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Gold famring boggles the brightest of minds, as Neal Stephenson discusses the inspiration for his novel Reamde during his GDC Online 2011 keynote speech. More »
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North Korea has officially responded to allegations it supported a hacking network that allowed it to gold-farm some $7 million out of South Korea-based MMOs. North Korea's (adjusts glasses, clears throat) "Committee for Peaceful Unification of the Fatherland" on Sunday released a statement saying, in effect, "no u." More »
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An awesome tale from Friday's New York Times alleges that Mister Fun himself, Kim Jong-il, finances his nookular ambitions with the proceeds of an MMO-gold farming operation. More »
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Inmates at China's Jixi prison labor camp are tasked with backbreaking, mind-numbing work: mining rock, carving chopsticks by hand, and assembly line work. Some are even forced to endure grueling video game play, farming for gold in online games. More »
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The FBI now is raiding homes looking for World of Warcraft gold farmers. The party van showed up March 30 at an apartment shared by two University of Michigan students (building pictured), who say the feds have got the wrong suspects. More »
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Gold farming is the practice of harvesting crap in online worlds with the aim of selling it for real-world money. Most developers frown on the practice, but that's not stopping an estimated 100,000 people from doing it. More »
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An analysis by a World Bank initiative recommends that gold farming - you read that right - is a substantial growth opportunity for developing nations' economies, and that NGOs - bureaucrat speak for do-gooder agencies - begin connecting the rural poor in these nations to gold farming enterprises under a fair-trade modeling. More »
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The makers of World of Warcraft have struck back at the game's gold-farming black market, convincing PayPal to suspend the accounts of those using the service for gold-selling transactions. Warning letters went out this month. More »
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A study by a student at the University of Minnesota suggests that gold farmers - the unscrupulous salt mine workers of the MMO world - have a lot in common with other undesirable lots, like drug dealers and street gangs. More »
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Yes, of course, there are gold farmers in China. But why? More »
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Someone on San Francisco Craigslist is seeking to employ a Warcraft player 20 hours per week to help him get his sorry ass to a supermacho arena rating of 2,000 or greater. More »
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Evony needs little introduction. If you're on the internet, at all, you've seen its intrusive banner ads pretty much everywhere. But just who are the people behind this "game"? Well, surprisingly, it turns out they're incredibly shady. More »
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Earlier this week, we brought word that the Chinese Government has tried to ban gold farming the reported $500 million gold farming industry. More »
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Friday, the Chinese government attempted to address the reported $500 million gold farming industry, said to employ some 400,000 workers, in the form of a ruling on the exchange of "virtual currency" for real world cash. More »
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The number three MMORPG gold-seller on the internet, MyMMOShop.com, has just made the ultimate transaction, with the website purchased by a private equity company for $10 million. More »
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A gold farming/money laundering ring in South Korea has been accused of moving somewhere in the neighborhood of $38 million USD from Korea to China (with the help of real money transactions). According to PlayNoEvil, they made false purchases to a Hong Kong paper company to move the money, which is what eventually led to their arrest. In addition to the ring leaders, an additional 11 people were arrested: More »
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It's a press release twofer! Mythic Entertainment has announced that Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning has gone gold, with the game shipping to stores in time for servers to go live on September 18th, and the gold farmers are ready for it! "Internet gaming service" SwagVault has announced that they'll be giving away 50 beta keys for the game via randomly selected email entries received between now and September 5th, giving players a chance to experience the game for themselves before deciding to buy. They'll also be giving out beta access to folks whose order numbers contain the number sequence 8907, which coincides with the open beta date of September 7th, 2008. More »
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Our friends at Manchester University have published another study looking at developing nations where the poor earn money by gold farming or powerlevelling in MMOs. The estimate is half a million people do the work for pay, a supermajority of them in China. Of the online toilers, 400,000 are involved in gold farming, the rest powerlevelling and other services. More »
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Via Terra Nova comes a fascinating paper by Richard Heeks that covers the historical, social, and economic aspects playing into real money transactions. I've just had time to take a quick gander at the paper, but unlike a lot of information out there, this appears quite comprehensive and with a more unbiased position than we usually see: More »
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Steve at PlayNoEvil noted this little news story, which involves two Chinese gold farmers who have pulled in over $200K USD being arrested in China. Why? How, exactly? Well, it would appear that one of the pair felt they were being swindled out of profits and reported his partner to the police: More »
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Steve at PlayNoEvil has some interesting analysis up on the current state of gold farming in MMORPGs (though he does admit that since hard stats are difficult to come by, "any analysis is more akin to reading tea leaves"); using data provided by mmobux, he looks at the pricing trends to try and divine what might be going on in the wild world of selling gold: More »
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And you thought gold farming was bad. Steve at PlayNoEvil has an interesting analysis up of the next wave of things MMO operators and players will have to worry about: gold frauders. The number of stolen credit cards being used to pay for WoW accounts has led to the UK bank Halifax to block payments to Blizzard, among a few other industry moves to try and deal with the ever-increasing problem of stolen credit cards, illicit RMT transactions, and other money-related issues. What is the problem - and why? More »
