Mar 20, 2008
The Gold Farming Industry
by Odus
This article is created to give people information on the growing business of "gold farmers" and their impact on the games we play. I realise many games currency is not called "gold", but they are reffered to as gold farms, so for the sake of easiness they will be referred to as gold farmers throughout the article.
Gold farmers are located throughout the world. Anywhere with a broadband connection and a few computers could set up a company and begin selling gold, and they have. Farms have been reported to be located in the US, Europe, Romania, Indonesia and Tijuana and more. But none of these compare to the size and scope that China has gripped onto. The main reasons China has been able to gain such a large foothold onto the market is because their is over 1.3 billion people (thats 20% of the world) living in one country. The cities population is dense with very easy access to cheap internet connections and cheap computers available making it a prime location to start these businesses. There is an abundance of cheap labour to fill the roles of maintaining bots are actually playing the game as is most popular now.
Famous gold farm owners:
Lee Caldwell - Rumored as one of the first gold farm owners by setting up his company "BlackSnow" in Tijuana, Mexico. He started by paying mexican workers small wages to farm gold in Ultima Online. A lawsuit was filed by "Mythic", the team behind creating Ultima Onlne. Lee Caldwell declared "does a MMORPG player have rights to his time, or does Mythic own that player's time?". He insisted that the player owns the rights for bringing the game's economy into existence. There was no final ruling, BlackSnow was issued a $10,000 judgement on an unrelated case against them, and they eventually disappeared underground. So i guess you could call Lee Caldwell and BlackSnow the pioneer's of gold farming.
Smooth Criminal - An elusive and intelligent farm owner who amassed a fortune through scripted bots and macro's. He has been banned from Ultima Online, Asheron's Call, Shadowbane, Star Wars Galaxies, and Ultima Online again. In 2004 he made $700,000 through various online games and made $1.5 million US Dollars alone through Star Wars Galaxies. He isn't shy about expressing his smugness of his earnings, "[SWG] built my new house, which I paid for in cash," he says. "So when you ring my doorbell, it plays the Star Wars music." As the game creators became wiser to the sellers, so did he. After farming gold and duping items, 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. This way, it's hard to trace the source, and the gold comes back clean.
Rich Thurman - A notorious UO gold farmer. He amassed 9 billion gold from having as many as 30 computers online in UO running scripts. Here is an actual picture of his setup - Click [URL=http://img397.imageshack.us/my.php?image=2farmjn0.jpg]HERE[/URL] . He worked around the EULA and ROC by technicailities i.e
"No 3rd party software to be used"
Well, the EULA stats that no 3rd party applications are allowed, but we all know and use many different utilities out there. So, since I agreed to the EULA, I am the first party, being the paying member for UO and EA is the second party, being the provider. So, if *I* make/author a utility, it is a 1st party utility, and in my opinion, anything you make doesn’t apply.
"The ROC says something like, thou shall not macro unattended."
The litmus test for this rule is a GM asking you to respond, and if the GM is satisfied, you are golden. I concentrated on resolving this first problem and I believe it was a pretty creative solution.
Instant messaging has been a great blessing and is used by millions of people everyday for instant communication. When a GM talks to you in the game, or anyone for that matter, UO becomes one massive IM application. So, why not wire UO up to something akin to Trillian and pipe any in-game text to an IM application of your choice? This is exactly what I did. Since I was able to get game text from the game client, I piped it to MSN messenger and was able to converse with GMs or anyone else in the game from my smart phone that was MSN messenger aware. So, as long as you are able to respond right? I felt that I had satisfied the ROC. Game on!
His business finally came to an end not from the game developers are legal action, but by the brutal, cut-throat competition. Competitor's like Lee Caldwell mentioned above made it difficult to farm gold by using dirty tactics and creating bots that hunted down bots. Price competitions were also created through people like IngotDude who used mass duping of items to slash prices and have larger stockpiles of gold.
