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There is even fair use when it comes to trademarks. The key is whether or not a reasonable person would be confused into thinking the user in question is the actual holder of the trademark. That is certainly not the case on gold seller/buyer sites.
Well the problem there is that most of the gold/item/character buying is done to eliminate the idiotic and excessively painful "grind" that exists in the big, graphical MMOs. For example, it should come as no surprise that people don't think it is fun or exciting to grind out 1,000 gold in WoW just so they can have a faster mount (which in turn gives no real advantage other than reducing the tedium of inane travel times).
Sure, there is some degree of competitive advantage from buying gold, items, etc. but most of that stuff can also be obtained in game. Does it make any more sense for the "catassers" (a term I am borrowing from a professor named Edward Castranova who studies virtual worlds) who play 10+ hours a day to be the ones with all the advantages?
It works somewhat well in Threshold, but that is because it is a smaller community with an enormous amount of community enforcement. Despite this, there is still a significant amount of cheating on quests, and this is in a game where quests have NO BENEFIT. Yes, people cheat on them even though they have no rewards of any kind other than the sense of accomplishment from solving them. Yes, the contradiction of that is not lost on me. I always boggle at why anyone would cheat on a Threshold quest when they have zero reward.
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