Gold-Farming Growing - BBC

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Gold-Farming Growing - BBC

Post by Steve Farrelly @ 02:15pm 22/08/08 | 40 Comments

BBC News has an article about something we've all heard about - Gold-Farming. According to the report, "nearly half a million people are employed in developing countries earning virtual goods in online games".

While this isn't necessarily new news, it is alarming that little seems to be being done about it with an estimated 400,000 people in China alone, logged on and farming for precious in-game gold.

Manchester University says the young people, described in the study as "playbourers", sell gold or other virtual goods, despite the practice being against the rules of many online games.

Have you ever bought farmed gold for your respective MMORPG? What are your thoughts on the topic?

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Mr Hardware
Posted 02:16pm 22/8/08

Awesome thread title!

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sif greazy
Posted 02:21pm 22/8/08

A lot of people 'survive' on farmed gold. It's really sad that you pay to play and then you pay more for gold.

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Steve Farrelly
Posted 02:21pm 22/8/08

It's funny these News Posts are still referred to as threads

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Term
Posted 02:25pm 22/8/08

if you're viewing it in a forum as he maybe technically it IS a thread :)

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reso
Posted 02:28pm 22/8/08

Yeah they're all threads to most of us since we see the new posts you make on the ausgamers.com front page in the QGL (and other) forums and are able to reply to them directly.

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Steve Farrelly
Posted 02:29pm 22/8/08

Hehe yer, just stirring the QGL pot ;)

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TicMan
Posted 02:33pm 22/8/08

China needs more avatar-setting-up-farmers.

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infi
Posted 02:34pm 22/8/08

really i come for the news but stay for the replies.

(actually i never came for the news)

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d0mino
Posted 02:43pm 22/8/08

i guess it shows that there is massive demand for alternate sources of in game currency. its a shame that wow hasn't adopted a free to play model and sold gold themselves to fund it.

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Fireblood
Posted 03:17pm 22/8/08

When I played WoW (2-3-4 years ago? about a year from when it came out)
I bought gold....it was like $10, and saved me hours of in game time.
Also my Dad played WoW and i bought him gold to buy a mount for christmas, was able to log on at like midnight Dec 24th, buy the gold and have it in his mail box by christmas morning!
He was stoked and spent a lot of the morning riding around on his new mount, ha ha!

All of that aside, WoW is a evil life sucking game and I am glad to be rid of it! (Although I still keep up to date with WoW threads etc....is that an addiction?)

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Jim
Posted 03:23pm 22/8/08

http://goldfarmer.ytmnd.com/

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Hogfather
Posted 03:25pm 22/8/08

I sold some plat in EQ once. I was a student and it fixed a fair few Christmas problems!

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Tollaz0r!
Posted 03:30pm 22/8/08

Yes, yes it is.

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Le Cock
Posted 03:43pm 22/8/08

Why don't they just make items cheaper in these games so you don't need to spend 1000 hours farming gold or paying for it?

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reso
Posted 03:45pm 22/8/08

because then every one could have that magic item!

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Obes
Posted 03:49pm 22/8/08

Le Cock and Domino ...

Put simply, the items only have "value" because they take time to acquire, remove that and they have no value (to most people they already have no value). No ingame economy leads to things in game having no value, improving your "e-value" is all these games are. wowjitsu and be.imba.hu are examples of ways to measure that.

If we wanted to play games for fun we'd all still be playing Doom and or Quake (and not the poofter pansy 'so-called' sequels).

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CaPt0
Posted 04:01pm 22/8/08

Although gold farming is a big issue and was the cause of alot of spam I think Blizzard have done a very good job of trying to combat it with things liek changing the ingame currency for items from gold to badges. Badges take you effort to self earn and no money can simply buy them for you. Sure you could pay some "farmer" to collect x number of heroic badges for you.

It is also good to see that Blizzard have also tried to help the in game gold farming with making gold more readily available to everyone. 30 minutes of "daily" quests gives you more than enough gold to raid for a week and they also ensure the raid bosses now drop sufficient amount of gold to cover the repair bills etc in game.

I am not sure what other mmo's are like but I do think Blizzard have done a good job to reduce the need to buy gold.

People will still buy gold, i have mates that do it regularly simply because they don't have the 1 hour of play time each week to top off their collection.

I still think though that the biggest problem is levellin services more so than gold farming. It is a pain and boring now day to level your x character through the same content when you can pay like $100 for that 48 hours of play time.

Still all this aside just employ your brothers wife to play by day and be your personal gold farmer like i do :P I pay the subscription, she plays by day i play by night, perfect arrangement

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Le Cock
Posted 04:25pm 22/8/08

Paying so you can play the game less. Somethings not right here!

