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The Almighty Buck Entertainment Games

Massively Multiplayer Sweat Shops 126

Posted by Zonk from the not-a-fun-game dept.
Computer Games World, part of 1up.com, has done up a fantastic piece looking into the world of Massively Multiplayer Sweat Shops. More than just a look at how it's done, it painfully illustrates that not all farmers are farming by choice and not all farmers are from Asia. From the article: "How does it work? The macros for World of WarCraft, for example, control a high-level hunter and cleric. The hunter kills while the cleric automatically heals. Once they are fully loaded with gold and items, the 'farmer' who's monitoring their progress manually controls them out of the dungeon to go sell their goods. These automated agents are then returned to the dungeons to do their thing again. Sack's typical 12-hour sessions can earn his employers as much as $60,000 per month while he walks away with a measly $150."
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Massively Multiplayer Sweat Shops More

Massively Multiplayer Sweat Shops

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  • Feeling Sorry. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by VGMSupreme ( 228396 )
    Remind me again why these exist in the first place. Are we that lazy of MMORPG players that we need to make sweat shops of people to do the work for us. I mean, a lot of us have to take the time anyway to earn up enough gold to even buy the stuff we needed, but they put a lot of efforting into what they are "farming", and they pretty much getting nothing out of it but a measly paycheck and flak from gamers about how cheap it is that they are camping common places.

    I don't know, I kinda feel bad for them
    • Because the current generation of MMOGs puts a very high value on time, mostly because YOUR time is free, content developers time is very expensive.

      Simply put, this exists because building your character is not fun, mostly. The quests get boring and repetitive and do not contribute much if any to some overarching storyline (thus you do not care about them, they are obstacles to conquer or avoid). All that remains is to collect all the baddest ass items, which often are either rare drops or very hard to get
      • I agree with "MMOGs are bad, but it's a compelling enough genre that people suffer through.". I agree with that because I've played the game poorly at times, and it can be a drag.

        But the point of MMOG is to emphasize the teamwork and camaraderie. If you're just grinding solo all the time, it's no fun. Socialize a little though and open up to some folks and the game just changes entirely and becomes fun again. Solo can be fun too, but my best experiences in WoW have occurred in a group. Having even jus
        • I've done my time uberguilding in EQ, it was not that much fun. I enjoyed only beating the content and getting places/gear I couldn't have gotten solo. It was fun one time through, and good guilds could beat content without effort. Once you knew the "secret" fights were boring.

          I agree current MMOGs are all about enforced socialization. I do not believe that is either the ideal or the be all, end all of what a MMOG could be.

          To me, the ideal MMOG is 100% opposite. People are smart but independent. They make
    • As annoying as these guys are, and as much as I want them gone, its hard to get too upset when I think that they may be doing this to feed their families.

      I've made maybe a total of five million gil in FFXI, most of it is currently in equipment, spells, or in crafting skill. I don't have a whole lot of time to play these days, but I'd never buy gil. The five million I've made painstakingly over time feels so much more worthwhile then 5 million I could just buy for around a hundred bucks (or whatever it sells

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • Spammers actually disrupt the Internet. It'd be no different than if a telemarketing firm actually called so many people and so often that you got more unwanted calls than calls from friends/family/work that you actually need to take.

          As for the RIAA/MPAA.. well they're pretty greedy. They could probably live quite well without lobbying to extend copyrights (for example) or shut down sites and services rather than going after the individual traders. Instead, they take the easy ways out by trying to ban t
      • As someone who has bought gil- I would never farm it myself. Spending the dozens of hours (especially as a bard- farming is *hard*) to very slowly get gil is not worth the time. If I looked back at my life and saw that much of a waste of time, I'd cry thinking of all the worthwhile things I could have done instead (be with my family, contribute to wikipedia, contribute to open source projects, do charity work, swim, play sports, etc). There's no feeling of accomplishment from earning it because its not
    • The farmers don't even get the flak, though. The bots that do the farming for them aren't attended until they need to be navigated back to sell things off. I know I love arguing with bots as much as the next person, but perhaps it is not so effective to even gripe at them.

