To be quite honest, stats are only numbers. What really matters about being a top ranked player is the journey that person had to take to get there. Taking shortcuts makes the time spent getting your account up obselete and makes this game much less fun than it would be to take the time to make money yourself on the video game.

 

My thoughts.

abellus: Wrong. While a gold farming 3rd world company needs employees, a lot of hardware, time, farming, etc. to get gold, JAGEX would have it a single SQL query away. So at certain point no gold sellers would be able to compete with JAGEX selling gold. As JAGEX doesn't have to farm it firsthand. Good point?

 

But I think gold selling wouldn't help with time requirement, since there are some skills you can't buy, so people low on time would still lose and the economy would feel the new good influx anyway. Now lets see what Eve Online has? Ability to train skills while you are offline.

 

Now think about it: With EoC: You can make progress even if you don't do anything, but you get more if you do something.

If members would get an option to train some skills slowly while they are offline, but would get more skill points if they actually train them online, and it would also drain some GP from economy, then we have a better fix for the problem people with little time face. And a fix that would reduce casual botting in no time. It would make training easier. But it wouldn't ruin the economy, and it would fix problems. And it would send more people to buy members.