Reports have surfaced that Blizzard has been issuing cease and desist messages to Paypal users that are being suspected of trading in-game currency from World of Warcraft, for real cash. The crackdown on these gold-seller services started last week, when Blizzard began sending out message that the users had been reported to Paypal for violating intellectual property rights by selling World of Warcraft merchandise. The message further stated that the users would lose access to their Paypal accounts if they refused to remove offers for in-game items from their respective website.
It is unclear if the crackdown has already lead to a reduced number of goldsellers in the game.
This is an interesting idea, but it will never work on individual gold sellers. This seems like more of a way to hit the gold selling websites that have an option to use paypal for an order.
This might help a bit more than you think, considering the fact that probably all of these transactions are done through Paypal (since it handles international traffic fairly easilly) and I’d expect most of these goldfarmers are associated with larger companies. If goldsellers would no longer be able to use Paypal so easilly, they might have to resort to other payment options that are less easy to use than the ones Paypal offers. And since everybody has a Paypal account anyway, this would also force users to set up a new account with a similar service… making it a lot more cumbersome for people to buy gold.
Reading your original post again, I realise I totally missed the point you were making. I totally agree this won’t help against individual gold sellers, who are not associated with larger sites, but I don’t think those are the people who have the largest impact on the WoW economy. The sale of in-game items will probably never go away, but as long as it’s being done by individuals, rather than organizations, I think there is little harm over the longer term.