  • I dunno... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Otter ( 3800 )
    This is an impressive bit of reporting, if true. But I've got to wonder:

    1) Just how much of a travel budget does 1up.com have?

    2) Why would the "sweatshop" owners allow them to take pictures?

    Or did they send pictures to the reporter? Two of them? The whole thing strikes me as implausible. In any case, I certainly wouldn't take these guys' claims of enormous profits any more seriously than when we heard similar stories from spammers, day traders and porn aggregators a few years ago. They're not public corp

    • Re:I dunno... (Score:3, Informative)

      by Nakago4 ( 576970 )
      No, this sounds pretty true to me. I have a friend that farmed gold in FFXI for quite a while and he made a very impressive sum of money for it. He did it all himself and sold to IGE directly. I think he may have made as much money farming gold for FFXI for 3 months than I do in a year's salary.

      Still not sure why I didn't join in as well, it just made me feel a bit dirty.

  • I farm Slashdot posts (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 06, 2005 @11:45AM (#12995154)
    +5 Funny costs $.50
    +5 Informative costs $.75
    -1 Flamebait is complementary with any purchase of a dozen +5 informatives.

  • Doesn't add up to me (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Peter Cooper ( 660482 ) on Wednesday July 06, 2005 @11:47AM (#12995178) Homepage Journal
    Sack's typical 12-hour sessions can earn his employers as much as $60,000 per month while he walks away with a measly $150.

    Let's be conservative and say they only make an average of $10,000 per month from his work. Now, why aren't there thousands of Americans making $10,000 per month by working 12 hour days on this game? I bet they're only making these incomes from the entire sweatshop, and not just from one guy's work, otherwise we'd all be doing it (or Sack would be sitting in a cybercafe doing it for himself after stealing their macros).

    Secondly, is the market for gold in online games really that big? Are there really tens of thousands of players who would rather pay $250 for some gold than actually play the game? I can understand buying characters at the start, but who are these people who can spend thousands of dollars with the gold miners?

    Yeah, I know I'm quite ignorant of the MMORPG market, but this all seems like craziness.
    • Are there really tens of thousands of players who would rather pay $250 for some gold than actually play the game?

      Yes.
    • Well lets see.. It was mentioned the min. gold per hour in WoW one of these farmers HAD to get was 15.

      So lets say they get 2 days off a week (not very likely).

      12 hr * 15g = 180g/day
      20 days * 180g = 3600g/month

      Right now IGE will sell me 300g for $29.99

      Most of their sales will be small amounts (no bulk discount) so it's fair to use this as a "constant"

      29.99 / 300 = $0.099966666666666666666666666666667 per 1g

      So 0.099966666666666666666666666666667 * 3600 = $359.88

      Ok so that doesn't add up..

      Lets see if
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • I am more worried that this becomes a new haven for the IRS to set online gaming taxes. It's the perfect place for IRS to start.

          - Lots of chaos
          - Lots of money
          - Lots of young people with no idea how to fend off IRS
          - Lots of people doing this for a living.

          There is no online tax now, but this shit gives congress plenty of Ammo.

    • Re:Doesn't add up to me (Score:5, Interesting)

      by MattW ( 97290 ) <matt@ender.com> on Wednesday July 06, 2005 @12:22PM (#12995547) Homepage

      Let's be conservative and say they only make an average of $10,000 per month from his work. Now, why aren't there thousands of Americans making $10,000 per month by working 12 hour days on this game? I bet they're only making these incomes from the entire sweatshop, and not just from one guy's work, otherwise we'd all be doing it (or Sack would be sitting in a cybercafe doing it for himself after stealing their macros).

      Probably because 'Sack' is a goat farmer and hasn't the first clue about where to get a macro, how to set it up, and wouldn't know what to do with the gold when he got it.


      Secondly, is the market for gold in online games really that big? Are there really tens of thousands of players who would rather pay $250 for some gold than actually play the game? I can understand buying characters at the start, but who are these people who can spend thousands of dollars with the gold miners?

