Thank you to the reader who brought this to my attention: Apparently there is a huge difference in prices between World of Warcraft gold on an US server and the same amount of gold on an European server. There is an article about that named "Is Europe the 'Third World' of Warcraft?", but if you want to read it, you'll have to google it. Because the site that posts it is a price comparison site for WoW gold sellers, and I'm not linking to such sites.
But I checked a gold seller, and yet, WoW gold in the US is about 10 times more expensive than in Europe. 1000 gold in the US cost $300 to $400, while you can get 1000 gold in Europe for $30 to $40. A striking difference.
Quote: "The cost involved in producing (farming) gold on Europe must simply be lower than the cost involved in producing the same gold on World of Warcraft USA. What this means is that Blizzard is policing its American realms far, far more rigorously than it is policing its European realms."
Can't argue with that. If the cost of farming gold was the same in Europe and in the US, and the farmers are Chinese who play whereever they earn most, prices on the two continents should be the same. Because otherwise the farmers would just move to where they can sell the gold for more money. Only Blizzard wielding a heavy ban stick on the US realms, but leaving the European realms alone can explain the huge price difference.
I'm just not so sure which continent is worse off by that. If you think RMT is a very bad thing, you'd agree with the article that Europe was treated less well by Blizzard. But if you want to buy 1000 gold, you'd probably prefer to live in Europe. Makes you wonder if Blizzard is running a huge socio-economic experiment on a test sample of 3.5 million players to find out how bad RMT really is for a game.
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