A very geared Everquest account has gone for stupidly high amounts of money. Several of my friends were in Afterlife when it was a top 2 or 3 guild across all servers, at the height of Everquest. When they finally quit the game, their accounts made them $500-$1000 for the platinum and then $5000-$8000 (US) for the characters themselves.

Warcraft comparably is stupidly easy to gear up a toon. Unlike Everquest, it is not a two year process with a raiding guild which puts in 40 hours a week, to reach "top 5 on the server" status for your class. If it took you 25x longer to reach 85th and two to three years before you reached BiS or a close item in each slot after reaching 85th... characters might go for a lot more.

Taking into consideration, 80-100 hours to reach 85th from 1st without RAF if you have a half decent idea of what to do, where to go, etc... and possibly less than half that time, for someone following a quest stacking guide or playing with RAF, etc... For someone who enjoys the game, this is not a monotonous and painful grind, but a fun process. Classic + BC (Battlechest) + WotLK + Cata = $120. If you value your time at $10/hr (which is what you'd make flipping burgers here), and assume you could level to 85 in say 60 hours... You would need 60 x 10 = 600 + 120 = $720 or more for an undergeared character. If you wanted to do a pvp grind for full honor gear and say three weeks of points for the Conquest weapons, that's likely another 40 hours. I don't see an ungeared toon selling for $700+ or a decently geared character selling for over $1000 in Warcraft.

In an environment where it was painful to level, and a 15-30 minute death loop (whether dying at your bind point repeatedly, or dying 6-8 times retrieving your corpse) could set you back 20-25 hours of leveling... The half geared characters at maximum level, the equivalent of a level 85 with full honor gear and a conquest weapon (was actually full Skyshrine - Halls of Testing gear) would go for $1000 or so. I could level and gear two of these at once over the course of a month.

Having played Everquest for six or seven years, putting massive amounts of time into the game and doing lots of stuff that was quite fun... Then turning it into a business for eight or nine months. Sure it was enough to pay for my limited bills at the time, and got me by. A full time job, flipping burgers would have been close to $1600 a month gross. I was making $2000-$2400/mo, which is a bit better. But this was more like 80 hours a week (weekends included) where the burgers would have been 40 hours (half the time). And the worst part, my own toons which had been so fun to play up until 2-3 months into the character business, were a boring monotonous grind where I didn't have any fun playing them.

At the start of Warcraft, looking at the character selling site I had used (playerauctions) for the EQ characters, Warcraft characters were going for $300. Even if I were to crank out four characters a month (twice what I had been doing with EQ), the money was not there. Plus, being a new game Warcraft was actually fun and I wanted to log in to play my characters (was two-boxing, with two machines no hardware/software... exactly the same as EQ except two boxes instead of six).

So selling characters financially is not a good option. Selling gold is no good, if you were to rely on your own accounts to generate it. And going the keylog route and screwing another person out of their gold would never be an option for me. I might be vindictive enough to bring a higher team and camp someone for an hour, if they flagged (Carebear server) to take out my lower toons who inadvertently became flagged for something. But I won't ever put someone through the aggravation/pain of a hacked account.

Not really a hard choice -- play the game and enjoy it as a recreational activity (even if I sometimes "log" 100+ hours in a week), and never really consider it as a business opportunity. The money is not there, which is a good thing because the fun factor goes away very quickly if your recreational activity becomes your money maker.