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I was thrilled to come across a most glorious article on Chinese MMORPGs (specifically, the wildly popular Zhengtu Online), translated to English from the original that appeared in the Southern Weekly. As Steve at PlayNoEvil sums it up, "While wimpy Americans can whine about "cheating" in online games, quibble about Real Money Transactions (RMT), complain about gold farming, gripe about power-leveling, and otherwise aspire to a mythical "purity" of game play, the most popular game in China, ZT Online, from Giant Interactive has embraced all of these things.. and online gambling to boot." More »
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There are some interesting thoughts at PlayNoEvil regarding gold farmers and buyers, and how best to deal with them. One potential solution? Visibly, spectacularly, and seemingly randomly punish people buying gold - to hopefully discourage people from buying, disrupt the flow of gold from farmers to consumers, and make repercussions for buying gold random, retroactive, public, and aimed at damaging the whole system (not just an account (or thousands)): More »
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A "rather sensationalized editorial" (as Worlds In Motion describes it) by Ma Jun in the Shanghai Daily suggests that the government should step in an add another level of control to the Chinese MMO industry: banning the sale of virtual goods for real money. While the author takes a dim view of the conditions gold farmers and their ilk work in, they take a really dim view of the people who make their living stealing account passwords and equipment from virtual avatars: More »
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Don't hand your credit card over to some shady, overseas gold farming fly-by-night company. If you need gold and need it now, invest in Joel Johnson. His handy gold making tips can turn any World of Warcraft noob into an Auction House expert. In just four simple steps (give or take) and ten minutes a day, you'll go from a 5 gold piece pittance to a 100 gold per week fortune. More »
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World of Warcraft players were treated to an uncommon occurrence recently when hundreds of gnomes fell from the sky, perishing upon impact. Their corpses were arranged in sequence to advertise the web site of WowMine.com, a third-party service dealing in in-game gold sales. The corpse storm was triggered by a client-side hack, according to a post on blogger Raph Koster's site, and were arranged in text form just outside the server's bank and auction house. More »
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A gold farmer, that is - it's another Sunday, and that means yet another issue of The Escapist, and this week's is all about MMOGs. And what is a discussion about MMOGs without at least a little bit about that topic that just won't go away, gold farming? Darius Kazemi explains what goes into catching gold farmers, namely a lot of analyzing data and looking for anomalies in patterns (you mean 'Abcdef' isn't a popular name choice for 'normal' players? Who knew?). More »
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In an article I somehow managed to miss out of last week's NYT Magazine, Julian Dibbell takes a not entirely new look at "The Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer," though it does focus a bit more on the life (or lack thereof) and less on the gold farming. More »
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Via CNET Asia, another look at the documentary Gold Farmers (we covered it last year), directed/produced by Ge Jin, and still a work in progress. More »
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NPR covered Gold Farming as a story on today's Morning Edition. Anyone who has read articles on this topic and are still confused about the working conditions or even how the work gets paid to these gamers, can listen to Louisa Lim interview which compares gold farmers to low-paid workers making Nike shoes. It also covers the social issues that Gold Farming has impacted in the real world such as anti-Chinese sentiment from American players. Instead of just focusing in on the gaming culture, the broadcast focuses on the money aspect, which is probably why this has actually become a story in other media outlets. Although it's another negative story on gaming, it's at least articulate and doesn't have a certain you-know-who from a certain southern state. Kim Phu More »
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In an apparently vaguely worded and of questionable enforceability announcement, the South Korean Ministry of Culture and Tourism announced that - starting next week - "the government will prohibit the trading of cyber items by 'unfair' and 'illegal' ways from next week to 'promote' the healthy growth of the game industry." Terra Nova has a post up that has parts of the new law excerpted, and explains: "The word 'abnormal play' is surely relating to some workshop whrere BOT program facilitated .... In the sphere of MMOs, RMTing of game money etc earned by normal play remains out of govermental regulation(except the possibility of taxing)." More »
]]> http://kotaku.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=259952&view=rss&microfeed=true Is Achievement cheating the new gold farming? There are quite a few websites out there offering ways to up your Xbox Live Achievement scores through cheating (I could tell you what they are but that would be unethical), mostly dealing with the uploading and sharing of saved games. More »
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Gameblog Aeropause reports (along with everyone else) that Blizzard has banned 30,000 accounts during May alone for the heinous crime of goldfarming: More »
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Allakhazam — that perennial haunt of MMORPG enthusiasts, the forums of which are often flaming with bitter theses on the loose morals of Chinese gold-farming zombie players — has been bought out by gold-selling scumbag company IGE. More »
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An NPR piece takes a look at how MMO economies are threatened by power leveling, gold buying and account purchasing. The writer infuses a little of his own situation when he asks if the time it's going to take him to make 90g for his level 40 mount is worth more or less than the amount of real life money he could spend to purchase the gold for the mount. However, the headline is a little misleading as you can't really "win" MMOs, you can clear what they have to offer, but there is always something to do, some obstacle implemented - and if not, one is probably coming a future patch. More »
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The stigma around gold farming in MMOs isn't glamorous. Gamecloud has an interview up with "Christine" of Enjoy WoW that tries to change that. Aside from being a farming group composed entirely of women (according to "Christine"), Enjoy WoW allows gamers to get more than just gold, they'll run Upper Blackrock Spire for your BoP Blue chest piece until their faces match your new breastplate. More »
]]> http://kotaku.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=132665&view=rss&microfeed=true Game Guides Online has a piece looking at the lives of farmers in and out of game. There's a lengthy segment on farmers making money and trying to hide the gold from their bosses, storing it on the characters of in-game friends and then asking them to sell it and paypal the farmer the proceeds. The Black Black Market. More »
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