It means "they make boring stuff the best way to get cash."
Well-known blogger and virtual worlds veteran Damion Schubert has an interesting post on his blog about how online games often fail to incentivize fun activities, which indirectly contributes to a number of problems including gold buying and farming.
When WoW announced that you could buy a flying epic mount in the Burning Crusades for 5K gold (up from 100g to get your original mount at level 40), a lot of people predicted that WoWs economy would have some significant problems. But it was the opposite problem that you might expect - it turns out that there wasnt ENOUGH gold in the system.
The problem is that the primary way for new gold to enter the system in a fun and interesting way was via questing. Once you are level 70, quests can give 10-25 gold on completion of the quest (once youre 70, experience you would have earned if not maxed out is converted to gold). The problem, of course, is that quests are a finite resource. You run out of them.
Read more at his blog, Zen of Design, and then tell us what you think at the ongoing discussion.