      Yes. I have a friend whose business took in like $700k selling diablo 2 items in 2004. This is how many years after it was released? It's obscene. He and I duped some stuff back when the early exploits were out. I wrote some code to sniff network traffic and spot uniques in trade windows, then we moved up to wholesale duping using a login/logoff race condition bug that I exploited using 4 computers at once. I was raking in stock options at the time, though, and eventually grew tired of it, especially with the competition from the Korean farmers wrecking out profitability by flooding the market. But he went on and perfected the process, using exploit after exploit, and finally got someone involved who reverse engineered the entire protocol so fully automated bots could play.

      Yeah, I know I'm quite ignorant of the MMORPG market, but this all seems like craziness.

      MMORPGs are good at getting people to "want" what the MMO gives them - whether it is gold, items, higher levels, etc. When it ceases to be about "playing" the game and starts being about "having" or "achieving" something, or about "being" a certain level of power, people with money to burn start buying their way to the top. And frankly, if you're making $100k/yr, have limited entertainment time, and want your gaming experience to go a certain way, why not spend the money? Right now, you can buy 100 gold on the server I used to play on for WoW for $9. That's enough for a mount and more. I actually quit playing WoW a couple months ago, and one reason was that I was tired of walking around. (By no means the only thing I found lacking in WoW, but a significant one)

      Now, for someone who is thinking: I want to get to L60, and I want phat l00t, and so on, $9 is a bit of a bargain. You're already paying $15/mo. How much can 100 gold "speed up" the process for you?

      It was the same in Diablo 2. The golden items were ones that let people farm as fast as possible. At one point, my friend and I paid some guy like $200 on ebay for a ring which was maxed out life leech+mana leech+magic find, so we could dupe it, because it was golden.

      Now, I think of all of this as a foregone conclusion. What *I* wonder about is: are there programmers who are making a *really* illegitimate fortune? If you were clever and, say, working at Blizzard, you might introduce some tiny error in the code that, if you knew how, could turn into a monstrous exploit. What would exclusive knowledge of such an exploit be worth? Especially if it was hard to track down, and hard to notice it being exploited? And hard to discover on your own?

      The exploits in such industry become very carefully guarded secrets. In the early days, on D2, people in the know could wheedle the information out of people. Then people saw what happened - how quickly the information spread and how a competitive advantage in duping/farming was lost - and now people are tightlipped.

      Anyhow, it's all an interesting exercise in examining why people do what they do. I'm more interested in how someone like Raph Koster looks at this privatel
    • Well, here are some reasons why people would want to pay for in-game stuff with their out-of-game credit card:

      1. To cheat. That's it: pay to cheat. If that real money can buy an undeserved advantage (as in, an advantage you didn't work for), and especially if it's a massive advantage, some people will pay for it.

      E.g., before I use City Of Heroes as an example, let me say that COH _doesn't_ have a real-money market for in-game money. (Ok, "influence.") The economy of COH is such that money is so plentiful
  • This article smells fishy.

    I know the farmers exist but those numbers seem way exagerated -- just like any make money quick scam.

  • Few Things... (Score:5, Informative)

    by bbeebe ( 661968 ) on Wednesday July 06, 2005 @11:53AM (#12995256)
    There's no "cleric" in WoW, they're probably referring to the priest class.

    I used to do this kind of stuff but you always get undercut by someone who will sell for much less. I don't know if these places really exist, but it would make sense. If I sold for how much they were selling for I'd be making less than minimum wage.

    The real money is in exploits. For some reason I have a knack for finding these holes, but they usually don't last long. I made $2000 in 2 weeks off an exploit in City of Heroes then it was patched, and I found a grouping bug in WoW that let me level insanely fast till they fixed it in this latest patch (still work but not as well).

