Personally I think these people are playing the wrong game myself, before long though we’ll have some sort of ZT-online pure RMT type of game come to Europe/US where money=power openly and these people will lap it up. In some ways that would be a good result at least if it cleared them off the real games, or maybe not seeing that there are more or less facebook games that do that now which still haven’t stopped them RMT’ing their way through WoW judging by the gold adverts every 60s.

For EQ2 though I’m not sure I’ve seen any signs of plat selling, I expect there is something that happens on the biggest US servers, but in the UK there are no adverts and apart from masters at the top level there is very little “must have” type of gear for sale that does not require status as well to buy.

If a game needs real money to do things to be “successful” then why not turn it off, load up a currency trading account and play with that, that’s a game that at least can give you some real success. I’m even against the fluff brought with real money from Station Cash or the Blizzard store, there its a bit of a fuzzy line, my big problem there is slightly different in that the more successful these things get the more inducement there is to warp the game to generate more money (ie less pets in the game you can find or earn).

Secondly though its funding all the scammers and Chinese gold farmers that I also object to, they’re just plain annoying.

With regards to character purchasing, I think the primary reason that people do this is simple. Either all of the fun is in the end-game or the person wants to play with their friends at a higher level. To circumvent this, ensure the gameplay (no matter what you want to focus on, i.e. PvP, etc) is enjoyable right from the very start of the game. And design ways for friends of varying levels to play along side one another (i.e. sidekick systems), thus removing any social barriers from the game.

I guess, my understanding behind the reasoning of it all depends on the value of the gold. If 1,000 gold costs $10 and is enough to buy, say, an epic mount which would otherwise take 10 hours to grind, then technically speaking it’s better “value for money” to buy the gold. That ways it’s perhaps only 0.5 - 2 hours work.