IGE - No doubt the largets supplier of gold and items today. They run under many names and have bought out a large proportion of businesses aiming to sell gold. Many game developers have filed lawsuits with IGE including Blizzard in summer 2007, but they have yet to be shut down. I firmly believe if IGE is shut down it will be a critical hit against the farming industry. (pun intended)
Impact on the game economy:
This is by far the biggest problem and one which angers players. Those who spend their real money to buy gold can afford armour, weapons, materials, potions, spells etc.. alot easier and advance through the game quicker. This is unfair and deemed "cheating" as it gives them an unfair advantage from 3rd parties. A game i am familiar with is World of Warcraft and its economy. Over the years it has fluctuated from gold farms popping up and being shut down constantly. By flooding the servers with farmers selling gold it allows in-game traders to sell their hard earned items for more gold at the auction house since there are players who are buying the gold to get these items. But there is a flip-side. With more gold to spend, crafters can mass produce their items and there is price wars between crafters lowering their prices to get the most sales.
So does this mean that gold selling is beneficial to the economy?
No. It is forcing us into playing longer hours to keep up our stocks of potions and items since we need more gold to purchase these. Outside the game it is damaging our health *see article link at the bottom of this paragraph*. Bots or farmers are stationed in remote areas to kill the same monsters over and over again to earn the gold, which is disrupting monsters that need to be killed for quests and limiting the amount of monsters that real players may need to extensively farm themselves for gold or items.
Read Windshell's article on health issues with video games - Click [url=http://www.realpoor.com/articles/article.php?mode=view&hpr=Heart_Attack_because_of_MMORPG&article_id=88&forum_id=0]HERE[/url]
The life of a gold farmer:
I am as un-biased as can be in this article, but the fact is these gold farms are just virtual sweatshops. The employees generally work 12 hour shifts 7 days a week without holidays. The pay varies but an average works out at $100-$250 US Dollars a month, a high-end salary runs in at $2900 a year. This is extremely low in the US but in China it is a higher value, but still a low salary nonetheless. Children and teenagers have often been used to work in these sweatshops but crackdowns on under 18's playing video games have made it more reliant on adults to fill the roles. Workers who were interviewed say they are happier working in gold farms than in sweatshops or bars, but it is still hard work in bad conditions.
Spot the difference:
Sweatshop building toys - Click [URL=http://img169.imageshack.us/my.php?image=055mattelfactory468x310ml5.jpg]HERE[/url]
Gold farming sweatshop - Click [URL=http://img169.imageshack.us/my.php?image=09game6502kh0.jpg]HERE[/url]
The reality is they are both the same. They are both large warehouses stacked with equipment to build large profit while the employees work long hours for low pay.
The changes in gold farming:
Gold selling is a business, therefore there is always going to be others looking to make money the same way. There are many gold farming businesses run, most in China. Those who can supply the gold quickest, safest and cheapest would be considered the best service.Gold used to be quite expensive when the practice was new and there was less competition. Now, you can buy 1000 gold on WoW for as little as $30 due to price wars. That amount would supply you with enough money to keep potions and flasks stocked for raids for weeks. This is the big attraction of buying gold, little effort = big rewards.
Over the years gold farmers have realised they dont need to pay for mass labour to earn the gold when they can create bots (automated programs that mimic a real players) that can do all the hard work. This was tried and tested through Ultima Online and as mentioned above, they made millions of dollars in doing so. But this was against the game's EULA and RoC, so any account using them were banned. This spurred hackers and programmers to create more elaborate and sophisticated bots that were undetected through games anti-cheating systems. I'm going to assume they are still undetectable in some cases since i have seen bots levelling up and farming for months while i killed them. (Tip - Kill a bot everytime you see one in WoW, its free honor and they suck at fighting back :) )
Hacking is the newest way of obtaining gold and this has caused a strong sense of hate from the Western communities towards China. Instead of weeks to obtain large amounts of gold, gold farming companies have now been using bots and Chinese workers to post URL links containing keyloggers all over the internet on game related forums, e-mail accounts and even in-game. For those who dont know, a keylogger is a sort of virus that can be implanted unknowingly on a persons computer that records keystrokes that you type and send them back to the source. This data will contain the log in details for bank accounts, e-mail accounts and game account. If they have access to your account, they can strip your characters bank, gold, weapons, armour etc.. and mail it onto different accounts to launder the items and gold. There is a more sinister side to this, if they have access to both your game and e-mail account they can potentially transfer the accounts e-mail over to a new one of their own and change login information. This leads to the possibility of them selling on the account quickly before you are able to realise what has happened.
