This paper reviews what we know so far about gold farming, seeking to provide the first systematic analysis of the sub-sector. It assembles available data at the sectoral, enterprise and worker level. Five main analytical lenses are then applied. Economic analysis shows how exchange rate variations and scale economies do and do not impact gold farming; and the strong influence of information failure in the purchase of virtual items: known as "real-money trading". Analysis from the perspective of industrial sociology charts the commoditisation and globalisation of the sub-sector, while value chain models identify resource dependencies and power inequities. Enterprise analysis investigates enterprise entry, existence and progression, and outlines the competitive forces shaping the sub-sector's development; particularly threats. Developmental analysis investigates the impact of this sub-sector in macro and micro terms. Finally, there is a sociological analysis of the role played by perceptions and other social forces.

I've got it saved for future reading, and from what I've seen, it's definitely worth a look if you're interested in issues of RMT and gold farming. It is long (and academic!), but think about wading through if you're feeling inspired.

Current Analysis and Future Research Agenda on "Gold Farming" [IDPM Working papers via Terra Nova]

Chengdu's Shuangliu county has arrested two virtual item and currency traders, surnamed Li and Zhang, focused on tapping out The9's (Nasdaq: NCTY) licensed MMORPG World of Warcraft (WoW), reports Chengdu Evening News. Police arrested the pair after Li reported Zhang for unfair revenue distribution. Going into business last August, the gold miners accumulated more than 20 employees with 20 computers to generate RMB 1.6 million in seven months of dealing.

Oopsies. I'll be nosing around for more on this story (like exactly what the pair was arrested for), but if any intrepid readers come across anything, send it my way. As Steve at PlayNoEvil notes, "Turn up the Irony Meter to 11. After all, with all of the complaints in the US about gold farming, it takes the Chinese to stand up and do something about it."

WoW Gold Miner Offers Himself Up To Police [Pacific Epoch via PlayNoEvil

If anti-gold farming initiatives were effective, gold prices should go up as the cost of business increases for gold farmers. (NOTE: This assumes that demand is fairly constant. If game companies could actually convince their players not to buy gold, than prices would drop with a glut of gold on the market and no one to buy it. I've not been able to get volume data from any gold sellers, but my sense is that their customers are not going away.)

The Gold Farming War - Who's winning? [PlayNoEvil]

"The real significance of this case is, 'What are the rights of the [virtual world] community members when they go online?'"

IGE's attorney seem to be familiar with the agreement, having argued in court papers that players don't have the right to even bring forth this lawsuit. It's sort of like a person trying to sue a thief who swiped the lawnmower he sometimes borrows from his neighbor. Still, they are ready to fight if need be.

"The stakes are high and our intention is to address [the lawsuit] in court," Miller said.

"We believe that shutting down gold farming and real-money transfer is in the interest of all World of Warcraft players and that a victory in this case would have a positive long-term effect on the online gaming industry as a whole," said Paul Sams, Blizzard Entertainment's chief operating officer

We'll keep you posted in case anything ever comes of this whole mess.

Video game fan asks court to ban real sloth and greed from World of Warcraft [South Florida Sun-Sentinel.com]

Now we have a problem. And it is not gold farmers.

Banks don't like chargebacks. High risk/ high fraud markets (the adult industry and gambling) pay a substantial premium for payment processing. If fraud gets too bad, payment processors will simply refuse to service companies. The also will impose additional procedures to combat fraud - all of which cost money.

The first consequence for the entire game industry will be a broad increase in payment processing fees. New game providers will face difficulty entering the market as most payment processors will refuse to work with them.

Subscription gaming is in trouble. While the free-to-play business model has been pitched by many as a good strategy, it is going to become necessary in a higher payment processing world.

Eep. Will there be more fallout à la the Halifax bank incident? Time will tell.

You hate Gold Farmers? Here come the Gold Frauders

The main Southern Weekly article on ZT Online follows a gamer as she first becomes interested in the game, through her rise to power, and her eventual disillusionment with the money-sink it had become.

Woven into the narrative are descriptions of the often shockingly brazen tactics ZT Online uses to soak the "RMB gamers" who would rather spend money than grind out levels. The picture resolves into that of an online casino dressed in the trappings of an adventure game, and Shi Yuzhu [the brain behind ZT] ends up looking a lot like a shady used-car salesman.

It's a really, really great (if somewhat lengthy) article from a number of perspectives - it's one of the better mainstream media articles I've read on gaming, though not without its flaws. But as the PNE commentary points out, the fascinating thing is how it turns a lot of ideas about 'good' MMORPGs upside down ... and is reaping major rewards. From the sounds of it, I doubt we'll be seeing it Stateside, but one never knows.

Gamble your life away in ZT Online [Danwei via PlayNoEvil]

The more I have considered this issue, I think spectacular, arbitrary punishments are the best penalty for gold buyers.

I'm leaning towards "The Roll Back". The game operator detects a gold buyer. He reviews the account file and makes a notation of where the player was when he bought the gold (or farther back, or at the time he is detected). This state is quietly saved. Then, at some random date in the future - say, 1 to 6 months later, the player is notified that he was busted for gold buying and his account is rolled back. No gains, no experience, no nothing from the time since counts.

This should be done rather publicly on a daily basis... banner headlines - a Player was rolled back from Level 63 to Level 20. He lost X gold, Y experience, the following items..... One of those annoying news tickers (with RSS feed, of course).

He's got some more interesting thoughts that are worth a quick read through. While such a system seems fraught with potential technical challenges and ups the amount of effort that must be invested by the operator, it's not like companies aren't spending any time going after farmers/buyers - and what better way to stem the tide of RMTs for virtual gold than putting a punishment system in place that punishes not just people you actually catch, but the whole system?

