Initially, trades in real time was conducted informally. "You might buy some gold from a friend at high school." Jacob Reed, one of OSRS gold  the most popular creators of YouTube videos about RuneScape known as Crumb via email. Later, demand for gold outpaced supply, and some players became full-time gold farmers or those who generate on-game currency and sell it for real-world currency.

Internet-age miners have always been part of the massively multiplayer internet games or MMOs such as Ultima Online and World of Warcraft. They even worked on several text-based virtual realms, claimed Julian Dibbell, now a technology transactions lawyer who used to write about virtual economies as a journalist.

In the past of these gold-miners were primarily placed in China. They hunkered down in improvised factories, where they slaughtered virtual ogres and pillaged their bodies during 12-hour shifts. There were even instances of Chinese government employing prisoners to run a gold farm.

In RuneScape the black market economy that the gold farmers benefited from was quite small until 2013. Many players were not happy with how much the computer game has evolved since it first introduced in 2001. They asked Jagex to bring back the previous version. Jagex made available a previous version of its archive, and users flocked back to what came to be called Old School RuneScape.

A lot of them were just like Mobley. They played RuneScape when they were teenagers and loved the sharp graphics and the fun soundtrack. Even though these 20- to 30-year-olds had time to themselves when they were younger however, they were now juggling responsibilities beyond homework.

"People have jobs, have families potentially," said Stefan Kempe another well-known YouTuber of RuneScape that has more than 200,000 followers and goes by the nickname SoupRS, in an interview. "It's an impediment to cheap RuneScape gold the amount of time they can spend playing all day long."