    I usually jump on new games for a month or 2, find bugs and exploits, cash in, then quit. If nothing else I'll at least make enough to cover the game and subscription fees so there's no loss.
    • And wasn't WoW's economy silver based? I have never heard of friends talk of gold in the game, only silver.
      • in WoW:

        100 copper = 1 silver
        100 silver = 1 gold

      • In WoW:

        100 copper = 1 silver
        100 silver = 1 gold

        When the game first launched a lot of people probably referred to things in terms of silver, but these days it's all about the gold. High level items will go for 100+ gold easily; I've seen some really rare stuff go for 1500g. Hell an epic mount (Level 2 Horse) costs 900g.

    • Re:Few Things... (Score:1, Flamebait)

      by FLAGGR ( 800770 )
      You make me sick. (Karma be damned)
      • Seriously why?

      • You make me sick. (Karma be damned)

        You need to learn the system here. Instead of saying "Karma be damned", you should have said "I know I'll get modded down for this, but...", and then followed with just a bit more of an explanation why he makes you sick.

        For example: "I know I'll get modded down for this, but you make me sick. Gold farmers ruin MMO economies, don't be a part of the problem."

        And boom, you would have a nice, shiny +5 Insightful. Now I'll patiently await my +5 Funny...

  • Why do people spend as much money as they do to buy gold from these people! Really, have you looked at the price of gold on WOW? If it was say 20 bucks for 500 gold I could see people doing it, but it's more like 200 dollars! Why would anyone spend that kind of money for something in an online game? Something that you'll probably only have for a few weeks before you get something better?

    Are Mommy and Daddy really not paying that much attention to the credit card? For the price of 500 Gold on WOW you could
    • Try $47.99 [ige.com]

      $200 will net you somewhere around 2200 gold. The market is at about 10g per dollar at the moment.

    • It depends on the question:

      "How much is it worth to you?"

      if the answer is the same or close to whatever is listed, then they buy it. If they want it NOW, its worth more, if they want LOTS, its worth more. See the pattern people?

      Supply and demand... and people demand that someone supplies them with gold, so someone does it. If somebody walked up to you and wanted to buy your mouse for five times what it was worth, and you could buy another easily, why wouldnt you sell it?

      "Hey, can i buy your mouse

    • Disposable income is just that: disposable. $200 is a lot of money for most of us, but for a lot of people it's not.

      I mean, it's a little like asking why someone would go spend $1200 on a big screen TV, or $4000 on a new motercycle. People have different interests, and are willing to pay money for different things.
      • 200 dollars isn't a lot of money for me either, but still I don't see anything in WOW or any MMO being worth 200 dollars of RL cash to buy.

        I guess I just have a better understanding of the value of a dollar than those people do?
        • Depends on your point of view. If I spend $200 for phat lewt in WoW, and I get a lot of enjoyment out of playing with that lewt, have I really wasted my money? Is it any more wasted than if I'd have dropped $200 going to the movies or buying DVD's for a month or so?

          We all piss off money for entertainment purposes, it's just a question of how.
    • Are Mommy and Daddy really not paying that much attention to the credit card?

      It's not little kids doing this.

    • What I find funny is that people will pay for PokerStars play money. Play money doesn't do any thing for you. Unlike a MMRPG, having more play money really doesn't change the way the game plays.

      What's more, if you lose all your play money chips, you get more automatically.

    • Back in my Ultima Online days, I watched an auction on eBay close... it was a castle (the biggest house type available in the game) on the server I played on, for $1,300. Over one thousand dollars! For something that doesn't really exist! If UO had shut down the next day, that guy would have been really upset. Fortunately for him its still around, but 1300 bucks? C'mon. I can see buying something online for $5 or something, but thats just ridiculous.
    • A couple of years ago, I had played this crappy buggy web-based pay-to-cheat "strategy" game. Well, if you think paying 200 dollars is too much, there was this guy in that game who allegedly paid over 20,000 US dollars for various in-game equipment and other benefits. Yes, that's not a typo. Over TWENTY THOUSAND dollars.

      "Are Mommy and Daddy really not paying that much attention to the credit card?"

      Well, that's the thing: games aren't just for kids any more. The guy above allegedly had his own company or s
    • If it was say 20 bucks for 500 gold I could see people doing it, but it's more like 200 dollars!

