One of my fairly obscure hobbies on and off over the past decade and a half has been developing methods for cheating in a handful of online MMORPG type games with a heavy focus on Runescape 2 (now OSRS) and now Runescape 3. I have little to no interest in playing these types of games legitimately, but the cat and mouse game of going back and forth against anti-cheating mechanisms is a lot of fun for me and always has been.

Jagex is the company that runs the Runescape games.

Runescape 3 catches a whole lot of shit because they constantly have different types of promotions that seem related here. There is a paid membership that you can get in the game that allows you to access all of the content (as opposed to a free membership that allows you to use a limited amount of armor, skills, limited access to game areas, etc.). They also have in-game items called bonds that you can purchase with in-game gold that gives you a couple of weeks of membership. However, they also allow you to purchase bonds directly with real world money, and those bonds can then be traded to players for other items, in-game gold and so on.

This effectively created a straightforward, Jagex-enabled real-money market for in-game gold and items.

To complicate that, as I mentioned earlier, RS3 also has constant promotions for what amount to purchasing randomized loot crates and similar. You can sell the items you get for in-game gold, which can then be used to buy bonds, which amounts to real-world currency. Since bonds can be sold to other players for real-world money through third-party sites, it's essentially a situation where the randomized loot creates and the like are a form of unregulated gambling.

Another effect of this is that huge bot account farms have shot up that gather in-game resources and gold, which then have real-world value through the series of trades outlined above, but that's been the case in plenty of other games as well. It's particularly relevant to me because of my particular hobby with the game, but I thought I'd point that out.

Anyway, all of that just seemed somewhat related.