I hated the pay wall cause it affected friends, it was annoying, but I understood it's necessity. I can see how most would hate it, but sometimes a one time minor pain can help avoid hours, days, weeks, months of more.
As for the rest, I see it like this:
by and large CO is a barren failure that even Cryptic has ignored up til now (making it really their fault) so there isn't a good reason to Gold Farm here.
NW is so terrible that you literally can't do much in PE without seeing Gold Farmers spamming day and night....ALL day and night. It used to be way worse, two or three working for the SAME SITE would spam there message 5 to 10 times in a ROW so it would be the only thing in the chat window, practically on each others heels. It was almost impossible to report spam one before the next one started. Recently they added an auto silence to anyone who talks more than three times in a row (or repeats the same message more than 3, not sure) all that has done is make them spam only three times in a row and much like the Mighty Hydra of old, you ignore one, two take it's place, still all day.
And interestingly enough, dispite STO's popularity their gold spammers haven't been too crazy, nothing like NW's at least. One random message here or there (unless they've changed since NW came out), it was annoying but no where NEAR the in your freaking face that NW has to deal with.
Annoying yes, but sometimes little pay walls help to limit those things, maybe not out right stop, but it makes a difference and eases your legit customers.
I think it was 5 dollars to talk in most channels. That change originally didn't go over as well at first but it did significantly decrease the gold farmer spam. Although the "pay real money" for PL spam was in force still.
In CO, haven't seen any Gold farmer spam.
Heard there were some in NW though.
Unknown about STO.
