Simon Carless takes a look at infamous middle-man for MMO currency, items and characters, IGE, via an interview with Chief Operating Officer James Clarke. It’s a pretty interesting read with details like how IGE doesn’t actualy employ anyone directly farming gold or items, IGE’s interpretation of item and currency rights despite the individual games’ EULA or TOS stipulations and how, for the time being at least, they’re treating their recent acquisition of MMO community sites like Allakhazam, Thottbot and OGaming entirely seperate from their trading operations.

I’ve been active on Allakhazam’s FFXI forums for a while and news of the acquisition didn’t go over too well with some folks, but so far everything seems to be going as it normally has on there.