Every gold farmer was competing on price with someone who had INSERT ... INTO ITEMS; available to them and the manual labor was winning.
There were many folks who said that there were solid commercial reasons for this refusal at the time. A lot of them boiled down to "I don't know about those crazy Asians but sophisticated American consumers don't want to do this thing that we're spending thousands of man-hours a month unsuccessfully trying to prevent Americans from doing." Those have been pretty decisively proven wrong since a) when AAA US MMORPGs experiment with item sales they make serious bank and b) the Free2Play model empirically has worked very, very well in the US, especially when you compare the revenue per user and in aggregate against the HUGE premium embedded in development costs of the AAA subscription RPGs.
Oh, also, Zynga ROFLstomped the entire industry. (10~50% of the revenues of the most successful MMORPGs for 2~3% of the development costs of the median AAA MMORPG... and they did it more times in a three year period than there have been successful AAA MMORPGs in history.)
