ethical-behavior
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The WoW economy code of ethics
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Fox Van Allen and Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Feed Fox's ego by emailing him or tweeting him at @foxvanallen. There's nothing more American than the idea of making money off the labor of others. Wall Street was built on it. Presidential campaigns are built on it. Even World of Warcraft fortunes are built on it. If you want to be a member of the 1%, you have to do it off the labor of the 99%. The whole process sounds a lot more unethical than it really is. After all, just about any sale of a physical good involves someone else's labor. You may have put a lot of work into building that lemonade stand yourself, but did you work the fields to harvest the sugar cane? And while you may be the one selling that Darkmoon Card: Volcano trinket, were you the one who collected the thousands of herbs and Volatile Lifes? Or did you visit the Auction House and profit off a farmer's efforts? Profiting off of others is simply how money is made. But we have a social responsibility to make money the right way. Without an in-game legislature or an in-game court system, what rules and laws should we operate under? As the engines of the World of Warcraft economy, what are our ethical responsibilities? How do we make money without causing social harm?
Ask Massively: Go outdoors edition
Here is the salient piece of advice from this week's Ask Massively, right up front and in the intro paragraph -- go outdoors. Right now. Shut down your computer and go for a walk. Take a hike somewhere you've never been. Explore. Take some time to just walk around out in fresh air and sunlight, or heck, enjoy being rained on. But take the time to break from a routine in which you read a whole lot of words on the Internet and just go see what's outside for a few minutes at least. Really, this column will still be here after you're done. It'll wait. I'm hoping that the two or three of you that actually listened to that advice enjoyed your walk. For you (and slightly earlier for everyone who just skipped over that paragraph) we've got questions this week about gold farming and the consistent scourge of site bugs. If you've got a question you'd like to see answered in a future installment, just mail it along to ask@massively.com or leave your question in the comments.