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Scooter
Posted 04:31pm 22/8/08

SquareEnix for FFXI have just flat out Banned quite a few 'Regions' in China.
I know 2 people (one that lives and one that was there for work) that got caught up in the ban and Se basically said, Tough Shit that area is mostly RMT so you're all blocked.

Really you have to stop the people buying it. From some of the posters here (that are much more open about buying gold for WOW then anyone i've met in FFXI) that doesn't seem like it going to happen any time soon.

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Martz
Posted 04:42pm 22/8/08

Paying so you can play the game less. Somethings not right here!

I don't think it's that black and white, but it is indeed sad.

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deadlyf
Posted 04:48pm 22/8/08

It is also good to see that Blizzard have also tried to help the in game gold farming with making gold more readily available to everyone. 30 minutes of "daily" quests gives you more than enough gold to raid for a week and they also ensure the raid bosses now drop sufficient amount of gold to cover the repair bills etc in game.

Wouldn't that inflate the price of everything though? I know when I was playing it was really expensive to buy low level items because you had to compete against level 70's buying gear for their twinks. I imagine if gold was even easier to come by at 70 now, then it'd be even harder for a new player or reroller to get items off of the AH.

I guess the reason game companies don't sell gold themselves is similar to Zimbabwe. If they priced the Chinese farmers out by selling themselves they'd only end up with massive inflation as they print their virtual gold.

On the other hand they'd make a ton of real money out of it.

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Tollaz0r!
Posted 04:56pm 22/8/08

There should be a RAID type encounter or somesuch that is a big dragon that sits on hoards of gold. You kill it and instead of getting items you just get massive, massive amounts of gold to share around.

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Martz
Posted 04:57pm 22/8/08

from another point of view, it has created ~500,000 jobs...

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Raven
Posted 04:58pm 22/8/08

So basically farmed Gold is a bit like prostitution - instead of arresting the Joes they go after the Hos?

So it sounds to me like they should be banning the people who buy gold, not the ones who sell it. In which case, how hard can it be for them to code in something that watches for transfers of large amounts of gold with no reasonably equivalent value item returned?

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Raven
Posted 04:59pm 22/8/08

There should be a RAID type encounter or somesuch that is a big dragon that sits on hoards of gold

Okay look, the whole 'Duel core' vs 'Dual core' was just stupid, but can I make a point of saying that no, you don't have redundancy in your parties and groups, nor will striping help here?

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wellwellwell
Posted 05:18pm 22/8/08

In EVE Online you can buy Game Time Cards (GTC) and sell them ingame for ISK, it is aproved by CCP and seems to work well, some people earn enough ISK to pay for the gtc and don't accually spend any rl cash.

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Carson
Posted 05:18pm 22/8/08

So it sounds to me like they should be banning the people who buy gold, not the ones who sell it. In which case, how hard can it be for them to code in something that watches for transfers of large amounts of gold with no reasonably equivalent value item returned?

This is actually a pretty good idea. Though I wonder how much backlash would be generated through banning the buyers? (I just have this image of an angry WoW player having a bitch that it's not fair) Though it makes sense because they're just as culpable for it.

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Steve Farrelly
Posted 05:40pm 22/8/08

It would be hard to look at though, because there are people that play the game for ages, build heaps of characters and generally have no social life until they invite a friend to come in, then usually send their new friend heaps of gear and gold to get them started (though probably not of the same amount as what is farmed and sold)

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reso
Posted 05:59pm 22/8/08

The EVE Online devs go after the buyers as well, they'll just minus the buyers account. Even if they've spent that 5 bill they bought. It's practically perma banning you, there's no way to afford ammo or repairs to continue running missions.

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Reverend Evil™
Posted 06:32pm 22/8/08

The reason people buy gold is because stupid low lvl greens, like say lvl 10, are fucking in the AH for 20g! No wonder the economy is fucking screwed. Blizz should put a value on items and that's all they should be sold for. Imagine in real life if businesses charged top dollar for simple items and none of us could afford them them? If you're expecting random people off the net to charge a reasonable prices for items you're fucking dreaming.

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Rick
Posted 07:03pm 22/8/08

The analogies with prostitution (and the drugs trade) are good - so some games firms have gone for the legalisation model. Sony did that with EverQuest II - two servers allow farming and trading - Sony takes a cut.

Incidentally, if you want to see the original report, it's: http://www.sed.manchester.ac.uk/idpm/research/publications/wp/di/di_wp32.htm

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Nathan
Posted 10:02am 23/8/08

Paying so you can play the game less. Somethings not right here!

