GoldFarming
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The truth about gold farming
MTV has posted a brief, but revealing look at life within China's gold farming "workshops." Sales of virtual goods will reportedly reach $9 billion by 2009, overtaking sales of actual games, but at the expense of hundreds of thousands of exploited workers, who may earn as little as 500 Yuan per month (roughly $65). The featurette, taken from a documentary in-progress, turns a critical eye toward brokers like Interactive Game Entertainment (IGE), which allegedly support China's so-called sweatshops.MTV also has an interview with filmmaker Ge Jin, which provides further insight into the range of conditions one might experience working as a gold farmer. As it turns out, many of these "factories" are not as perilous as we imagine.
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.
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.
The Economics of Warcraft
This interesting article attempts to explain the economics of Azeroth in terms of real life economic theory. As players, I'm sure we can all poke holes in this theoretical view of our favorite game, or perhaps find the lack of game knowledge frustrating. For example... Goods rarely cost less in the neutral auction house (though sometimes lower prices will reflect lower prices on the Alliance or Horde side - but usually neutral prices are jacked up to the highest possible profit rate), due to the higher cut the Goblins take out of the transaction. Trade-skill items are of less economic importance than seems to be placed on them - very few craftable items being desirable, long-term, over bind on pickup drops found in dungeons. And it does not consider Blizzard's continued efforts to rid the game of gold farmers, which has an ongoing (though variable) impact on the available supply of gold in the economy. However, it is always interesting to see how real economic theory can apply to a virtual game world, and I would say the article is worth a read.Update: The comments below may well shed more light on the subject than the initial article - so read on!
Interview With Author of Synthetic Worlds
We reported a while back on Edward Castranova, one of the prominent economist studying the economy of MMO's. Businessweek Online has a featured interview with Mr. Castranova (I wonder if he's related to the new drummer for Journey?), in which he discusses his new book on the subject, and the future of online MMO economies.The economic aspects of MMO's are a fascinating subject for me, as I've said before, and this article is a great read for anyone interested in the subject. You can find the full interview here.
Breakfast Topic: Have your say about our ads
We've had a few discussions here about gold farming, and we're well aware that thanks to some of the keywords on this site, the Google AdSense ads displayed here can be incongruous with the message we are trying to get across. While we've had to leave the adverts as-is so far, we want your feedback on this issue, and we're prepared to act -- how important is the content of our advertisements to you?Technologically speaking, we can block certain ads based on their URLs, but as more sites spread and more domains spring up, this isn't going to help too much. Of course, we know that most of you aren't going to buy gold, so if you do click on the adverts you're costing the gold sellers money -- doing this, and making advertising expensive for them, could be one way to combat the problem.What would you do in our position?
Breakfast Topic: Fun with campers
The humble camper is a life-form frequently encountered amongst the many zones -- often found in great numbers throughout high-level areas in particular. By sticking to one particular spot based on a number of factors -- primarily aiming to harvest particular drops for fun and profit -- campers cause high-level questers a lot of trouble. I've had numerous encounters with level 60 campers who decide that pulling every mob in the area, all at once, is a good tactic to maximise drops -- indeed it is, but when there are other players there waiting to complete a quest, it's not a particularly nice tactic. Of course, on PvP servers you can add ganking into the equation, making it often more fun for the would-be quester to give up rather than waste several hours on one quest.Have you had bad camping experiences? Any tips to deal with those who just refuse to budge? Or are you a camper, and willing to defend your stance?Asking politely is one way to deal with campers, but it only gets you so far -- nowhere, when it comes to the opposite faction. Irritating them so that they'll give up is another tactic that I've seen employed, but can't bring myself to try. Ultimately, there isn't much you can do to stop people camping, especially when they ignore you -- but don't dismiss them all as gold farmers without a second glance. Some may be questers just like you.
Gold farming mogul comes clean
It's rare to hear gold farmers speak up and give details on their business, which is exactly what the folks at Terra Nova have unearthed. Despite the stereotype, not all gold, plat or gil farmers in massively multiplayer games are Chinese; an American farmer who made something approaching $150,000 in a year from platinum harvesting has come forward on an Everquest board to speak out.This history of gold farming in Everquest, from a first-person perspective, is fascinating. However, if this farmer is indicative of the profession, then it seems that foreign competition and the use of exploits are seriously threatening "home-grown" farmers' businesses. As Terra Nova points out, the question is whether anyone other than the farmers really cares.
The history of real money trading in MMOs
There have been some hefty discussions going on recently at WoW Insider concerning buying gold and accounts, and the subject of gold farming's fast becoming a favourite amongst MMO commentators. However, the phenomenon of real money trading (RMT) is not a new one, and Terra Nova have been digging into its history.An interesting comment is that powerlevelling another character wasn't originally a service done for cash: "Men did it for women in the hope or expectation of some kind of emotional or physical relationship." Nice work if you can get it. According to Richard Bartle and Jessica Mulligan, selling items for money dates back to about 1987, and character sales have been happening since at least 1989. However, both were on a much smaller scale than the items available to purchase through eBay today; the universally-known auction site has certainly helped RMT take off and attain a much higher profile than it had in its early days.
Our attitudes to gold farming
The Daedalus Project has an interesting article up, which talks about a subject we've covered here before--gold farmers. However, Nick Yee uses the article to address the way we talk about gold farming and the picture we usually paint of the subject. He talks about whether all farmers are Chinese, and our ways of identifying and interacting with farmers. On the European servers, I haven't run across any obvious gold farmers; they seem more widespread on the American servers, possibly because of the larger customer base. It's interesting to examine the sub-culture and our attitude to it, though, especially as many people seem reluctant to talk about it.