      Actually, the current price of gold is about $1 for 10G in wow, or a bit less. IIRC $129 dollars will get you 1500G.

      Why would anyone spend that kind of money for something in an online game? Something that you'll probably only have for a few weeks before you get something better?

      Well, for me personally to farm 1000G needed for an epic mount in WoW would take me months. I play on the weekends mostly
      • Well I make well over a hundred a day at work as well. Yeah monetarily I could dump that and a lot more into the game and not even flinch.

        But I guess I just have different values. You're not getting any physical tangible thing for your money. You don't have something you can take home or put on the shelf as it where.

        I suspect some of my issues is that in a fairly old (+10 years) on going online game I 'own' one of the prime pieces of the game. I built it, and through careful use and design got it to the p
  • The article says, "He then uses three accounts to launder the gold: a duper account, a filter account, and a delivery account--each created using different IPs, credit cards, and computers."

    It's hard to believe they can get away with that. It's not like the real world where you can use cash and other tricks to hide the money trail. The administrators should be able to trace down the gold and where it went in seconds if they store enough information on transations.

    • Re:Money laundering (Score:4, Insightful)

      by sgant ( 178166 ) on Wednesday July 06, 2005 @12:50PM (#12995864) Homepage Journal
      Really...and I can't understand how people "sell" their accounts either and get away with it.

      I mean, if they sell an account they give the account to someone else with the password for that account...then the new person has to set up payment for that account using a credit card with a new address etc etc. A simple trace of that would show a different person/credit card/name using that account which should send up a red flag.

      On the other hand, the company that says they don't condone selling of accounts are still getting one monthly fee for one account. So perhaps they may publicly say they will kick/ban people for doing this, but in reality they turn a blind eye to it.
      • It won't really work. If a parent, spouse, brother, friend is paying for the account then the name won't match up in the first place. If they banned everyone where the name didn't match up. You'd have more problems.
      • I view it as a covering their ass situation; Blizzard does not want to stop getting your monthly 15.95 or whatever it is but if they condone account selling then they become liable for fradulant account sales; this way if you get burned on a transaction Blizzard can go 'we told you not to do that, it's not our problem' while still keeping accounts active that would otherwise get closed down.
    • These are really small transactions in the big scheme of things. It is really not surprising that they are able to get away with it. Try it some time. Take out a $10,000 loan, get a new credit card and transfer the balance. Transfer it again in 25 days and start the process all over again. You really think they would come knocking on your door when it shows you are paying off all of those cards and have a great credit rating?
      • Is this legal?
        • I'm not a lawyer, if you want real legal advice don't ask here.

          That said, as far as I know this kind of thing isn't illegal on its face. I know personally people that "rob Peter to pay Paul" like this, shifting credit card balances like a find the lady game to keep ahead of the game. I don't think you'd actually get a good credit rating out of it, but I know even less about how your credit rating works than the law.

          What is does do is make people very suspicious. The activities people employ to launder

  • Hangs head in shame... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Redlazer ( 786403 ) * on Wednesday July 06, 2005 @12:03PM (#12995354) Homepage
    Well, coming from Lineage 2, i certainly understand the popularity of the market for its currency. The creators of a game determine how easy it is to accumulate money. In lineage 2, it is a bitch and a half to make money at all - your lowest items (D Grade) cost around 1 million a pop, which, while not entirely outlandish, is certainly a high mark to reach. Also, since the game has teired equipment, you tend to get people buying only the best of that grade, be it no grade, d grade, etc. Also a very important fact is that customization of your character is nearly impossible, aside from your equipment. You have skills, but they are completely linear in their development, and it is easy to learn all available skills at a certain level.

    So, the combination of all that makes for the stratification of equipment - buying anything less than the best available is a tremendous waste of time, money, and energy. Which are also all very valuable things in Lineage - leveling is stupid slow, soloing is next to impossible for 90% of the classes, and nothing has a high resell value.

    This is where the Bind on Pickup/Equip system in WoW really shines - it really helps to control the market from shaking itself apart, which has happened a couple times in my old server for Lineage.

