farmers
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A snapshot of today's gold-selling/power-leveling market
GameSetWatch, the alt.blog on CMP's Gamasutra network of sites, has up a discussion with a gold-farming boss. "Mr. Smith" is one of the owners of a gold-selling site, and submitted an article looking at the current state of the virtual currency market - from his perspective. Smith makes two interesting points in his discussion: that power-leveling is now the 'growth industry' for RMT services, and that the newest workforce in the marketplace is ... wait for it ... North Korea.The cost of these power-leveling services has also dipped considerably as new players enter the marketplace. Competitive pressure has dropped the price from about $6/level to more like $2.50/level in World of Warcraft. All 70 levels now averages about $250, down from a high of almost $500.
The Daily Grind: Gold farming in your favorite game
Though not every game developer discusses it, pretty much any game with a currency has an issue with people farming for funds and reselling them for real world cash. What we're asking you for this morning's Daily Grind is how farmers impact your game play experience. Are they a daily hassle? Do you have to fight them for the best farming spots? Have they caused massive inflation in your game's economy? Are they constantly spamming you with messages? Or are they completely inconspicuous? Let us know the game you're playing and how gold farmers have changed -- or not changed -- the way you play.
FFXI "Special Task Force" takes on cheaters
Square Enix proves once again that they are willing to bring the hurt on people who use hacks or exploits to gain an unfair advantage over other players or destabilize the economy of Final Fantasy XI. In a Special Task Force Report, they break down the approximately 8000 bans and suspensions that they've doled out since this time last month. Among the groups most actively targeted are people using illegal fishing bots, Chinese gil farmers, and people abusing the auction house system for use in real money trading schemes. In so doing, Square plucked a staggering 2.3 billion gil from the hands of cheaters and money traders.It makes you wonder why more companies aren't actively reporting the numbers of exploiters and gold farmers that they're busting every month. It's not like we don't know the practice exists, just tell us what you're going to do to stop it!
Farmers and Warcraft players in the US of A
This blog post is careening around the blogsphere at large, and it probably behooves us to mention it here on WoW Insider, considering the points it makes about WoW players. It's a variation on the red state/blue state argument, in that it points out that there are actually more Warcraft players in the United States today than there are professional farmers. And so, says the piece, when someone, be they politician or pundit or newscaster, says that "the real America" is rural farmland where people are more likely to be milking cows than running Karazhan, they're wrong.There are a few problems with this argument, of course, one of which is admitted to in the article: farming and World of Warcraft-playing are hardly mutually exclusive. Just because you read blogs and play MMOs doesn't mean you're not a person who wakes up in the morning and gets your eggs out from under chickens. The other issue is that if you're going to start fighting nostalgia, you're going to lose. Every generation looks at the future (or in this case, the rapidly approaching present) and compares it unfavorably to the past. I've always thought it amazing that someday we will have someone in the White House who knows how to get 30 extra lives in Contra, and that person will probably look at the new holo-vid-games that come out in 2016 and say "when we were young, we played with buttons and thumbsticks!"But back to the issue at hand: it's true-- America is becoming a technological, urban country, and whether you like it or not (politics completely aside, because I know how much you guys like those on this gaming blog), it's a fact that a person on the street is more likely to know what day Brewfest starts rather than when the summer solstice hits. Sure, we're not seeing the latest class changes on the evening news, but we are seeing Warcraft selling trucks, and whether newscasters and politicians are recognizing it or not, the MMO culture is becoming more and more massive every day.
Azeroth Interrupted: Introducing a column about balancing life in Azeroth with life on Earth
Each week, Robin Torres contributes Azeroth Interrupted, a column about balancing real life with WoW.My husband, who plays WoW 5 to 6 hours a day at a minimum, informed me the other day that playing video games in general and WoW in particular was very unproductive. Most people would give him the Captain Obvious award, but I consider the timing of the statement a bit odd, considering WoW Insider just hired me to write a regular column (yay!) about balancing real life with WoW. Certainly, playing WoW can range from being a very pleasant escape to ruining your life, but that is actually the case with any hobby or recreational activity. The fact is that, with a little effort and planning and lots of learning from mistakes, you can successfully balance real life with WoW and even use WoW to make real life better. There are many examples of WoW players using their hobby for being productive, and I am not even talking about the despised and pitiable gold farmers. I'm also not talking about the Blizzard employees, because anyone in the video game biz can tell you that working on a video game can not only ruin your fun in that game, it can make you not want to play any video game at all for a while. But there are people who use the social aspects of WoW for professional networking, there are the professionally sponsored arena teams and there are people who actually put their WoW playtime on their resumes. Of course, there is more to life than just making money and WoW can help there, too.
