Roleplaying games

Everyone who plays MMORPG knows about it. The gold sellers. You can spot ads everywhere talking about “EQ Gold” or “WOW gold” and so on. For the few people on earth that don’t know what is this about, is very simple. They are true companies selling in-game gold (or whatever currency the game uses) in exchange of real world currency (dollars). There’s a real pricewars about this, various sites trying to offer the best “currency rates“, and so on.
They also generally offer other “services” like powerleveling (getting your character to high level at faster pace), or in the worst cases they even sell complete character or accounts.
Of course, people who play honestly those games knows exactly how hard and time consuming is to get your character to high levels, or to gain lot of in-game gold. Often indeed people, when they want to offend someone playing, they use to say “did you buy your character”? or even “is another powerleveled guy”.
Is all this business good or bad for the general roleplaying genre ?
Personally I think is neither good, nor bad.
Isn’t good of course, for the reasons stated above. Isn’t too bad either because people like me who don’t have lot of time available to play everyday are able to compete head to head against those teenagers guys that play 10h a day to raise their characters to super powerful levels…
In any case the real problem is that even if wasn’t good at all, and even if the big companies that produce such games forbid these practices, is practically impossible to track them all down, so be sure that they will be never able to stop them completely…