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Blizzard has taken a stand against this (going so far as to shut down peons4hire and acquiring their web domain) and adding the "report spam" feature in chat to quickly remove Mabinogi Gold spammers from the game.
The spamming is a bit of a nuisance on normal servers, but on RP servers it can completely ruin the attitude and setting of someone. Also, gold farmers tend to key log people in order to gain access to their account. They then strip them of their gold and either sell all of their gear as well or use them to spam advertisements or to farm more gold, with either resulting in them being banned.
This has a much smaller impact on the economy, as ISK is not being generated to be sold; however, the eve ISK still must be farmed by someone in order to be spent.
This did not stop gold sellers on EVE, but it reduced their numbers by a large amount, and deterred people from risking their accounts when they want to buy eve ISK and offered them a safe alternative.
SOE is more towards the far end, where they set up a shop where players are able to safely buy and sell gold and characters to each other, and SOE handles the transaction.