If this is the case i fail to see how your scenario is a problem. Whoever originally bought the timecard paid full price for it, you’re just getting it at a discount because of money sellers. CCP still gets the same full purchase price.

The demand is there. It’s only a question of who has the supply.

…and yes, I’d not want gambling in these games, either. I have a long standing beef with gambling. Of course, I’m no fan of the loot lottery either, which is effectively gambling, just by paying time rather than money, and time is money…

When I was first playing EVE, I noticed that the price of one PLEX worth of Isk from a black-market Isk-seller was less than the price of a month’s subscription. Basically, I could buy Isk, use it to buy a PLEX, and pay my subscription for (iirc, this was a while ago) about 5-7 dollars a month, instead of 15.

The reason not to do so, even if you don’t care about the rules, is that CCP have a reputation for aggressively stripping purchased Isk off the accounts of buyers, so you could well end up with no PLEX, no Isk, and no 5-7 dollars. But if they were as laissez-faire about buyers as Blizzard seem to be, introducing sellable timecards could easily cause the goldselling industry to explode in size.

On another note, what I find incredibly strange is why Blizzard implemented the dual spec system at level 40 and yet charged 1,000g for it. It’s almost like they’re taunting people to buy gold in order to obtain it! If they don’t want level 40s to have it, they should have just increased the level restriction.

Plus, gambling sucks. I live in a casino town. Foxwoods and The Mohegan Sun are close by, and I’ve even worked in one of them. It really does destroy wealth and lives, and it shouldn’t be encouraged any more than it is. I’d cheerfully take a sub hike or a cash shop over a casino.

I would like to keep real money completely out of the game, but if often comes indirectly through things like minipets. For example, some people bought many copies of a PC magazine offering an “Asura minipet” code for Guild Wars and sold the Asura minipets then ingame. This required multiple accounts to work (1 pet/code per account only), dunno if trial accounts worked, but they somehow got several minipets.

If you get a very rare minipet, you can also sell it on eBay. It seems to work very well, for some pets I could buy the digital CE bundle of Mass Effect 1&2 for instance.
As long as people are willing to pay for virtual items in MMOs, the problem will not go away.

While I do not like it at all, I think companies should really start selling “gold” themselves. This might reduce the criminal scene somewhat. People prefer to stay legal, even if they have to pay a bit more for the same than from a gold seller.

I still don’t like it. I collect armors, weapons, pets and all that. Again, I would like to see a total separation of ingame and real economy. I can already see envy and people making fun of proud collectors showing them their collection and they say things like “that cost you quite some money, didn’t it?”

One of my friends got his GW account hacked twice and WoW once. He is so paranoid by now that he hides his equipment in every game that allows for it because he thinks that standing around in expensive prestige armor made hackers target him specifically. Which is probably not true, but accounts get hacked specifically to make real cash out of the chars and their inventory.