Blizzard has decided to post a statement on gold selling stating that gold sellers are responcible for hack accounts.
While that maybe true now it isn’t the whole truth.
See there’s always going to be a market for gold sellers. Yes Blizzard can track down the transactions, detect bots, respond to player complaints about farmers, ban people etc,...
However gold selling is probably a market that would be best served by regulation and guide lines rather than black and white legality which simply creates a race to the bottom. Capital punishment for all crimes doesn’t so much reduce crime and simply push people to the extremes. I mean if your going to get capital punishment for stealing a handbag you might as well carry an illegal assault rifle to try and blast your way out of trouble if your going to be arrested.
For instance the main reason peoples accounts get hacked is because people farming gold and botting are lumped into the same catagorie as people who hack accounts. Both are illegal. The difference is that the first pays Blizzard money and has an interest in keeping the accounts active for as long as possible and the later doesn’t have any sort of tie to the game what so ever.
So rather than targeting farmers what you’d want to do is squeeze out people who hack other peoples accounts from the marketplace by encouraging a code of ethics for gold farmers and allowing those who follow it to do what they do unhindered.
Blizzard could make special gold farmers accounts all tied to a master gold seller account much like a guild. Then they could decide that gold farmers aren’t allowed to enter instances. That if there is a registered complaint then they are ported to another zone of their choice so that the player can quest in that zone in peace. That they must do their best to prevent and refund gold/items from hacked sources. That they shouldn’t be disruptive or use hacks/exploits. That gold farmers are not allowed to spam or advertise in game or on the forums except in a dedicated channel/forum for them.
Blizzard could even build in a payment thing under account management and be a eschow service taking a small cut for administrative costs. Or even have players sell gold to gold sellers for credit to their accounts.
You can also extend it to power leveling. You could have a power leveler log into your account via their own account and perhaps be limited to a character that you’ve preselected and power level them. There maybe limitations such as being unable to do anything but repair and accept items in trade. However it probably isn’t nessisary as Blizzard could easily see which power leveling service you were using if there was a complaint about lost gold/items.
Anway the idea being that at the end of the day gold sellers/farmers whom have a low negative impact on the game for other players exist and gold sellers/farmers whom have a high negative impact on the quality of gameplay for players are squeezed out of the market. Players would be able to trust gold sellers/farmers and power levelers who’ve gone through official channels and the impact on gameplay would be minimal.
Plus if Blizzard found that people were simply power leveling or buying gold rather than farming or leveling themselves then perhaps they’d change their game mechanics to promote people actually playing the game rather than attempting to limit their exposure to grinding and create more of the content that people actually log on for.