Proxy Products for Gold Farmers and RMT in Blizzard's World of Warcraft [PlayNoEvil]

Being indignant at such crimes, I also feel sorry for those criminals. Many of them are even more wretched victims, of the unconstrained online game business, than legitimate users and players.

They are addicted young players who wasted too much time in the games and become losers in schools and, as adults, have difficulties in finding a regular job to support themselves - so they turn to online crime.

Some of them, induced by experienced crackers, join the business of online larceny, and mostly function as tiny worms in a huge nest.

Considering there are plenty of non-loser college graduates who are also having a hard time finding legitimate jobs (as illustrated by the near-riot that took place at a Zhengzhou job fair last year), I don't think we can pin the rising unemployment problem on online games, but no doubt there would be some happy players and companies if the Chinese government did step in and ban the sale of virtual goods. I can't imagine it would stop the problem, but perhaps - at the very least - stem the tide. But that leaves another question: what is an unemployed gold farmer to do?

Virtual sword theft is real theft [Shanghai Daily via Worlds In Motion]

For easy reference, the plan for profit goes something like this:

Step 1. Create a mule.
Step 2. Install Auctioneer, allowing you to monitor prices and keep track of purchases.
Step 3. ??????
Step 4. Profit.

I suppose it's Step 3 that will be of most interest to WoW profiteers, so you'll have to get into the nitty gritty at Joel's site. A good read, even for a clueless MMO outsider like myself.

Make 100 World of Warcraft Gold a Week in Just Minutes a Day [JoelJohnson.com]

Scummy? Maybe. Creative? Definitely. Blizzard doesn't look favorably upon the act of gold farming or reselling of virtual assets from its ultra popular MMO, so some vendors are forced to work around traditional methods of publicizing themselves. Given that we're now talking about their actions, it sounds like they were successful.

Gnomes Rain From Azeroth's Skies [Clickable Culture]

Kazemi points out that gold farming isn't just a phenomenon that pisses off players and designers, but involves a whole host of people:

In the end, it comes down to a cost-benefit analysis: Is banning a suspected farmer worth the $15 per month subscription fee you lose that the farmer is paying, and on the chance that it's not a farmer, is it worth the bad word of mouth to insinuate you don't trust the people who play your game? It's a delicate balance that involves the marketing and customer service departments of a company every bit as much as it involves the designers.

To Catch A Farmer [The Escapist]

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.

Scattered around the stifling, dim wang ba, 10 power levelers just off the day shift were merrily gaming away. Not all of them were playing World of Warcraft. A big, silent lug named Mao sat mesmerized by a very pink-and-purple Japanese schoolgirls' game, in which doe-eyed characters square off in dancing contests with other online players. But the rest had chosen, to a man, to log into their personal World of Warcraft accounts and spend these precious free hours right back where they had spent every other hour of the day: in Azeroth.

While news of gold farming, bannings, documentaries, and the like is all over the place these days, it's usually interesting to see yet another take on the "surreal" business of getting virtual loot and selling it for real money. Maggie Greene

The Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer

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.

The clip over at Cnet is an interview with a Chinese gold farmer - after seeing bits and pieces of the trailers and stuff like this, I'm really hoping this project comes to fruition. It looks like it would be an interesting documentary indeed. Even this short clip of an interview brings up issues that go way beyond 'just' gold farming. Maggie Greene

There's gold in them servers, boy... [CNET - Fluorescent Paradise]

China's 'Gold Farmers' Play a Grim Game [NPR via Eclectic Gamer]

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)."

Companies like NCSoft initially supported the ban, but people are starting to get suspicious about the government's motives and just how they plan to sort out legitimate deals from "unfair" and "illegal" ones. I guess we'll find out next week. Maggie Greene

Ban on Cyber Asset Trading Clouds Game Industry [The Korea Times via PlayNoEvil]

It seems those crafty Microsoft employees have put the kibosh on that business with the newest update of the 360 dashboard. Tank over at 2old2play was able to turn up some details.

The fall Dashboard introduces a hybrid locking system which renders most of these cheating tactics useless. Only some of the 'unlocked' style game saves currently work and to guarantee they work, they need to be re-done on an updated Xbox360 and then re-uploaded to a game sharing site.

Many of the top scorers on the World leaderboards have admitted to cheating and the former World #1 Ranked player, ST The King has stepped down from his throne, although it's not clear whether he actually cheated his way there.

For a more in-depth look at Achievement Cheating check out 2old2play, a favorite site for old geezers like me. Flynn De Marco

Microsoft takes a stand against Achievement Cheating [2old2play]

While the administrators of the Allakhazam forums try to pretend their integrity has been kept in check by a clear delineation between IGE's gold-selling endeavors
and its owned sites (which also includes the Ogaming sites and Thottbot), Allakhazam readers are obviously not so thrilled. The riots are already underway.

So is there any good news when a company many MMORPG players consider to be a scourge on the entire industry buys out one of the most popular MMORPG websites? Well, some: Allakhazam is now becoming Zam.com, which will certainly be a relief to the chronically dyslexic.

Gold Farmers Buy Allakhazam [1UP]

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.

Thanks Tim!

Paying Real Money to Win Online Games [NPR]

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.

Enjoywow.com Interview [Gamecloud]
Wage Slaves [1UP]

Equally interesting is the segment on the shift-changes of the farmers (who usually work in pairs on an account). As they near a shift change, the farmers try and dump their wares. At this point, the patient consumer can try and get their goods on the cheap (assuming the farmer hasn't hit their quota for the day). The net result of the piece is the argument that farmers do not inflate the market and instead that their sales of many items at bargain bin prices actually restricts inflation.

Secrets of Massively Multiplayer Farming [Game Guides Online]