Gold, Gold, Gold

If you play World of Warcraft, at some point you've probably witnessed some gold seller spam.

From WoW wiki:

"Gold Spamming is normally associated with unsolicited contact of players in World of Warcraft for the express purpose of selling them gold in exchange for real money. It can also include advertisements on fan sites related to the game. Some of the spam includes power leveling services in addition to gold. It is not uncommon for players to be spammed multiple times during a gaming session."

Some Gold sellers are pretty dumb, barely being able to speak/type English, while some others have gotten quite creative with their gold spams.

Now technically, buying in-game gold is against the ToS, but people do it and I think doing it from time to time is perfectly fine, so long as you're careful, just like purchasing anything online.

Have you ever purchased in-game gold for a game you play?

I've done it twice.

The first time, Valentine's Day was approaching and I really wanted to get a pair of epic plate gloves (the Stronghold Gauntlets) crafted for my boyfriend at the time and give them to him for Valentine's Day, as he didn't have a pair of epic gloves and I knew he wanted them. So long as I could get the mats, I happened to be friends with one of the 2 people in game who could craft them and said he'd make them for free for me.

The mats were crazy ridiculous though and although I was able to get the gems and farm the essences, I was coming up short on thorium and arcane crystals to finish them. Desperate and really wanting to have these gloves in time for Valentine's Day, I decided to purchase a couple hundred gold for like $20 so I could afford the rest of the mats - I rationalized it by the fact that this was a Valentine's Day present and I would spend "real" money on it anyway.

Needless to say, I got the gloves crafted and he was thrilled (see? Giving gifts to gamers can be pretty simple - just get them something they really want in game and they're happy!). Looking at them now, these gloves kinda suck, but as a DPS warrior back then I guess they were pretty awesome, plus they were epic. He wore them for awhile til he got a replacement, and then he kept them in his bank, as he knew I'd be upset if he just DE-ed them or sold them to a vendor, lol...

The other time I bought gold was when I working on my Ironforge reputation via Runecloth turn-ins, as I really wanted the Ironforge Ram for my human paladin and an upcoming patch was going to make it so something would be cheaper, so long as you had the max reputation for it. I farmed and hurried but was coming up short, so I decided to purchase another couple hundred in-game gold so I could continue to buyout Runecloth. Eventually, I hit max Exalted (with the help of farming the AV battleground) and got my ram. On the day that made it so you could purchase any of the battleground faction mounts regardless of race, while everyone was running around on the Black War Ram, I proudly rode my light brown Ironforge Ram.

That's me on my ram, 2nd on the left (the other light brown ram was my boyfriend at the time who was a dwarf and didn't have to work on rep to get his). This was just inside the AQ40 instance.