Real Money trade or pay to win destroys a lot games. Even a lot Mmorpgs died or bacame less attractive because of it.
In my opinion someone who buys items or ingame currency with real money is just a cheater. Thouse ppl have a lot excuses why to do it in the end they only want get an advatage vs normal players because they are unable or just to stupid to do it legally.
Same goes for bot users. Why they even want to play that game if the most time a computer plays for em ? A lot bots are also used to farm items and in game currency. So every person that sells such things in big scale is using bots or buy thouse things from bots.
Bots are quite anoiying they also destroy the game experience for normal players, because they block hunting grouds.
Take the infamous Lineage2 and log in to a server you see so many bots in the quests hunting grounds u cant even finish thouse quests and if it takes quite a while.
They even reduced drops and stuff but this is only hurting normal players and so they loose a lot players.
So yeah i think in game currency buyers, -sellers and also bot users are retarded low life people. Because they are the reason a lot games die or get destroyed.
Real money trading and pay to win are two very different concepts.
Real money trading = players trading with other players using real world money.
Pay to win = games, usually free to download and start playing, that have things the use pays the company to add to their character/setup, however the game devs make it in such a way that if you actually want to get on in the game then you have to buy things from them. Note also that not all free to play games do this or can be considered this.
"are unable to do it"
I have a busy life of staring at the ceiling most days. However I can memorise a list of weaknesses and time my clicks well should I find the need. With all the good content, guilds and whatever else being aimed at max level players and me being able to contribute to that world does it matter so much if I started with max level stuff? Now I agree we had a similar discussion for pokemon where my reasoning was "it takes basically no time and no skill to max a pokemon" where for the average online type game discussed here does take an enormous amount of time and at least a tiny bit of skill to time things properly.
Now real money trading, and the things that rise up with it, may well have rendered various games considerably less fun to play. I can well believe that, the question is was it bad game design to not allow for/account for that?
At various points I have chucked a high level weapon/money/whatever for free to newer players when I am a high level one, and I was not certainly not alone in that. What difference does it make if the low level user causes this to happen with some money?
Much of what you say may be true, I have certainly seen evidence for it and in some cases I would agree it is pretty distasteful, but you seem to be setting about explaining that in the wrong way.
On every seller uses bots....
let's not forget the issue of gold-farming sweatshops.
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/05/26/chinese-prisoners-used-as-gold-farmers/