Any of you lucky enough to have never experienced the World of Warcraft might not be aware of the vast underground industry that exists to supply impatient players with gold and high level characters. As the story goes, somewhere out there, armies of geeks sweat away in basements turning Warcraft gold into top dollar, or yen, depending on who you talk to.

The biggest battle faced by Blizzard Entertainment (the makers of Warcraft) is keeping control of the endless wave of spam on the chat channels from companies attempting to sell players this ‘illegal’ gold. It’s all pretty basic stuff, just slap ‘cheap gold at www.warcraft-gold.com’ up on the chat channel a few hundred times until the account gets pulled, set up a new account and repeat ad infinitum.

I’ve been bored silly by the game for ages now but after a couple of weeks immersed in Credit Crunch stories it seemed like great time to exit reality – looks like I picked a good moment too.

Just after entering one of the capital cities ‘MMOINN.com’ was slowly spelt out on the floor with dead Gnomes, to the excitement of my fellow players. Hats off to the programmers who pulled off this spectacle however, as the letters began to fade away someone asked me what it said, before answering I had to double check this screen shot to be sure, leading to the enevitble conclusion that when using dead Gnomes, the message is in fact more important than the medium.