Well.. in my experience over the years, I personally know people who have had this happen.
Sure, so have I. Each and everyone of those people I've known who had their accounts stolen were not exactly keen on securing their computers. What's more, based on my now firsthand knowledge of how the gold-trading sector even WORKS, this simply cannot be blamed on them. The people who hack accounts and strip them to unload to the gold dealers are not the gold-dealers themselves. When a man robs your house and unloads the stuff at a pawnshop, the pawnshop isn't the party responsible for robbing your house. When it's impossible to even track or suspect whether or not goods are stolen, because it's a straight numeric, it is simply unreasonable to blame an honest gold merchant for it. The fact that hackers occasionally pretend to be gold merchants, demand things that no honest gold merchant would ever ask for or need to know, and take in suckers. Quite simply, a lot of these people asked for it. They download dodgy third-party programs, and make no effort to secure their computers. I also wouldn't be surprised if elements of the company are involved. After all, THEY have access to all this data, so any disgruntled or corrupt employee could trivially "hack" your account.
So I guess we are at an impasse here. Though I do not think companies are always honest, this whole "anti-establishment" excuse is a bit of a "occupy" style of argument. Foreign gold sellers (people who are protected because of international laws and barriers) are more honest with your money and accounts than a major corporation who isn't immune to lawsuits of such mishandling?
Gold sellers operate on trust. In the underworld, reputation is everything. There are no legal recourses one can turn to, no authorities that can be bought, no intimidating barriers that can stop a bad word from spreading about you. If my dealer rips me off, I'm out a handful of gold, he's out every supplier I have contacts with and every supplier THEY have contacts with. His business lives or dies on the spreading word of mouth that he's good for it. He may never face legal prosecution like a drug dealer might, but his business depends just as much on his reputation. The company? Sure, they're TECHNICALLY susceptible to lawsuits, but between multiple layers of obfuscatory paperwork and the fact that individual players generally cannot afford to mount a legal challenge, the odds of this are remote. They've erected heavy layers of legal shielding around themselves and have the perceived advantage of being "aboveground". Their reputation with players is nearly always mud, but they persist anyway because they offer what amounts to a monopoly product in many cases. Reputation simply does not matter for them. In the underworld, though, reputation is everything.
My experience and education says otherwise, but hey... its the internet and claims like these are worthless.
Anecdotal evidence. Also, worthless to this discussion.
Sure, we can discard both our observations. That reduces this to a he-said-she-said. But there's a difference. My claims aren't worthless. My claims have a hard dollar value attached, and as such, have a directly quantifiable value. I can tell you exactly how much my claims are worth. As they say, money talks.
If game play is circumvented due to RMT, then it is pay to win. Period. Regardless of who does it and who specifically benefits.
See, that's interesting, because your definition of pay-to-win excludes actual literal pay-to-win! Let us propose the simplest example of a game, which we shall call "Pay To Win". Your score, the "win", is determined by one thing: How much money you give the operators. Since gameplay is not circumvented due to RMT, as the gameplay *IS* RMT, without which none occurs, it is not circumvented. This game is as literally pay-to-win as it gets. You literally pay to win. Your definition of pay-to-win excludes this.
Furthermore, your definition of pay-to-win encompasses basically every game, ever. There is no major game where you cannot find those purporting to provide power-leveling services. I've never actually partaken of these services, nor do I see any reason I ever would, so I cannot vouch for their integrity, and I, like you, have heard nasty things about them (plus, giving your account data to strangers seems deeply unwise), but they exist. Thus, pretty much every game with levels is pay-to-win by your definition.
Given that your definition is vague enough to encompass nearly every extant game and yet fails to actually cover literal pay-to-win, I can't help but see this definition as critically flawed. It's as if you've created a definition of atmosphere that asserts that the Earth is an airless rock.
Now, I define pay-to-win as simple: As a verb, the act of paying real money to achieve win (gold, advancement, items, etc.) in the game. As an adjective describing a game, a game is pay-to-win when there is non-cosmetic quantitative benefit (win) that cannot be reasonably achieved by a committed player without paying the operators or owners of the game for it over and above any pay-to-work (read: subscription, box purchase cost) already attached. Suffice it to say I am not a big fan of the pay-to-work model, it violates the basic rules of economic common sense.
Unlike your definition, it covers actual pay-to-win and isn't so broad as to paint basically every single game in existence, rendering it meaningless as a descriptive qualifier.