WoW Moviewatch: The BBC on WoW
Proving that World of Warcraft is a big enough phenomenon for even the most mainstream media to notice, this three-minute clip features BBC reporters attempting to explain gold farming and buying to a non-gamer audience. While the information may not be terribly informative to those of us who already play and understand the game, it's usually interesting to see how exactly the media attempts to portray gamers to the larger public. Previously on Moviewatch...
Hello! Are you a farmbot?
I've run in to more than a few farmbots in my day -- often in Winterspring, while farming Timbermaw reputation. The furbolg you had to kill to gain favor with the Timbermaw also happened to drop good coin and runecloth, making them lucrative targets for farmers. The bots (characters controlled by a computer program of some sort rather than a human being) were always easy to spot. They'd follow a set circuit around the area, taking down targets one at a time. When the area was empty, they would return to a spot near its center and spin around in circles until they managed to target a fresh spawn -- and then they'd begin running an identical circuit. Depending on the particular farmbot, sometimes I could game their system and let them farm reputation for me. See they've targeted something? Assist them and use an instant attack to tap it before they can -- back when I was doing my reputation farming, the farmbots didn't have seem the intelligence to notice if something had been tapped after they've targeted it and sent in their pet to attack. (They were, of course, always hunters.) A real person would certainly be annoyed by this behavior, but the farmbots would simply continue their cycle.However, a post up on Kinless' Chronicles makes me wonder if the farmbots have managed to get smarter. Kinless noticed an orc hunter constantly (from 4AM to 4PM, server time) mining thorium in the Eastern Plaguelands. That information alone simply screams farmbot to me, but there's more to the story that makes me wonder. On one encounter with this suspicious hunter, Kinless decided to follow him along his farming route. The hunter dismounted in Hearthglen and started to fight the elite guards there. Figuring that anything worth this much effort to an obvious bot must be wealth indeed, Kinless ventured inside to see what was there. And inside? He found not a single thorium vein and he barely made it out alive. But in his chat box, our friendly farmer was kind enough to wave him farewell before mounting up and leaving. Kinless explains the quandary:This is a live player, with brains, who does nothing but farm mineral nodes across Azeroth. (I later noted him in the Barrens, Winterspring, Burning Steppes.) He does nothing but farm, and plays round the clock, and does not own the expansion. He's certainly not funding a main, or a twink, since he's got no time. And it's a live player since he played that little trick on me.This isn't possibly an entertaining way to play the game, so what's happening here? Is it an improved intelligence bot? (Now with new player-baiting technology!) Or are we seeing live players out farming for real world profits? Unless we can get them to start answering whispers, we may never find out.
Cellphones are dangerous/not dangerous, bee killing edition
Apparently, we should all feel incredibly guilty for simply using our cellphones, as not only are we encouraging the growth of ear tumors within our bodies, but now we're hearing that radiation flying out from our mobiles are demolishing the world's supply of crops. All jesting aside, a controversial report is now claiming that "radiation from mobile phones are interfering with bees' navigation systems, preventing the famously homeloving (and pollinating) species from finding their way back to their hives." The comically-named Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) is reportedly being seen on a much larger scale in the US and Europe, and elusive "evidence" is purportedly backing these dodgy claims up. Backers of the shocking data are even going so far as to suggest that in the future, our refusal to set aside the cellphone could cause "massive food shortages as the world's harvests fail." Man, this sounds worse than Y2K, for sure.[Via Slashdot]
WoW Moviewatch: Chronicles of a Goldfarmer 2: Ni Hao This!
Yesterday we saw the first episode in TotalHalibut's Chronicles of a Goldfarmer series, and today we're jumping straight into the second. (Sorry, folks, there's no episode 3 lined up for tomorrow. We'll just have to wait for TotalHalibut to put together another one.) So sit back, relax, and enjoy more goldfarmer stalking at its finest.Previously on Moviewatch...
