In-Game Gold Farming a $500M Industry 201
SpuriousLogic brings us this excerpt from a BBC report:
"Prof. Heeks said very accurate figures for the size of the gold farming sector were hard to come by, but his work suggested that in 2008 it employs 400,000 people who earn an average of $145 (£77) per month creating a global market worth about $500m. ... Already, he said, gold farming was comparable in size to India's outsourcing industry. 'The Indian software employment figure probably crossed the 400,000 mark in 2004 and is now closer to 900,000,' said Prof Heeks. 'Nonetheless, the two are still comparable in employment size, yet not at all in terms of profile.' Prof Heeks suspects gold-farming might be an early example of the 'virtual offshoring' likely to become more prevalent as people spend more time working and playing in cyberspace. "
We discussed the life of a gold farmer last year.
it shows you why happiness is fleeting (Score:2, Interesting)
the existence of WoW is, overtly, to have fun
but if you are employing someone to heighten your fun, all you are really doing is distancing yourself from the true pleasure of the game. you are talking about people who do not know how to enjoy the gaming experience
why do people cheat in any game? its the triumph of ego over id. its people mistaking the pursuit of pleasure with the pursuit of heightening your self-regard. when you conflate the two, you actually destroy your own happiness (though you don't realize this) because you are no longer solely concerned with pleasure, but winning. of course winning is pleasurable, but winning at all costs deadens pleasure, it doesn't heighten it. this is especially true of your actions and their effects on the happiness of others, by warping how the game experience exists for them
gold farming indicates a philosophical and psychological disconnect between the point of something like WoW and what people actually do with it. they turn fun, into work
that's just wrong in some extremely fundamental way, and shows you why true happiness is so fleeting in this world: we destroy our own happiness by actively placing the pursuit of happiness secondary to the pursuit of some other, lesser goal, out of your own blindness and forgetting what is important, especially in the context of something like WoW
i'm not saying trying to use the game in ways not as originally intended is wrong no matter what. you can use WoW to do lots of interesting things that isn't what the game was intended for. what i am saying is that this particular unintended game experience, gold farming, is odious and toxic to the expeirence of everyone, including those employing the gold farmers, they just don't know it, as they are blind to their own philosophical and psycholigcal failures that lead them away from the pursuit of happiness and instead towards the pursuit of ego tweaking
Re:Obligatory Penny Arcade post (Score:3, Interesting)
And to add something more, gold farmers have major marketing campaigns in WoW. An endless stream of seemingly different services are endlessly spamming capital cities, sending whispers and even in-game mail. Some spammers will first whisper something like "hello :)" and when you reply they ask if you want gold. I don't know if they're bots. Also, on one realm I encountered something way more irritating than that: group invites. Like, all the fucking time. It got so bad I simply had to get an addon that blocks unsolicited invites, but on a few occasions it caused problems with legit players who I wanted to group with. If you wanted to you could get addons to block all gold spamming messages but I prefer to report them instead (only takes a few clicks).
Re:Econ 101 (Score:2, Interesting)
In short, Blizzard should be selling the gold. They'd get money, it would be easier on their servers, and the money would go towards American interests, not Chinese ones.
Re:it shows you why happiness is fleeting (Score:5, Interesting)
why do people cheat in any game? its the triumph of ego over id.
You've got it backwards there. According to Freud, the (super)ego was the "higher" area of the mind, responsible for conscious, rational thought. The id was the subconscious, responsible for our baser impulses. Therefore, he would have viewed a cheater's conduct as the triumph of id over the ego, not the other way around.
Re:mmo's waste of time (Score:2, Interesting)
Anda's Game (Score:1, Interesting)
Cory Doctorow wrote a cool short story incorporating gold farming in his collection Overclocked [craphound.com].
Free downloads of the html version [craphound.com] and
PDF version [craphound.com].
Re:Obligatory Penny Arcade post (Score:3, Interesting)
Mod parent up.
Blizzard should stop wasting time on anti-bot and anti-farming measures and instead put more effort into making the game not turn into a second job. When I used to play, being a level 60 was much less exciting than being a level 20. Too bad... It's a beautiful universe.
Korean players do use bots and farm (Score:5, Interesting)
Excerpt from Brandon Sheffield article on Gamasutra :
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=18510 [gamasutra.com]
It was Blueside who first introduced the idea to me, cynically stating that consoles won't succeed in Korea until players start just playing games for fun, instead of treating them as work. I laughed then, but subsequent meetings only served to confirm the theory.
Companies from Gravity to Ntreev to Nexon agreed that a very large number - varying from 30 to 50 percent, depending on who you ask - of players in South Korea are playing games as a job. Generally, people didn't feel too good about it either, which at least indicates that people aren't designing them with that as a goal. But it's still disconcerting.
And as any player of Lineage2 can attest, some Korean MMOs really ARE designed to be grindfests and farming prone.
From L2 official boards :
PushyCat on official boards:
So, Koreans play and sell in their own servers and it covers the cost of their PC Room and meals. This is a normal aspect of Korean games. Listen to me while I say this. Ebaying is NOT CONSIDERED CHEATING in KORea. It is an important element of mmporgs. With game money, not only can you sell it to make cash, you can also order pizza, buy computers and accessories (like auto mouses, keyboards, macroprograms), and pay for your monthly fee (for those who play at home). In Korea, game money is an accepted tender for Real Life. Noone posts on message boards about cheaters, ebayers, and bots because EVERYONE does it. In Korea, the game is played much differently than in North America, and asians have different cultural backgrounds that make gameplay different as well.
Re:Well the thing is (Score:3, Interesting)
I think your are mostly corect about some people ruining it for the rest of the crew but you also have to look why they can't have fun and work toward getting the best gear at the same time. Its failure of the games economics.
I don't play wow but I remember in UO that way to much commerce went on with NPCs rather then other players. It would work better if I could do something I like, say become the most efficent gold miner ever and buy the things I need like clothing from other plays more easily. I should be able to give you gold for the pelt of the monster you just killed. It would lead to less gold farming, because everyone would be "gold farming" I might be doing it grinding at the gold mine, you might be doing it killin mosters for their teath to fashion knives to sell to other moster killers and pelts to others for clothing.
The other pressure that leads to gold farming is external to these games. Some people have much more time to play then others, if you can only play an hour a day or less its impossible to compete. Which means you can't have to many in game relatonships because the players you know level up while you remain at noob level that is unless you can buy your way to betterness from some farmer. The only solution to this I have ever come up with is let players join server based on the number of hours per week they want to play. I would be much more interested in playing serve that only allowed say 8 hours per week average over 2 months or something. That way if one week I want to play a little more I can. It will keep everone equal in terms of play time though which will make for a steadier in game economy.