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leaving aside the ethics of gold farming/gold selling, what bugs me the most about banner advertising of any kind (generally sourced, as content, from some third party) is that it can, and often does, contain malware... and the site serving it to the user then becomes a facilitator of that malware. even Blizzard was selling banner space for a while, which was (IMO, as far as i can tell) responsible for a number of things being delivered to my system that i would have preferred to keep out, and/or stuff that crashed IE reliably, etc.
hence, i block all adds using a captive proxy server, and i tend to browse a site with something like Opera or Firefox first (i.e. a browser that does not have a lot of fancy, microsoft-proprietary active control capability), and if the site seems too "flashy", operates as a platform for a lot of advertising, i steer clear of it.
in general, i think the temptation to turn a popular "community" site into a revenue stream needs to be balanced against the safety of the community. and policing the providers of your advertising content can be a full-time job. which is worse, destitution or unwitting redistribution of malware? i don't know.
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