**Feels good to have internet back again, even if the loss was just for a few days! So I had a few days to think of ideas and such, especially since Mabinogi has been floating around in my head... Let's give this one a shot.**

    Any MMORPG with a ton of players is going to have players who want power and money, fast. It creates a demand for a product, as illegal as it may be to trade it the way they are being traded. And where there is a demand for a product, there is someone who will supply it... for a price, of course. And to speed up the process and make the service cheaper so it sells more often, programs are created to make the gold efficiently, and it can be run on multiple IPs, multiplying the availibility of the product by however many programs they can run. All sorts of products can be farmed; items, experience, and gold for instance. Even though this service is 100% illegal, since to gain rights to playing the game the farmers had to agree to the terms (Which every bigtime game will include the rule that no outside programs that modify the game may be used), small "businesses" can still get away with it. One game where I see this business flourish is Mabinogi and has inspired me to write this.

    What does gold selling do to the game? First off, it imbalances a game's economy. Let me talk about how MMORPG economies work for a bit. When developers make a game, they decide how money will be given to players, and how much money will be destroyed (EX: Selling items to NPC vendors or using their services). There is a balance created in how much money all of the players in the game own as a whole and how much items/services cost. If a game's playerbase has too much money, and the services (Including tax systems such as MapleStory's and GaiaOnline's) aren't able to take a huge chunk out of it, the money loses its worth. If there was only a few cubic meters of fertile dirt left in the world, it'd be worth TONS of money. Items such as Ultra Megasword which is the strongest sword in made up game and is randomly given to five players every month and lasts for a month, were worth five million gold in the game last month, and is now worth ten million gold, because a lot more gold has been brought in to the playerbase. The GMs then decide to distribute fifteen of these swords every month instead of five, making them less rare, and brings their price down to four million gold. When bots bring in tons of gold and then sells it to the players, it makes gold worth less. Also, if they constantly pick up the same rare drop and sell that for real money, too, that item loses its worth as well. Bots also ruin the gaming experience. You're going in to a dangerous forest to hunt a boss monster, the travelling experience should feel suspenseful and epic. However, when you get in there, there are at least thirty bots in starter clothing, all killing random monsters, then picking up their drops. One dies, and another fills its place until the original returns from the spawn point. All of a sudden, it's not a scary forest but a boring factory filled with humanoid machines. The illusion of adventure, a very crucial component to an MMORPG, had been shattered. Bots may also get directly in your way. Perhaps you had gone to the forest to hunt the exact same thing as the bots were, since this is proven to be the best and only efficient training spot for your level range. However, all of these bots are taking all of the kills, and from their hours of farming are able to one hit them. When you finally get a kill to yourself, another botter comes and steals it, and picks up the rare drop that had come from it. I'd be pretty ticked off... Some bots are made to advertise their gold selling website, creating useless spam when you and your friends are trying to chat.

    Players who buy the services are even worse than the gold sellers, for without them, these "businesses" would have no income and would eventually die out. Instead of "playing" the game, the simply want to beat it. People wouldn't buy a copy of Pokemon: Diamond if the game came with a team of level 100 Darkrais and the game already beat, so why will these people buy gold and powerleveling? The game is meant to be played, beating it should barely even matter. Some people may do it for bragging rights, having a level 70 with three thousand gold will definitely make you the envy of your peers (lie). Or they may simply do it for their epic mount, someone I had known had bought gold so they could buy their mount (I scolded them, of course), but getting the gold for your mount is meant to be another part of the game, and is meant to show ingame "authority", because if everyone was in epic gear and on a mount, players wouldn't feel as if they had acheived anything. And a note to anyone who uses these services, if a botter ever steals your kills or hurts your gaming experience, you better salute them.

    Why aren't game companies doing something about the issue? Because it's not as simple as you may think. You may not even know they're doing anything about it. It's not as simple as banning all of the gold sellers' IP addresses then calling it a day. IPs can be changed or proxied, making it possible to return to the game as many times as the gold sellers would like. Same for hackers, you can't just ban them, you have to constantly combat their programs, which are getting better and better at disguising themselves, with your own programs, for example, Gameguard and Norton's. Compare it to coevolution. There are ways with dealing with gold sellers, too. Companies have a few choices, the easiest yet most monotonous and and sometimes useless act of banning IPs over and over again. Another is treating them like hackers, writing programs that will detect and prevent botting, however these programs cannot be written in a day, and must have whole teams devoted to this. The most drastic act would be to take legal action against them, suing the organizations that use the bots to sell gold. However, this action requires many resources (Mainly money), and with so many gold sellers running around, this would be a long and tedious process, yet would no doubt be the most effective.

    At its current state, it is not dramatically harmful to a game company's income, making it a lower priority to most games. However, this underground business is growing and, if left unchecked, may become uncontrollable one day. Games unable to combat gold sellers will some day lose large numbers of their playerbases, and along with that their oh-so-precious income.

**Phew! Another long one... Okay, back to Mabinogi!**