    But for Lineage, sieges are fun as all hell. But its reserved for only the hardcore - playing less than 5 hours a day is impossible - youll never level, and youll never be able to do anything on your own, lest you be an archer.

    The gold market offers value to people with short attention spans, who are greedy, or who are lazy. I, personally, happen to be lazy with a short attention span. In Lineage, i did not have the time to farm mobs that i got no XP for just for cash -especially since my class was strictly support and could not solo worth a damn. (56 Elven Sword Singer when i left). Same goes for WoW - some people dont want to farm, and since there is demand, there is a company supplying what i wanted. Its really a fantastic idea.

    Also, it is important to note that if you gave the people in these other countries the US's minimum wage, it would make the employees ungodly rich, and would screw everything up in the 3rd world country. If they are paid to scale with the rest of the country, then the country will develop, because now people have JOBS instead of being unemployed.

    -Red

    • Ugh, Lineage II... It's completely beyond me why people play that. I was in the open beta, it was awful. After every single fight you had to wait forever for your HP to regenerate and fighting wasn't very interesting to begin with. I played an orc mage, you have only one spell with that, it's a spell you activate and that makes you fight better as long as it's active*. So in reality you're a fighter with lower stats and no special attacks that uses mana when fighting. All fights were the same, activate spel
    • "Also, it is important to note that if you gave the people in these other countries the US's minimum wage, it would make the employees ungodly rich, and would screw everything up in the 3rd world country."

      I think I agree, but you put it poorly. Minimum wage here would be middle class there, let's say. The important thing is that their wage is (hopefully) set by the capitalist market in their country. So, since the global economy is mostly free, as we pay them money to do this, their standard of living r

  • I don't quite get it... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sH4RD ( 749216 ) on Wednesday July 06, 2005 @12:08PM (#12995402) Homepage
    Sweatshop? How? To me it looks like a bunch of teens and college students who are doing an easy job (and even on computers! how fun!) to make a little extra cash while their superiors profit massively. Sounds like the typical teen job. Go look at a grocery store or a fast food resturant, heck, even an internship. It's making the company a lot of money (even indirectly, think how much money they save in productivity if an intern is getting the coffee), and yet the student doesn't get much cash. So where is the outrage on our side?
    • Grocery stores don't exactly make a ton of money, although they typically pay you minimum wage. The markup on most items is maybe five cents if it's a premium brand.

      Fast food, you're on the money. It's even worse in movie theaters, where the markup is easily in the hundred of percents and the lines don't care.

      Now unpaid internships, that's just crass commercialism. The worst deal I've seen so far is medical transcription. As part of their Community College degree, they have to get an internship. Unpaid, w
      • Now unpaid internships, that's just crass commercialism.

        That may be the case sometimes but every case of internship that I've been involved with we were lucky if the intern's productivity equaled the cost of cleaning up their mistakes!!
        • I hate to hear what you go through with new hires!
          • I hate to hear what you go through with new hires!
            New hires aren't new to the industry so they have a minimal learning curve and make smaller mistakes along the way.
            That said, some interns actually do get hired full time if they do well and are interested in staying on.
            • Well, if your company isn't keen on hiring recent grads, an internship program seems like a bit of a waste. Probably someone's idea of proving "why we don't hire new grads"?
              • Well, if your company isn't keen on hiring recent grads, an internship program seems like a bit of a waste.

                An internship program is also a way of giving back to the community.
                I would recommend doing a bit of research into the whys and wherefors of internship programs. Sitting down and talking with some of the managers at the companies involved and, even more importantly, discussing your concerns with the folks at your school's internship office will probably give you a lot more insight into why thing
    • An intern -does- get something : Experience.

      It's not as if the jobs those farmer-teens are doing is worth mentioning in their next job interview.

      • An intern -does- get something : Experience.

        "Yeah, I see here on your resume that you got coffee for some pretty important people."

        It's not as if the jobs those farmer-teens are doing is worth mentioning in their next job interview.