Asumedly they're paying so they can play a different part of the game, a part they are more interested in. While the article is about gold, not power levelling, I can completely understand why someone who's reached the endgame as one character and would now like to try it with another class, would pay to skip all the levelling.

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Raider
Posted 10:12am 23/8/08

who needs to buy gold when u sell PR 2050 for 5000g a pop bambam easy gold.

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ViscoS
Posted 06:54pm 23/8/08

Have you ever seen someone sell a level 10 green for 20gold in the AH Reverend? I sure as hell haven't.

The economy only works that way if people pay for it, it shouldn't be up to blizzard but the players to set the prices; lest WoW go the way runescape has recently.

I tell you what though; 10g for a stack of mageweave is robbery.

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CSIRAC
Posted 08:16pm 23/8/08

whilst i dont farm the gold myself, it tends to jsut build up and next thing u know you have so much you dont know what to do with. thanks to selling gold it pays for the monthly fee and then some, and then some more. its not much its nice to know your playing the game for free.

last edited by CSIRAC at 20:16:00 23/Aug/08

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Superform
Posted 04:05pm 24/8/08

i used to buy twink blues off the ah from dumb fucks who didnt realise they were for twinks.. buy a lvl 19 blue for 3 gold.. turn around and put it back on the ah for 100-200

easy momey

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Tollaz0r!
Posted 06:04pm 24/8/08

Yer AH scanners + lvl 19 blue gear = easy money.

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Kimbo
Posted 03:02am 26/8/08

In many ways it could be called "valid e-commerce". I don't like to stir the pot.

I've done two so called tests. I've played one MMORPG (asian-F2P not listed here) and I never bought anything that was 'outside' of the game environment. That economy was screwed over by botting for virtual currency.

I played another game where they had currency in a cash shop that could be traded for ingame currency and was basically like an ingame stockmarket. The game was/is also very well molded on the casual gamer in mind being that you can do a daily quest and get a substantial amount of 'experience'.
They would also only allow ONE LEGITIMATE company to hold all the gold and all the cards and ban said other companies with great vigilance.

The other one I played is opening shortly to an American market. See www.perfectworld.com -- Oh the irony.

I found that the second model tends to work a bit better. Where an economy is controlled and nurtured with semi timely updates happening on occasion.

No I haven't played World of Warcraft yet. Do I intend to? Maybe.

What I've been meaning to say in response to the BBC article is that maybe. Gold farming is achieving what the World Trade Organisation has been trying to achieve for years. Maybe virtual currency farming will be the salvation for many poorer countries of the world. Either that or we go back to Plan B which is we design MMORPGs that cannot be farmed.

In any case. With cheap optic fibre being put in countries like Russia, South Africa, Vietnam, North Korea (and not just China might I add.) 'Gold farming' might just be a e-revolution in it self. In a world, where we (gross major economic sociopolitical countries) cheat on prices for food, fuel and we hire in workers at cheaper rates. We put demand on poorer countries for our essentials of living.

Could virtual gold be the way to virtual salvation?

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TicMan
Posted 10:21am 26/8/08

I like to think of it as giving 500,000 people a job so that rich western infidels can lesiurely throw around $100 to get an epic flying mount.

At the end of the day it's free trade at it's best. It's supply and demand working all the way through to virtual worlds and as long as people will convert real money to gold then those 500,000 people will have rice on the table for dinner.

With a bit of smarts and investing some time you can clear a few thousand g a week so that you don't need to buy it, but then there are players with lots of commitments who don't have the time but have the disposable income to get the gold to help them play the way they want.

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Kimbo
Posted 11:43pm 26/8/08

Other interesting thing was that Age of Conan said the MMORPG bubble had burst.

Maybe their business model wasn't working correctly.

Free-2-Play gets people in. I know it because Silk Road Online got people in. See: http://www.rev6.com/stats/servercapacity.asp you don't think those are 3000 bots now do you? A fair few of them are actual people.

If MMORPG is the 'new gambling' then damn straight, there is your 'self employment model' right there and all you have to do is hire a ton of people and a bank of computers to do it.

Better yet setup shares in the virtual company. Game company and or Gold Farming Company.

If Tab Corp can do it: http://www.tabcorp.com.au/investor.aspx

Then so can say for example: http://online.wsj.com/public/quotes/main.html?symbol=PWRD

If you don't think gaming is 'serious business' then:

http://www.cnbc.com/id/22083631

Think again...

Because soon they're going to open an American server. Will it get World Of Warcraft players? Probably not. But then again. You know what the human condition is like when it comes to taking risk.

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