I recently heard of a player of Lord of the Rings Online who got a 7-day ban for BUYING gold. Banned, not for spamming to sell it, not for actually selling it, but for being on the receiving end of a transaction. In EVE Online, it's standard practice for GM's to deduct twice the amount of illegal ISK from your account if it was bought with real world cash. This can put players into a situation where they have a negative amount and until the balance gets to 0, the character is almost unusable.
In the case of our gold-buying LOTRO player, he had never gotten any kind of disciplinary action before. Usually, bans start at 24 hours, then 3 days, 7 days, then a permanent ban is the final step. Looks like buying gold puts you on the fast track. This means that for the duration of the account, any further infraction could result in a big red hammer getting dropped. This would really hurt if our LOTRO player had ponied up the 200 dollars for a lifetime account.
How many other MMO developers do you hear of taking steps like this against the players who BUY in game currency with out of game money? Do you really think Blizzard is going to ban any of their precious WoW catasses? Would SOE show purchasers of non-Station Exchange EQ II gold the door? I never hear any players of those games with sad tales of interrupted play because they got some of that "24/7 delivery on any server" action.
What it comes down to is this: If game companies are going to say they don't condone RMT in their terms of service, then they need to start enforcing it for players who buy as well as sell. Confession time, I bought gold once for World of Warcraft and did so with no fear of any action being taken against my account what-so-ever. None. Because I know that Blizzard has no balls.
Guess which companies have games that I will never buy currency in? If you said CCP and Turbine, you are correct. That's what we call a deterrent. And it works.