        "Yeah, I see here that you spend 20 hours a day glued to a computer doing whatever you have to do to make money."
      • It's not as if the jobs those farmer-teens are doing is worth mentioning in their next job interview. That reminds me of something I read on a diablo 2 website once. When the ladders got reset at some point, this one guy was like number 3 or 4 in the ladder after it stabalized, and actually put that on his resume. It landed him a couple interviews at least, I don't remember if one of those led to a job though. The companies were game companies that recognized the amount of effort it took to do that.

  • And then the move to other gametypes. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by KingJackaL ( 871276 ) on Wednesday July 06, 2005 @12:12PM (#12995447) Homepage
    I guess it's only a matter of time before people overseas start hiring out their services as TK'ers in FPS games :|. $10 and you can have somebody you dislike followed and TK'd for a couple hours...
  • Sack's typical 12-hour sessions can earn his employers as much as $60,000 per month while he walks away with a measly $150."

    If this is true, why don't the employees immediately start their own similar business with higher profit sharing. The startup costs are probably not very high and they know the operation. Even if they are severely economically disadvantaged, a few employees could team up together.
    • There is a lot of infrastructure that's non-trivial to create. Some things needed before you can sell:
      • A bunch of computers, say 30 (we wanted to make a good amount of money per day, right?)
      • Network infrstructure, and a dedicated internet line
      • Good software, and knowledge of how to use it (the sweatshop employees could probably get this without much trouble)
      • 30 copies of the game, and 30 subscribed accounts
      • Potential customers to sell to, along with the marketing infrastructure to reach them
      • Characters bu
    • Evaluating this purely from an econ standpoint, not meaning to endorse it. His labor is a very minor contribution to the value added. The setup (capital) and the business model (entrepeneurship) are much more important inputs into the process -- take the macros and the guy who speaks enough English to negotiate with IGE and you can make a new farm farm with any "lumpen proletariat" you choose, but take the labor and lose the macros and contacts and they're just a bunch of poorly educated people trying to
  • [troll]who or why would anybody spend cash on something so intangible as online gaming "goods"? [/troll] 1. Cheap chinese/asian labor 2. Profit Same as always
  • Usually located in dark alleys, these cyber-cafes are usuallly a room without any door sign outside, in which you could find boys and girls crowded together to earn that little .56 cents. Windows and doors are closed to evade laws enforcement official, usually no air-conditioning...

    However, consider the cost to stay online is just 2 renmin (~0.24 cents), that's almost 100% profit margin.

    That's quite different from those sweat shops in which kids are forced to work for their living because in these cyber

  • Bogus Story (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Psychic Burrito ( 611532 ) on Wednesday July 06, 2005 @01:07PM (#12995999)
    Why would they have flat screens in those pictures? It's not like space comes at a premium in china, so CRT monitors would be fitting the bill better. Frankly, the pictures look like taken in a typical chinese internet café at a moment when nobody was looking happy.

    Plus the story is so full of holes... $60,000? C'mon, for that money, I would do it!
    • Completely agree.

      There's what seems to be like a lot of natural light, there is some kind of rather public business looking door to the left in one of the photos, and they are all excessively low res. Do those tables have glass tops? Why are there so many empty seats?

      That place looks like it has a much nicer setup then my last job in downtown san francisco.

      The whole entire article doesn't ring true at all. It reads like something from a creative writing class. 'The gold comes back clean' .. ?
    • Why buy CRTs when you can steal LCDs?

      I mean, they're willing to steal the gold using exploits, right?
      • Again, it's not stealing. It's called copyright infringement and when are people gonna realize that it's not the same thing and stop astroturfing for the RIAA.

        So they're not stealing, they're borrowing...

        Er, wrong conversation. carry on.

  • People are always asking why should selling gold/items for real money be illegal? This is precisely the reason, at least in my opinion.

