Larger Edit on MMO Wiki Page

I expanded my edit to the MMO article on Wikipedia. For ease of reference and documentation, I will post my exact edit as follows:

Virtual Economies

Within a majority of the MMOs created, there is virtual currency where the player can earn and accumulate money. The uses for such vitual currency are numerous and vary from game to game. What becomes very interesting, is there is an economy that is created from this development of virtual money. The virtual economies created within MMOs often blur the lines between real and virtual worlds. The result is often seen as an unwanted interaction between the real and virtual economies. This practice (economy interaction) is mostly seen in this genre of games. The two seem to come hand in hand with even the earliest MMOGs such as Ultima Online having this kind of trade, real money for virtual things.

The results of this interaction between the virtual economy, and our real economy, which is really the interaction between the company that created the game and the third-party companies that want to share in the profits and success of the game. This battle between companies is defended on both sides. The company originating the game and the intellectual property argue that this is in violation of the terms and agreements of the game as well as copyright violation since they own the rights to how the online currency is distributed and through what channels^{[citation needed]}. The case that the third-party companies and their customers defend, is that they are selling and exchanging the time and effort put into the acquisition of the currency, not the digital information itself. They also express that the nature of many MMOs is that they require time commitments not available to everyone. As a result, without external acquisition of virtual currency, some players are severly limited to being able to experience certain aspects of the game.

The practice of acquiring large volumes of virtual currency for the purpose of selling to other individuals for tangible and real currency is called gold farming. Many players who have poured in all of their personal effort feel violated that there is this exchange between real and virtual economies since it devalues their own efforts. As a result, the term 'gold farmer' now has a very negative connotation within the games and their communities. This slander has unfortunately also extended itself to racial profiling and in-game and forum insulting and verbal abuse.

The reaction from many of the game companies varies. In games that are substantially less popular and have a small player base, the enforcement of the elimination of 'gold farming' appears less often. Companies in this situation most likely are concerned with their personal sales and subscription revenue over the development of their virtual economy, as they most likely have a higher priority to the games viability via adequate funding. Games with an enormous player base, and consequently much higher sales and subscription income, can take more drastic actions more often and in much larger volumes. Blizzard Entertainment and their wildly successful World of Warcaft, are not afraid to publicly announce that tens of thousands of accounts that have been banned due to violations regarding currency selling^{[citation needed]}. This account banning could also serve as an economic gain for these large games, since it is highly likely that, due to demand, these 'gold farming' accounts will be recreated with freshly bought copies of the game.