape for 5 years and they killed their own pvp trying to get rid of it causing I believe it was 6% of the population to quit membership. I would preffer it gone but just dont F up your own game doing it. Then again everyone is smarter than Jagex (maker of runescape.)

i used to casually farm when i needed cash, but loot-scaling put a stop to that. i can certainly see why people buy gold.

all politics and analogies and "sensible" arguments aside, i'd like to see Anet sell gold in the in-game store. why? GW's economy is farked beyond repair, and i think its because there is no easy way to sell items in-game (ie. auction house). unless something is extremely rare (therefore coveted and quick to sell), its often not worth your time to spend hours spamming in the big cities to make a measly plat or two. i'd like to spend my limited time playing the game - not playing saleswoman.

hell, when my patient guildies need money, i give them a ton of loot to go sell for me and i split the profits with them, because i can't be asked to stand around and spam. its friggin boring and frustrating.

and hey, lots of people just want stuff and they want it now, regardless of whether or not they have "earned" the "right" to have said stuff. those willing to pay will always find a way. a legitimate means to do so would be nice. i'm sure people would rather give their money to Anet than some random chinese farmbot that may or may not even deliver your gold and/or steal your account/credit card number.

I've seen to many cases of game policing in the past. It sounds great, and even works for a short period of time, but dies in the ass too fast. Where there is power, there is corruption, it's human nature. The only way they (A.Net) could ensure a safe environment for all, is to employ people to monitor each server (making this their sole purpose)

Well, it was a hypothetical after all, so what do you expect?
But seriously though, the sort of barriers that raise gold-seller prices without affecting legit players are barriers that raise the gold-sellers' overhead -- better bot detection and banning, better anti-farm/loot scaling scheme, better gold spam blocking and banning, and perhaps better legal action (if not against gold sellers directly, then against the US domain name registrars and online-payment services that enable their business).

You answer your own question:
At that price level, there would not be enough customers to support an organized business like we have now. You'd sell 50k for $5000 one week, then not make another penny for a month because customers would be too rare. You couldn't keep the lights on. There might still be individuals who occasionally sold a high-value account on e-bay when they quit, but organized gold-selling would be dead.

This is kinda like asking me to prove gravity. You increase the money supply, you increase inflation -- simple as that. The change in money supply over a given period is always going to equal the summation across all accounts of the gold generated from monster-killing minus the gold sunk at NPCs for that period. "Legit" players, particularly farmers, tend to cause a bit of inflation, because they generate more than they sink, but we forgive them for it because they are "playing the game the way it's meant to be played." Bots and sweatshop farmers cause much more inflation per capita than legit players (even hardcore farmers) because they generate much more gold than a normal player and sink pretty much none of it. A-net conjuring gold out of thin air would have the same effect -- only worse because gold would probably be generated even faster than bots generate it now.

Another way to "prove" inflation is to point to you some current item prices. No matter how hardcore a farmer you are, presuming that you don't bot or buy gold yourself, and that you've never gotten a windfall by selling something to someone who did, I doubt you're in a position to be buying those 100k+Xecto/armbrace items. And no one else is either. The only way anyone ever got the kind of money to offer 100k+Xecto/armbrace for anything was from the gold sellers -- either directly by purchasing gold, or indirectly by selling something to someone who had purchased gold and was able to pay an inflated price because of it. Without the gold-sellers, nothing would be up i nthe 100k+Xecto/armbrace price range simply because no one could afford it.

The falling price of armbraces is a red herring. Other factors aside from gold-seller-induced inflation are acting on the price of armbraces -- most notably the fact that there's still so many duped armbraces out there that armbraces probably outnumber bog skale fins.

And you are assuming that it would lead to ruination of the IG economy. It very well could, if it was implemented badly. If you're talking about selling IG currency, the arguments posed here have brought me round to thinking that's a bad idea, as it could to easily destroy the economy.

However, I've since proposed an alternative whereby items are sold in the IG store for RL money. The items are customized, they can't be traded in game. Only a small percentage of players would choose to use the store for items, and all items would still be available from existing sources. How could that ruin the existing economy? By reducing the number of IG trades that are items for gold? We're talking about a minority of people who would effectively be removed from the IG economy.

The additional funds generated could be used to better the customer service and bug fixing. It's almost 4 months since the problem with the scrying pool was discovered...

The best way to keep RMTs to a minimum is to keep offering max equipment via collectors and as very affordable options from readily accessible merchants. When the time required to get max stuff goes beyond what your casual player would consider convenient, then RMTs become attractive.

I don't think you can truly quash RMTs outright - only reduce the demand for them.