WoW Moviewatch: Chronicles of a Goldfarmer
This video is hardly new -- its time stamp places it squarely in the middle of summer 2006 -- but it remains entertaining nevertheless. Just what the World of Warcraft needed: real investigative journalism on Azeroth's true scourge, the goldfarmer! Previously, on Moviewatch...
WoW Moviewatch: Machinima with a conscience
Hugh Hancock from Strange Company (one of the coolest ideas for a company on the planet: they produce machinima professionally) sent us his latest work, part of a campaign in support of Fair Trade, the foundation that works around the world against inequality and exploitation for Third-World farmers. I wasn't sure what to expect when I first loaded it up, but it turned out pretty good. That poor troll! What is Runecloth selling for on the AH now? Somehow I doubt the corporations that take advantage of farmers around the world are orcs in suits saying "Monopolies FTW," but it seems close enough. Kudos to Hugh and company for bringing social and economic ethics to the world of Azeroth.
Bot Spotting 101
Doc Robot has a short but sweet guide to how to spot a botter (or, sometimes, a farmer) wandering around the World of Warcraft. Warning signs: they behave erratically, don't answer tells, use repeated attack patterns, and so on and so forth. Chances are that if, like me, you play on one of the higher population servers, you've seen this stuff happening, even if you didn't know at the time exactly what you were dealing with.My own bot story is pretty funny-- I was leveling my rogue through Stranglethorn Vale, killing and skinning panthers to grind and make some money. Along comes a paladin-- she walks right up to a panther near me, and proceeds to kill it. I play on a PVE server, but I've got no love for the alliance, so I did what I thought was an appropriately undead rogue-y thing to do and I ninja'ed the skin from her on that kill. She tried to skin, failed, and... moved onto the next mob. I got no reaction out of her at all. So I let her kill the next mob, beat her to the skin again, and still nothing. I did this three or four times, and I didn't get so much an emote out of her-- not even an angry look.I couldn't believe that someone would let me get away with this, so even despite the fact that she was a few levels ahead of me, I went ahead and flipped my PVP flag on, and threw down a few /taunts. Still nothing-- she just keep rolling on in her pattern without even acknowledging I was there. By then, of course, I knew I was dealing with a bot, and so for an hour or so, I tagged her panthers, let her kill them and gain experience for me, and then ninja'ed the skin out every time. Wonder if that botter was surprised that his paladin wasn't very productive that hour.Unfortunately, I never did report her, which is what you're supposed to do when you find a character botting or farming (as the article says, it's usually a hunter, so my guess is that my paladin was simply being powerleveled). Blizzard is doing everything they can to battle this stuff, but my guess is that it's much more rampant than even they will admit. Have you seen a bot? What did you do when you discovered it?
To /afk or not to /afk...
Right now, at least, I'd recommend not. It's hard to walk into a battleground these days without noticing at least one player who's not doing anything but sitting quietly near the battleground entrance gaining honor and reputation. Perhaps they're using a bot or perhaps they're watching a movie and occasionally pressing the space bar -- either way, they're a nuisance at best. And when this post showed up on the customer service forums, I couldn't help but be surprised. Because while Blizzard would previously take action against players using bots or hacks to prevent them from going AFK during a battleground, now they seem to be prepared to act against any players "who are not actively participating" in a battleground. The wording is still very vague, but this could mean a crackdown on AFK players -- regardless of method.
Breakfast Topic: Dealing with Bots
Last week we saw a couple of entertaining ways to deal with bots. However, the entertaining is not always the practical - and if you don't play a priest on a PvP server, the methodology contained in those videos isn't going to help you much. For my part, if I encounter an obvious bot I'll tend to look for somewhere else to grind - it's not always easy to beat the speed of an automated hunterbot, and trying to tends to just be frustrating. But how do you deal with bots? And do you, perhaps, have advice for the rest of us?
MMOs and the Secondary Market
The Escapist has a good article discussing the secondary market of various MMOs. It doesn't focus on World of Warcraft, but gives an interesting broader picture on the practice of buying and selling currency in virtual worlds. The question of whether players can remain competitive at this point without the aid of additional financial is a curious one. In Azeroth, additional gold, BOE items, or power-leveling can certainly be of help, but are they necessary to keep up with the rest of the players? For PvP, I'm tempted to answer "yes" - as the bar to reach the upper ranks of the honor system is so high as to make it neigh impossible for many players to reach - unless they do nothing but take short breaks for sleeping and eating between play sessions for weeks on end.
