In RuneScape the black market economy supported by gold farmers was quite small--until 2013 OSRS Gold. Some players were unsatisfied with how much the game had been changed since it was first released in 2001. Therefore, they asked the developer to reinstate the previous version. Jagex released one of its archive, and users returned to what was to be known as Old School RuneScape.
Many of them were like Mobley. They played RuneScape when they were teenagers and reminisced fondly about the sharp graphics and the fun soundtrack. Although these 20 and 30-year-olds had hours to spare as children but they had to take on responsibilities beyond homework.
"People have jobs right now, have families potentially," said Stefan Kempe, another popular YouTuber of RuneScape who has over 200k subscribers and goes under the username SoupRS, during an interview. "It's an obstacle to how much they can play every day."
The game can be very tedious. To boost a character's agility from 1 to 99, the highest level, would require more than a weeks of constant play according to a thorough guide made by the developer. Now that they had more than their typical allowances as teenagers, players like Mobley, who works in a data center, decided to skip the grind of trying to level up their characters and the expense of expensive objects, and the often boring beginnings in the gameplay.
Others, like Corne, a 21-year-old programmers located in Arnhem, Netherlands, who did not want to reveal his last name, bet on gold, and in extension real-world currency, on duels with other players. "I have a love for money. Whether it's in real life or in RuneScape it's nice to have," He said on the course of a phone call.
He buys much of his gold from intermediaries, who purchase gold in bulk from gold farmers and then sell it through websites like El Dorado or Sythe. Horn believes he's spent anywhere between four and five thousand euros runescape account, fueling his belief that at one point was the equivalent of an addiction to gambling.