My name is Sevok, and I'm a RMT user.  I've been free of RMT for about 6 months. 

To those that know me, this will come as no surprise.  But I'm going to be perfectly honest with all of you readers here: I have spent thousands of dollars on RMT (Real Money Trading) activities over the past 8 or 9 years.  Mostly on game accounts (mostly EQ1 accounts), but also on currency and other stuff.  

I look(ed) at it this way: hobbies cost money.  If your hobby is, say, golf or skiing or stamp collecting or radio controlled aircraft, you spend lots of money, probably many hundreds and possibly into the thousands of dollars on that hobby.  Well, since 1997, my main hobby has been MMOs.  And I've spent lots on it!  But that's all changed now...

In the beginning, back in UO's heyday, RMT was gamer-to-gamer.  A player that had way more playtime than most, or had found a good way to earn lots of cash quickly would sell things to people with less playtime or who didn't know the secret.  It wasn't really a big deal.  Just players selling stuff to other players out of the game.  After EQ was released and shattered all subscriber records for MMOs, a few actual companies started engaging in RMT.  They were still owned and staffed by players but they were definitely companies and were doing it for serious profit.  IGE started this way.  Things were still sort of ok, because you either did RMT or you didn't, and if you didn't, it never really intruded on your game life.

That all changed about a year or so ago in World of Warcraft.  WoW had already blown away all subscriber numbers ever dreamed of, and a new breed of RMT company entered the arena in serious numbers.  This is the "Chinese RMT company".  Of course not all of them are Chinese, but unfortunately for the legitimate Chinese players, they take the rap for it.  Anyway these companies are not owned nor staffed by players.  They are simply businesses massively farming in game currency and items to sell.  They do not play the games, they do not care about the games, and they are using annoying and  disruptive business tactics such as mass spamming in game.  I doubt many players of WoW go a single play day without getting at least one "ZOMG BUY MY GOLD!!!!!!!!!!!!!2@" spam tell or in game mail. I can no longer support RMT in any fashion because of the involvement of these companies.

What can be done about it? Well, probably nothing.  WoW bans thousands of not tens of thousands of accounts per week for RMT spamming and the like.  But as people always point out, the accounts are usually just trial accounts and mean nothing to the RMT company.  Even their "real" accounts they use to farm and transfer gold don't mean much to them.  The only real way to stop RMT is to make it so that players have no desire to engage in RMT.  If the market disappears, so will the companies.  If no one's buying, they can't sell.  

Another possible way to fix it is to take the focus off so much difficulty in games.  WoW is an "easymode" game basically, but there are still things that are a little harder to obtain.  Mounts for instance, especially flying mounts with the BC expansion.  Your friends have them, you want them.  You can't play as much, so you might turn to RMT to help you get one.  Since I used to be a huge RMT user, I can explain at least my mentality.  I didn't enjoy being poor in real life.  Thankfully those days are behind me.  So why would I enjoy being poor in a game?  I don't!  So, I used RMT to negate that un-enjoyable portion of the games, thus having a much better experience.   There are other reasons.  Some people have really low playtime, but have friends that play that have high playtime.  In a lot of games, high level players cannot meaningfully group with low level players.  No one disagrees that a major attraction to MMOs is the social aspect: playing with friends.  So that low playtime person might turn to RMT (power leveling services in this case) to help stay evened up in levels with their friends.  A way to make that less likely to happen is to have "mentoring" type systems in games, where high level players can temporarily drop down in level to group with their lower level friends.  EQ2 and CoV/CoH both have this type of system, though in CoV/CoH, the low level character is temporarily made higher level to group with the high level person, I believe.  Never used it myself.

In the game I'm mostly playing now, Lord of the Rings Online, they've already banned a few hundred accounts just in open beta for RMT activities.  Yes, in Open Beta.  So far the LOTRO community seems rabidly anti-RMT, so maybe LOTRO can be made a relatively RMT-free game.  We can only hope.