On the topic of farmers...
My priest has been, for some time now, looking for a pattern for the Truefaith Vestments - the epic crafted priest robes. While I would occasionally see a Robe of the Archmage or a Robe of the Void pattern, I've not seen any of my own. However, over the past couple of weeks, I've seen more and more Robe of the Archmage patterns - as seen above. The cost has dropped dramatically, as well - what once sold for a hundred gold and up is now, as you see, more often selling for 30 to 40, when they sell at all.This has started to puzzle me, as the pattern drops off of Pyromancers in lower Blackrock Spire, of which there are few, and difficult to get to. I've gone with a number of groups that refuses to attempt the pull with the Pyromancers, simply because it's large and difficult. So where then, do these patterns come from? Several commenters on Thottbot claim that you can solo your way to the right area with the use of stealth or invisibility potions, and one poster goes into some detail about two rogues taking the group down with timely use of sap, vanish, and evasion. But even if the pattern can be acquired with the efforts of one or two players, this doesn't explain the sudden appearance of so many in the marketplace. It's possible that the drop rate has been increased, but it seems unlikely that the drop rate of one of the epic robe patterns would go up while the other two remain the same. In my past experience with the game, a sudden flood of rare items on the market has been an indication of a new farming technique or hack, allowing farmers to now easily acquire something that was usually difficult. (For an example of similar circumstances in the past, see this old Dire Maul hack.) However, at present, there's no evidence one way or the other - so this remains simply an oddity...
Breakfast Topic: Fewer Farmers?
I wrote a while back about an odd lack of farmers on my own realm at the time. And, with yesterday's additional account closures, I wonder if other realms are starting to see similar relief. Will Blizzard's continued efforts against the gold selling community really have a long term impact on the game's economy? Or will the farmers simply continue finding new methods to avoid Blizzard's watchful eye? I personally think it will be a constant battle on Blizzard's part - but if they stick to this sort of approach, they can make farming sufficiently difficult that it may become a less lucrative business. But that's a long-term view - the important thing for current players is how are conditions today? Does your realm seem to be lacking in farmers since all of these account closures?
59,000 More Accounts Closed
In their continued effort to rid Azeroth of hackers and gold farmers, Eyonix announced this evening that 59,000 accounts were closed during the month of June for terms of use violations. Have you seen anyone behaving suspiciously on your server? An account that's being controlled by a bot isn't too difficult to spot if you spend a bit of time paying attention - and Blizzard investigates all reports. So if you suspect such behavior, report it to a GM, and help the community be rid of the annoyance of hackers and bot farmers.
Missing in Action: Bot Farmers
Complaints on the forums suggest that they aren't really gone, but I've noticed an astonishing lack of them on my own server in recent weeks. All of the obvious bots - the ones who followed a specific pattern through the same area day after day - seem to be missing lately, making farming Timbermaw reputation a nearly pleasant affair, having only to compete with the human reflexes of other players.While I'm thrilled to see this lack of farmers on my own server, I have to wonder if any of it will last. At the end of last week, I pointed my web browser in the direction of a major gold-selling site to see to see what I could find out. I checked the stock on gold for US servers, and for nearly all servers saw the text "NOT IN STOCK! PRE-ORDER THIS ITEM NOW AND RECEIVE CURRENCY AS SOON AS WE RESTOCK." Another check today yielded much the same results. The servers that do have gold available for order only had it in smaller quantities (if you can consider 200 gold a small quantity). Does this imply that Blizzard's continued efforts to weed out gold-sellers starting to have a notable impact, or is this just a temporary setback on the part of the gold-farming professionals?
Blizzard Closes Another Round of Accounts
In their never-ending war against the evil gold farmers of the planet, Blizzard has announced that during the month of May, over 30,000 accounts have been suspended, removing over 30 million in gold from the economy across all servers. Now, just look at those numbers for a moment: 30 thousand accounts closed. That's a number of subscribers that many small game companies would love to claim as their entire playerbase, and those are not only just the cheaters in WoW, but only the ones who got caught! And 30 million gold out of the economy...that's...well, I'm actually not sure what the hell that means, because I'm not an economist. i'm sure Ben Stien could tell you.In any case, the bottom line is, don't cheat, or Blizzard will get you. If they're lucky. You can read the full announcement at the official homepage right here.
