Interested? Well your prospective employer also demands that you be able to play a Death Knight to "farm honor for items." Reward is $50 per hour while he's sub-1,850 in arena rating, $100 an hour when he's past that, and a big fat $5,000 bonus if he hits 2,350.

I'll admit, half of this is going well the fuck over my head, but it sounds a lot like the time back in sixth grade when I paid Jones Holcomb $20 to let me roll a 16th level fighter in D&D - in the basic set. That's right, I didn't even get to buy an artifact with that. No Mace of St. Cuthbert, no Celestian's Mantle, no Libram of Ineffable Damnation. Not even a sword +4 vorpal. And I was certainly more gracious and less bitchy about the transactional relationship than this clown:

"You *MUST* be trustworthy, helpful, have vent WITH MIC, and not have an holy-then-tho [sic] attitude," the advertiser writes. Christ, if I was getting paid to go into Warcraft and stand around healing some schmoe with more money than sense for 20 hours a week, I might not have a high opinion of my employer, but I'd definitely have a lower opinion of myself.

Oh, and, "Principals only. Recruiters, please don't contact this job poster." Just in case you're a headhunter for arena-healing death knights.

Looking For WOW ARENA Healer Who Can Also Play a DK...(Laurel Hts / Presidio) [Craigslist, thanks Jeffrey S.]

Bruce Everiss, who works in video game marketing, has written up an excellent piece on the shady side of the "game", pointing out the fact it's owned by a guy who has been sued by Microsoft for click fraud and who also runs a gold farming company, that it steals assets from Age of Empires and that the game is spamming people's blogs and forums with unsolicited Evony ads.

And what did Bruce get for his troubles? Well, of course, he's been threatened with a lawsuit by Evony's owner, Eric Lam.

More About Evony [Bruceongames, via Valleywag]

Officially, China's Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Commerce said that in-game monies "will only be allowed to trade in virtual goods and services provided by its issuer, not real goods and services."

According to a release from the two bodies, "using virtual money for gambling will be punished by public security authorities, and minors may not buy virtual money." Sure, the Chinese government hopes to curb gambling and illicit trade, as well as money laundering via virtual money, but this ruling is not a ban.

Professor Richard Heeks of The University of Manchester explains:

This is a government restriction on the use of the quasi-Paypal-like currencies (mainly QQ coins) that are used extensively in China to pay for virtual game stuff. As announced they can now only be used to pay for virtual stuff, and you can't buy real things with them as game companies were allowing to happen, nor can you gamble. This therefore is not about what gold farming clients do: use real money to buy these virtual currencies; it's the mirror image. And it's not about the major trade in gold farming such as World of Warcraft, which relates to other types of virtual currency. And it's not about buying/selling in-game items. And it's not about the power-levelling of avatars. Bottom line: it's not about gold farming.

China Bans Gold Farming!! … Er … But In Fact It Hasn't [ICTs for Development via IncGamers]

Officially, China's Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Commerce said that in-game monies "will only be allowed to trade in virtual goods and services provided by its issuer, not real goods and services." That could potentially put a damper on the burgeoning industry of accumulating in-game assets in World of Warcraft, then selling them for yuan, dollars and pounds to people with too much money on their hands.

The Chinese government also defined that "virtual currency" include "prepaid cards of cyber-games," which may be able to be cashed in for digital funny money.

According to a release from the two bodies, "using virtual money for gambling will be punished by public security authorities, and minors may not buy virtual money." The Chinese government hopes to curb gambling and illicit trade, as well as money laundering via virtual money.

China Bans Gold Farming [Information Week]

The website MyMMOShop.com, which specializes in the farming and selling of in-game money from massively-multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XI, and Everquest II, has by purchased by My MMO Inc. to the tune of $10 million.

“MyMMOShop.com appealed to us because of its strong reputation for providing optimal customer service,” says Hunter Crowell, My MMO Inc.’s Media Relations Agent. “That focus will continue with our purchase.”

Crowell noted that with more and more people spending their time at home playing video games in the face of a troubled economy, traditional investing is a risky prospect. In this volatile time, virtual currency is one of the few in-demand items left to invest in.

I wonder how much of that $10 million the farmers themselves will see?

Charges were also filed against 11 Koreans who allowed the scheme to use their bank accounts for money laundering.

Jeong and his ring reportedly sold the game money illegally produced in China using cheap labor and virus programs. They are believed to have taken a commission of three to five percent of the money traded to purchase game money.

And you thought gold farming was a problem. The connection between the gold farming ring and the money laundering ring is unclear, but this is just one more example of RMTs being put to, uh, creative uses.

`Online Game Ring Smuggled Out $38 Mln to China` [donga.com via PlayNoEvil]

So how exactly does a gold seller wind up with 50 beta keys for an MMO from Mythic Entertainment, a company that has gone after such enterprises legally in the past and won? I'm going to go ahead an assume they used bots.

EA and Mythic Entertainment Announce That Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning Has Gone Gold
Award-Winning Fantasy MMORPG Marches Toward Sept. 18th Launch

FAIRFAX, Va.—(BUSINESS WIRE)—GET READY FOR THE WORLDWIDE WAAAGH! Electronic Arts (NASDAQ:ERTS) and Mythic Entertainment today announced that the highly-anticipated MMORPG, Warhammer® Online: Age of Reckoning™ (WAR), has gone gold and will open its servers on September 18, 2008 at an MSRP of $49.99 in North America.

“We’ve done our best to create the next great MMORPG experience, but it’s the fans that will bring our world to life,” said Mark Jacobs, vice president at EA and general manager of Mythic Entertainment. “The Day of Reckoning approaches and it’s going to be glorious! It’s time to go to WAR.”

Based on the popular tabletop game from Games Workshop, Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning is an epic fantasy MMORPG featuring innovative Realm vs. Realm™ game play that pits the forces of Order and Destruction against one another on the battlefield to determine the fate of nations.

Awarded “Best Online Game” at the recent Games Convention in Leipzig, Germany, “Best PC Game” of E3 by G4’s X-Play and “Best MMO” of E3 by IGN, WAR has been well-received by critics and by the gaming community as an accessible and engaging MMO title. Tens of thousands of players have already joined the battle in the closed beta, and soon the time will be at hand for players the world over to pledge their allegiance to the armies of WAR.

Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning is scheduled to launch simultaneously in North America, Europe, and Oceania on September 18, 2008. Available for PC, WAR is rated “T” for Teen by the ESRB. For more information, visit http://www.warhammeronline.com/.

Swagvault Warhammer Online Beta Access Key Give-Away Event

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The study's author admits that precise estimates are not possible because of the underground nature of the activity. But it's at least a $500 million global industry as of now, with organized crime snaking its tendrils into the business.

The growth is entirely predictable and not really a new phenomenon, when you think about it. "When you get people with more money than time and time than money the two will find a way to meet," said Stephen Davis, of game security firm Secure Play. Quoted for truth.

Poor Earning Virtual Gaming Gold [BBC]

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]

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]