    Blizzard has announced several times that they have caught and banned/suspended some of the gold farmers, but the hard truth remains: You will never catch all of these people. If Blizzard starts monitoring large sums of gold in in-game mail, the farmers will just start setting up fake auctions, where they sell a grey (vendor trash) item for thousands of gold. Those would b
    • It seems to me that they would just have to set up an average price for every item in the game... and then monitor when things get sold for way over value. Granted, people could slowly bring up the price of an item, but this could be countered by setting up auctions by Blizzard or known non-farmers of every item in the game and getting an approximate price. It wouldn't be too absurdly hard to stop. It would also be useful to ban the people who bought the gold, as it will make the purchasing of in game items
      • So how are the gold/items transferred to IGE and then again to the customers? I imagine it would be in-game. So why don't some of these game companies just ban IGE from playing? It's got to be obvious based on behavior which accounts belong to IGE. One of the reasons this has become such a problem is that the transactions happen in broad daylight. At least if you forced it underground, there would be a lot fewer people willing to spend their money on this stuff. Black market volume would be a lot low
    • What got me thinking recently was going back to my old COH account, only to find the game (A) flooded with people running around with 10 times more money than they can possibly earn at that level, and (B) the game increasingly becoming balanced for those. Now generally I like COH, and in COH you don't even need to pay RL money for it. You just need to ask a max level player, or I've even had a few ask me if I wanted any money.

      But still, it got me wondering: why not elliminate money at all?

      E.g., COH seems
  • Its a simple concept. Most people have an excess of one of two things, time or money. Most people believe that time IS money, so people spend whichever they have more surplus of.

    The part that I think its funny is that I've played WoW for over 4 months now, have a level 60 priest, and alts of various levels. The only thing that I've ever really needed money for was to train in my spells. Almost never have I had to borrow money from anyone, except about 20g for my horse when I hit level 40. I promptly paid t

  • Tolerated? (Score:4, Informative)

    by redelm ( 54142 ) on Wednesday July 06, 2005 @03:18PM (#12997275) Homepage
    Surely Blizzard can monitor unusual activity and terminate accounts. Farming must be detectible, perhaps by the large amounts of transfers out and very slow character progress. The cost of a terminated account is also fairly high.

    I can only assume that whatever it's protestations to the contrary, Blizzard likes farmers. They pay fees, and they attract players to want to pass others (even if they cheat). They might even farm themselves! The dire pronouncements and trophy busts are to quieten the rule-abiding masses.

    • It's more expensive than you might guess to try to monitor unusual activity. Blizzard does ban (close the cd keys) for dupers and cheaters, but people who are doing legit farming just using bots are much harder to catch.
      • Why so difficult? They run the servers, and presumably keep logs of major activity, especially transfers. Just mine the logs. Someone who accumulates gold and transfers it is suspicious. So is someone who just transfers. Look at ratios and pick off the hogs.

        • The amount of data, and the amount of players involved in legit farming is absolutely tremendous, and the people cheating aren't dumb. They can hide their activity by deliberately attempting to make their behavior closely match the behavior of legit farming players.
      • Even worse to catch algorithmically are the ones just farming using manpower. Lets say the logs tell you that someone spent 16 hours online in a spot known to be very efficient for getting gold. Quick, AI: is that a farmer or is that any of the hundreds of thousands of hardcore players playing the game as it is designed? You might think that tracking outgoing gold transfers would help you, but honestly, the hard core aren't hording the gold either, and you can easily design a money-laundering protocol be
  • The article indicates how complicit IGE is when it comes to gold* farming (and even accepting duped gold, laundering as necessary). Is it possible that their actions constitute intentional interference with a contract (or intentional inducement of a breach of contract)?

    ( * by gold, I mean the form of currency in any given game)

    I ANAL, but from what I've been able to dig up on the web, proving such a case usually requires proving that (a) the defendant is aware of a contractual elationship between the pla
  • I don't understand the folks who buy the farmed items/gold and have thus created this "industry". Games are fun, you don't "win" by having huge piles of crap you didn't actually earn in-game, why are people spending real money on this stuff?

    I've recently started playing City of Heroes [cityofheroes.com] (check the news archive for a free 14-day trial if you're interested) and I wouldn't pay for in-game items even if they were offered to me... I'm playing for fun, not to "beat" some other nerds.

    I did appreciate the Influenc

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