What has gotten into this world and MMORPGs?!

The problem with this is that people are willing to buy that gold/item. For example, let's say you were offered 1000 gold in WoW for 50 bucks. Let's say that you work, and you make 10 bucks an hour (I'm not sure how it would work if you didn't have a job, I suppose in that case you're freeloading off someone).

So, for 5 hours of your worktime, you can get 1000 gold, which, if you farmed it yourself, would take you about a week or two to do (barring getting any high value drops that is).

Yes, it's stupid, I know. But that's the mentality a lot of these people have when they buy gold. They are saving their time in the game by paying someone else to get stuff for them. Again, sounds stupid, but when you consider a game like WoW, where you have to endlessly run 3 hour+ dungeon raids over and over, it gets boring as heck after a while, unless you're really hardcore (I myself burnt out after a few raids, cause it's boring). So of course some people will try to rationalize that paying a little bit for money = less time overall grinding/farming, which means more time for them to play (and anyone who's played World of Warcraft for any good length of time knows that the endgame content isn't as good as the lvl 1-59 experience overall).

And it seems to happen enough that it's profitable, or else gold selling wouldn't be so rampant. And while Blizzard officially disapproves, they often don't do much about it (they might do a mass banning once in a while, but that's not gonna stop the gold farmer from simply buying a new account, and starting over from square 1).

Of course, this happens in other games too. It's just that WoW is currently the most popular MMO out there (they have like half of the population for MMO players. 6 million people can't be wrong), so of course it gets the most attention.

Jam it back in, in the dark.