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Comment by cstejerean | Hacker News Reader

If people are willing to pay for a higher level avatar, etc, I wonder why Blizzard doesn't just allow one to purchase that directly from them. Virtual worlds are one place where actually putting time in to do "work" is only required if the owners of the world decide to require it.

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My guess is that they evaluated how much money they would gain from doing this versus how much they would lose in subscriptions where people didn't feel like they could adequately compete against wealthier players.

Additionally, Blizzard makes their money from the longevity of their players. Someone who paid someone else to power level their characters are going to have a smaller emotional tie to their character, and are going to be less likely to continue to subscribe in the long-term (as a large amount of content has already been skipped for them).

If Blizzard were to really make this legitimate, new users would probably be turned off to the fact that they, too, are sweating to boost their character when others are just buying it. If it is somewhat underground, many people don't see it as legitimate and won't be turned off or notice that others around them simply buy their status.

Because it ruins the damn game.

Do you play WoW?

There seem to be two MMO models, the subscription model and the subscription-free model where you pay for better gear. I don't know if there are any hybrid games (I don't play any MMOs myself) but I could imagine that once the premium practice was legitimised, people would get upset about having to pay for the subscription.

You can sell time cards for in game cash in eve online. You can also trade charters between accounts in eve.

At the same time there seems to be a lot of gold farmers in the game.

I think everquest opened a server where you could buy cash but there are few high end items you can get by spending gold in that game.

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