The first time, real-world trading occurred informally. "You may buy gold from a fellow student at the school." Jacob Reed, known as a prolific creator of YouTube videos about RuneScape known as Crumb in RuneScape gold an email to me. Then, the demand for gold exceeded supply, and some players became full-time gold farmers or players who create in-game currency which they sell for real money.

Internet-based miners have always been associated with by massively multiplayer online gaming or MMOs such as Ultima Online and World of Warcraft. They even worked on some text-based virtual worlds, declared Julian Dibbell, now a technology transactions lawyer who used to write about virtual economies in his journalistic work.

In the past, a lot of these gold farmers were resided in China. They hunkered down in improvised factories, where they slaughtered virtual ogres as well as looted their bodies during 12-hour shifts. There were even stories of Chinese government using prisoners to build gold farms.

In RuneScape, the black-market economy supported by gold farmers was rather small until the year 2013. Players had been dissatisfied with the extent to which the game had changed since it was first launched in 2001. Therefore, they demanded the developer to reinstate a prior version. Jagex published a new version of the game from its archives, and players went back to cheap OSRS gold what later came to be known as Old School RuneScape.