Over 90% of Keyloggers in the last year have originated from China
Phishing e-mails (fake e-mails made to look like they are from real businesses) have been used to lure players into giving out full account details to obtain access to accounts.
Phishing example 1 - Click [URL=http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=3709652373&sid=1]HERE[/url]
Phishing example 2 - Click [URL=http://img231.imageshack.us/img231/2491/wotlkbetascamny0.jpg]HERE[/url]
Advertising has become a big part of selling gold. Adverts are placed everywhere on gaming sites, forms, even Realpoor! However there are some methods of advertising that are becoming a nuisance to players and disrupting players games. Bots have been placed in major towns and gathering places of players to spam a macro advertise their site, they have also been used to spam across large zone-wide channels to reach more players attention. Advertisements spammed through in-game mail systems and forums have also been a large part of advertising. Many of these links, especially those that contain .cn, .biz and even .jpg have been widely known to contain keyloggers.
Combating the farmers:
The game developers had to come up with solutions to remove farmers disrupting their economy and members. One of the biggest changes came from China's government itself to limit their playtime to 3 hours a day, over 3 hours a day will diminish rewards (experience, gold etc..) by 50% and after 5 hours per day, it gives 0%. This was introduced to limit under 18's only to promote a healthy lifestyle and break gaming addiction for the next generation. It hasnt stopped the farmers, but it has lowered the amount of children and teenagers used to farm gold.
In WoW, gold sellers used to be able to send the gold through mail to the buyer, but Blizzard caught onto this and eventually made a delay for gold being sent from one account to a different account to give them time to monitor these large transactions. The sellers came up with a way to combat this, they changed the method of transferring the gold. In 2007 when a gold buyer wanted to purchase e.g. 5000 gold they would be told to create an auction at the auction house and enter the item "Bread roll" or "cheese" (i guess it depends on which company) for 5000 gold. The sellers would then visit the auction house and purchase this bread roll for 5000 gold making it look like a regular auction. This was leaving Blizzard wondering how they were managing to deliver the gold until buyers (perhaps employees of Blizzard trying to uncover the operation) started blowing the whistle on the method of transfer. This lead to delays in auction house items being delivered, again presumably to monitor large transfers of gold. I dont actually know how they are transferring the gold now, but i have no doubt they will find ways time and time again.
In Ultima Online, chinese originating IP addresses were eventually banned from the game to cut down on the amount of bots and farmers disrupting the economy.
Runescape has had a more notable change, albeit an unpopular one is the "3k limit". This update forced players to be limited to trading "3k" every 15 minutes (which is apparantly pocket-change to RS players). This effectively ruined merchanting for honest players and they have lost hundreds of thousands of players by taking this drastic, and imo stupid move. Jagex, the creators of Runescape let members increase their amount they can trade up to 300k based on Quest Points (which stops new accounts being used for gold farms to trade gold). Jagex essentially destroyed their own game through bad approaches to combating the farmers.
So is it worth it?
It is estimated that gold farms employ over 100,000 in China alone. Now even i dont need to tell you that people need jobs, even if it is working at a computer 12 hours a day/7 days a week causing as much controversy as covered above. I would like those who have read this article to answer the following question (click on Write comment on the bottom right panel if you are new to Realpoor):
Is it worth the aggravation and trouble gold farms cause to give over 100,000 people a better quality of life?
I would like to thank everyone for taking the time to read this long article explaining gold farming beyond the knowledge of "lol china". I hope this has provided some level of education on this illicit trade and its effects on the games we love.
Article sources
- http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3141815
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2005/mar/13/games.theobserver
http://www.markeedragon.com/forums/ubbthreads.php/ubb/showflat/Number/29818/site_id/1#import
http://www.tv.com/users/RK-Mara/profile.php?action=show_blog&entry=m-100-25223232
*Many more un-named*
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