I don't buy WoW gold anymore - cheap or no. I find it more fun for me to mess around in the auction house every day. The thing is, I've had a question on my mind from the day I started playing WoW...

Who does Blizzard think they are to tell people they can or cannot buy gold?

It is absolutely ridiculous. I don't understand how Blizzard can possibly be hurting from the in game currency buying/selling industry. Maybe my friends and I are different from most WoW players, but everyone I know has, at some point, either purchased gold or power leveling services. The truth of the matter is that (from the average working person's perspective) it just makes sense to buy gold. Most people want to play the game and have fun - not spend all of their time farming for gold or leveling to the cap after the latest expansion.

Gold sellers are in an absolutely perfect position. They are able to provide something that people want quickly and at a relatively low cost.

Here's an example: (after the break)

You have a raid tonight. In 2 hours. You have 15g sitting in your bag. Most of your full epic gear is red. The rest is yellow. You have no flasks and your guild isn't providing them to you, but does require that you have them.

Another: Your friends are making fun of you because you still don't have your epic flying mount. You have a job, wife, and kids. You don't have time to farm all that gold.

What do you do?

You buy gold. That's the easiest and quickest way for you to get the gold that you need to get in order to participate in tonight's raid or get your mount. You might say that you could go do some dailies and maybe make enough gold to repair your armor, and maybe your guild won't notice that you don't have flasks, and maybe your friends will stop making fun of your slow flying mount. But it's always easier and requires less grinding to just buy the stuff.

Now, why does Blizzard even care?

Well, they claim that it screws with the economy of the server, and in some instances they may be correct. The problem with this claim is that the World of Warcraft economy is not closed. Gold can be created and destroyed. So, every time you - or anyone else -  kill a humanoid and they drop 2g23s36c, you have effectively reduced the value of everyone else's gold on the server. Not by much, but the value has been reduced nonetheless. To counterbalance this, every time you buy something from a vendor or the game takes a cut from auction house sales, Gold is destroyed. This process increases the value of everyone else's gold on the server.

So, one would think that a large number of gold farmers on a server creating extremely large amounts of gold would reduce the value of people's gold by a significant amount. Wrong. Most of the things that people buy gold for are vendor items - things such as mounts, the Haris Pilton Gigantique bag, and the Band/Signet of the Kirin Tor. Not too many people buy gold so that they can go and buy things from the Auction House. Where is the proof? Well, if people were injecting the massive amounts of gold into the economy that Blizzard seems to think they are, the prices for everything in the Auction House would skyrocket out of control.

Like I said, I don't buy gold any more - mainly because I can make more of it on the Auction House in one day than I could afford to buy. Most of the strategies that I use, I found in these WoW Gold Guides. If you need gold quickly, buy it, if you want a long term steady flow of gold, learn to make it yourself.