Last year, I went through a marital separation, moved into a new place with roommates, and was laid off from my job within the same week. It took me a month, but I eventually found a full-time job, and a weekend job. The damage had been done though, I was behind on bills and struggling to keep up. I had a WoW subscription going and was considering cancelling it, but the through of selling gold occurred to me as a way to help make ends meet while I wasn't work at either job.
So, in order to help get out of debt and pay the bills, I started selling gold to individuals just through word of mouth, and to gold farmers when there wasn't a demand from the people I knew.
Let me tell you, it was not very fun at all and really killed the game for me. For those not familiar with the game, you can do up to a certain number of "daily quests" (quests that are repeatable every 24 hours). I would do the maximum allowed and use my tradeskills (both gathering skills) and sell the goods for in-game gold, then turn around and sell the gold to whoever would buy it. I was playing probably 5 hours a day, just farming. I could make around 5-7k gold per week (Before the Lich King) and sell the gold for $10-20 per 1K.
Typically I made between $3-500 per month from playing a video game. I bought the Lich King (expansion), leveled my character to level 80 and started gearing him up to farm efficiently at that level, but I was so burned out from playing every day (and finally out of debt). that I no longer saw a reason to play and cancelled my subscription.
It sure as hell helped pay the bills, but the constant headaches from farming for hours at a time, killing my social life, and sucking up all my free time to do meaningful things, killed the drive to play the game.
I can't imagine gold farmers (who play far more hours than I did) enjoy this at all. It's not as bad as working in a sweat shop and/or doing real labor, but it's kind of rough and really wears on you after awhile. Even so, I don't see why their government would outright ban the buying and selling of game currency. A lot of these people are really depending on that income. :(
