Can gold buying be outlawed?

Followup on today's earlier gold farmer post, where Felsir in the comments suggested banning the gold buyers. According to this newspaper there are as many as 500,000 Chinese gold farmers. That is for all MMORPG together, but obviously WoW has a significant market share.

In Blizzards regular gold farmer bannings press releases the usual number of accounts banned is between 60,000 to 80,000, and that is just the accounts that have been found using bots, Blizzard doesn't ban "manual" gold farmers.

Lets do some hypothetical math. Lets assume that WoW has a total of 100,000 gold farmers. Each gold farmer earns $100 per month (see link above). According to the spam tells I keep getting in game, its about 1,000 gold for $50, but I'd say 80% of that is kept by the companies running the gold farms. So each farmer only gets $10 per 1,000 gold, and needs to make 10,000 gold per month to earn his $100. Which means that each month 1,000,000,000 aka 1 billion gold are being sold, for $50 million. Wow!

But now lets look at the buyers. 1,000 gold seems to be a frequently traded amount, so lets assume that a typical buyer buys 1,000 gold per month. But if each gold farmer produces 10,000 gold per month, there must be 10 buyers per seller. So that would make 1 million gold buyers, or 1 in 7 World of Warcraft players.

Blizzard can well afford to ban 80,000 gold farmers. It makes for good publicity. And most of them will be back within a day, so Blizzard isn't actually losing any money from the bannings. As they need to buy a new account key, Blizzard actually *makes* money from these bannings. At $20 per new account, banning 80,000 gold farmers nets Blizzard $1.6 million. Call it a Blizzard tax on gold farming operations.

What Blizzard couldn't possibly afford is to ban the 1 million gold buyers. As these have no commercial interest in playing WoW, and banning would destroy the characters they were willing to invest in, a large percentage of the banned gold buyers would *not* open another account and start over. Blizzard can't afford to lose one seventh of their player base. Especially since we can safely assume that most gold buyers are in the USA or Europe, where Blizzard earns a lot more per month on each account.

Do you know what Blizzard could do to permanently remove at least half of the gold farmers from World of Warcraft? Easy, just decrease the cost for the different levels of riding skills by a factor of 10. Learning to ride an epic non-flying mount should cost 80 gold, not 800. And the epic flying mount 500 gold, not 5000.

True, the gold farmers exist only because there are gold buyers. But the gold buyers exist only because of the money sinks in the game. If there weren't expensive things like epic mounts to buy, and if raiding would net you more gold than the cost of repairs and potions, few people would need to buy gold. And then the gold farmers would be out of a job.