I dunno if anyone brought this up, but:

What about the taxes involved in RMT? I mean if i sit on my comp all day, farm with a few other people, and sell those things over the game for cash (not through an online site or anything, just straight up P2P) isn't that considered a source of income?

Just a thought...

quit wondering pls, we don't need anymore stupid ideas thank you.




that makes no sense whatsoever, it's like saying "lets sell hacks, if you have $150 you can use the gm only skill "Bammph for an instant kill"

stupid stupid stupid

Whoever supports 'credit card wars' has put little serious/rational thought into their argument.

I saw we raise the penalty for selling AND buying to a real live death penalty.

Send me some addresses, devs, and i'll buy a gun.




Official disclaimer: This post may not be used against me in court, but I ALMOST mean what I said.

Only if the only way to get the item is be doing that grind.
And all of these items are tradable, so I don't care that they aren't guaranteed drops.
Doing an area to a certain standard the first time is an achievement. Repeating it to the point of bordem because the random number generator didn't throw the result you wanted the first time isn't.
I don't like bind on pickup, because all it does is limit the actions a player can chose between to get the item they want. So it makes the grind worse

And I'm guessing that a lot of the gold buyers are people who don't like the grind, so they buy gold to avoid it. I can't fault someone for avoiding the parts of the game they don't enjoy if their don't make things worse for other players, which is why I'd like to see a system that removes the problems from the gold selling groups (spam and inflation) without increasing the grind.

My assumption was that the gold buyers would buy from NPC's because it's quicker and they have enough gold so they don't care about the increased price.
Even without the gold sellers, inflation would always exist. The gold sellers make it worse, along with bringing in lots of spam.

I find grind titles pretty silly as a whole. In fact when I look at grind, I see a way for game developers to increase the time people spend playing a game without putting in much effort.

How many real economies measure inflation by just looking at the prices of one item ?

How many of those economies pick an item that most people only buy a few times before never buying a new one ?

We generate gold from an unlimited pool, the only limiting factor is the time. This is not a real world economy (!), and even there your view how inflation works is not wrong, but very basic/shallow.

World of Warcraft must be in ruins because of gold sellers, the prices inflated like hell. But it did not happen.

Same for GW. We have dropping prices, everything loses value. Not only armbraces, which is caused by ursan groups and everyone and his brother making farm runs there. In fact such things, and the 55 HP monk, changed the economy more than gold selling ever did.

ANet cannot give you 1000 Platinum for 1 Dollar. This would make gold worthless.

1.) They would have to take their own economy in account, the time factor needed to get the ingame gold.
2.) Be competitive with gold sellers

Gold sellers would still exist if they are considerably cheaper than ANet gold. If they are not so much cheaper, people would not risk their account or wait for a delivery and all that. They would go to the store, boom, get money legally.


Money selling would work in GW1, but I do not really want it. They could leave it as it is and fight gold sellers and their customers once they get them, as they already do. The impact does not seem to be considerable, given the excessive gold spamming by always the same bot over days if not weeks. Or they join the gold seller market and cash in.

I wonder how much money ANet could have generated, maybe enough to make GW:EN a bit more than scraps of upcoming chapters pieced together.

Bottom line:
I hope for a system in GW2, I mentioned some examples in my discussion with bilateralrope, that makes gold less important. Really good stuff must be earned, not bought, is my idea behind it.

BoP, Token systems, quest/pre-quest requirements and stuff like that. You would not be able to buy everything.

Take a look at WoW, it works, despite being the biggest gold seller market known to westerners.

Makes as much sense as you do. Nobody would pay 150 dollars to kill you, maybe you are the extra stupid one here.

Actually, if you had bothered to read the thread, you'd see that there are ways in which this can be done with little to no impact on the IG economy and effectively shutting down the goldsellers. Also, no one is seriously considering that Anet should sell gold anymore. We're discussing other forms of RTM and no one is suggesting that RM buyers should have access to buy uber-skills or weapons or armors.


Uh, actually serious and rational thought for a lot of pages back there. Just because you don't agree, don't insult people buy emo-dismissing their arguments without actually addressing them.

WoW's economy isn't affected TOO MUCH by gold sellers, not because gold sellers don't affect in-game economy (like how you tried to conclude), but because THE WAY THINGS WORK IN WOW.

People buy gold in WoW mostly to get the epic mount training; a big money sink in WoW. Gold people get from gold sellers doesn't even enter the market; it comes into people's inventory and goes right out of the game through the money sink.

And even though some people use the money they've bought for some equipments in WoW, those equipments are mostly a one-way trade; you buy them, you lose the money with no way to get it back due to the fact that most equipments in WoW bind to you when used. The equipments go out of the market and don't have any monetary value left in them the moment they're used.

