Initially, trades in real-time was conducted informally. "You might buy some gold from a friend you met at OSRS gold high school." Jacob Reed, one of the most popular creators of YouTube videos on RuneScape who goes by Crumb, wrote via email. Later, the demand for gold surpassed supply which led to some players becoming full-time gold farmers or those who generate the currency in game to trade for real-world currency.

Internet-age miners were always associated with hugely multiplayer games or MMOs, including Ultima Online or World of Warcraft. They also worked in several text-based virtual realms, claimed Julian Dibbell, now a technology transactions lawyer who wrote about virtual economies as a journalist.

In the past, a lot of these gold miners were primarily placed in China. Many hid in makeshift factories, where they slaughtered virtual ogres and scavenged their corpses in 12-hour shifts. There were even reports of the Chinese government using prisoners to gold farm.

In RuneScape the black market economy that gold farmers supported was rather small until the year 2013. People were unhappy with how much the computer game has evolved since it first introduced in 2001. Therefore, they demanded the developer to reinstate the previous version. Jagex released a version from its archive, and users were eager to play what would come to osrs fire cape service be called Old School RuneScape.