Compare that to GW; you buy a crystalline sword of whatever for 100k, you use it for years and then you can still sell THE SWORD to someone else with more or less the same price you paid to get it. The gold never really leaves you but only changes into a sword with its value in gold still intact (more or less).

I can't really make it any more clearer due to the limitation of my English language skill. But I hope some of you get my point and can explain it better. I'd really appreciate.

Cacheelma, we could make all weapons BIND ON EQUIP. Basically, if you use them, you can no longer trade them.

Would butthurt some people who never customize their weapons. ^^

Apparently I failed in simplifying my point without losing it. Let me try again:

Inflation over period, P, is proportional to Delta(Money Supply) over P. Delta(Money Supply) over P equals the rate that gold is generated at over P minus the rate that gold is permanently sunk out through NPC's over P. We care little about the absolute size of Money Supply, and nothing at all about where Money Supply comes from; what we do care about is the balance between these two rates.

Or, in short: The speed with which gold is generated is what matters.

If the designers balance their drop rates and gold sinks properly, "legit" players aren't a problem because, in the aggregate, they generate and sink gold at roughly the same rate.

Gold-sellers are a problem because they generate gold a faster rate than "legit" players, and don't sink at all. They're putting excess gold into the system that wouldn't otherwise be there, and that's going to have an inflationary effect.
(This can be dampened if the gold-buyers sink the gold instead of using it to buy things from other players, however they still increase the money supply by the amount that the gold-buyer generated during P and would have otherwise spent on the sink (eventually) and now has available for buying things from other players. The dampening effect arises out of the assumption that the gold-buyer generates gold slower than the gold -seller.)

Having a-net create gold out of thin air is going to have the same sort of effect -- the rate of gold generation gets increased while the rate of gold sinking stays constant. But it's going to be worse because it's going to have to be faster than the gold-sellers if they want to make it cheaper than the gold-sellers.
(The idea of counting your gold purchases against your drop rate so that your long-term gold generation rate doesn't change would work in theory. But I have a feeling that people would find it exceptionally un-fun when they played for weeks without a drop. (And, yes, you would have to be denied white drops too to make it work.))

As for making high-end items bind-on-drop, that would save those items from inflation (because they'd be out of the market), but it would increase the inflationary effect for everything that's not bind-on-drop, because there would be the same amount of cash and less goods to spend it on.

As for making items bind-on-equip, it would make matters worse because there would be the same amount of cash and less goods to spend it on. Moreover, it would royally "butthurt" those of us who like to equip an unknown skin for a moment to see what it looks like before deciding to merch it or transfer it to another char. I really don't want to have to wiki every time I find a skin I haven't seen before (or don't remember).

You are failing to consider that other countervailing factors could be (and are) at play in WoW, and so you end up drawing an incorrect conclusion from "the sky didn't fall in WoW" to "gold-sellers don't cause inflation." In fact, gold-sellers do cause inflation; other things in WoW mitigate that and/or cause deflation; and the net result is that the sky hasn't fallen.

Much like trying to stamp out gold-sellers (or drug dealers) would have a positive effect even without completely solving the problem, gold-selling (official or otherwise) would have a negative effect even if it doesn't completely ruin the economy.

All that credit card wars do is give an advantage to bored older players and adolescents with mum and dad shelling out notes to make their kid happy.

It automatically puts those with less disposable income at a disadvantage, which is a terrible idea to implement.

Thats just wrong. You don't need to Grind anything to get max stats weapons and armour in Guild Wars. How would some rich kid have an advantage over you with his Tormented Weapons and FoW armour while you went around with a 1k Green and Droks armour all the same stats?

Long, long ago, we published an interview with ArenaNet Co-Founder Mike O'Brien where he talked in some detail about the issues of real-money or real-world traders. You will find Mike's interview here.

We block members of gold-selling networks by the thousands, each and every week. I'm going to be starting a wiki page to show the numbers, because we think that would be a cool thing for you guys to see.

In the meantime, as we have always said, we have no issue with legitimate farmers, but we take great issue with real-money gold and item sellers, and will use every resource at our disposal to curtail their activities.

That would be interesting to see. I know you may not be able to give very specific information, but are you folks able to track the gold sellers to specific countries/regions? Are most coming from trial accounts or retail boxes?

One last suggestion I would like to make would be to remove the restriction on the report function that the person you're reporting has to be in the same district as you. There have been times where I've been looking for a team in a major town, and started to receive a flood of whispers for gold selling sites, but couldn't report a single one because they were in different districts...

On a more positive note, the fact that GW has collectors w/ max stuff makes any desire I have to buy gold vanish...