Gold Farming

There's a pretty great New York Times Magazine article about Chinese World of Warcraft "gold farmers" out today. If you don't know what that means, you really have to read the piece, though everyone should check it out. This made me wonder:

At the end of each shift, Li reports the night’s haul to his supervisor, and at the end of the week, he, like his nine co-workers, will be paid in full. For every 100 gold coins he gathers, Li makes 10 yuan, or about $1.25, earning an effective wage of 30 cents an hour, more or less. The boss, in turn, receives $3 or more when he sells those same coins to an online retailer, who will sell them to the final customer (an American or European player) for as much as $20.

One interesting thing is that as best I can tell the only reason the online retailer is making so much money is that the gold farming is against the rules of the game. If you're able to sell gold at $20 then it would make sense to offer more than $3 for the sake of increasing your volume; the retailers should be competing against each other and bidding the price up. But since the farmers need to be wary of drawing too much attention to themselves, they have a limited ability to switch retailers. At the intersection of this reality and cheap Chinese labor, the most valuable commodity in the whole process is knowledge of the supply chain, rather than the gold itself.

Incidentally, a good friend of mine is working this from a different angle -- a basement full of computer playing the game automatically according to some kind of program he's written, rather than relying on outsourced labor.

Comments

Good article.

I used to play World of Warcraft on and off, very casually. The funny thing is that gold actually is quite meaningless for everyone but the most hardcore raiders, a small minority of the population. Most of the good items you can get for your character, and all the best items, are non-tradeable. Gold is commonly used for one of two things: one time purchases of special things like a mount or rare recipe, and repeat purchases of consumables such as potions and elixirs. So the value of money is already very limited in WoW.

What gold really represents, of course, is a shortcut for actually playing the game the way it was meant to be played. Some person wants his epic flying mount, but he doesn't want to put in the hours of playtime to get the mount, and he's willing to part with $100 or so real dollars to it immediately.

The demand for that kind of thing is out there, and it's hard to repress demand. In the future, I expect MMO gaming companies will incorporate more and more "real-world trading" into their business models. Personally, I think this is unfortunate, but money speaks louder than words.

Posted by Korha | June 17, 2007 1:32 PM

Oh, I also know someone who runs WoW "bot" programs on his computer. He has a couple accounts running 24/7 farming gold, which he then resells on various websites. I don't know exactly how much he makes but it's a good chunk of change per day for doing essentially nothing, and suplements his day job quite nicely.

Posted by Korha | June 17, 2007 1:35 PM

"What gold really represents, of course, is a shortcut for actually playing the game the way it was meant to be played."

Meh. It's not up to you to decide how the game is "meant to be played".

For example, I already outsource many of my blog comments to a team of folks working in an office park in Gujarat. Some folks would say that isn't how blog comments are "meant" to work. But I'm just being a more efficient commenter.

Posted by Petey | June 17, 2007 1:38 PM

Doesn't "meant" mean "intended by the designers"? Teleology is usually crap, but not when we're dealing with a product of human design.

Posted by AlanC9 | June 17, 2007 1:47 PM

All this seems a rather complicated way of saying that producing the gold is not the constraint, just reaching the consumers. Which is why automated programs (of which there are many) aren't really that useful.

Especially since these companies DON'T make any effort to avoid detection by the mother company. They advertise freely on websites, are easily found via web searches, and wage a constant campaign to spam players in the game.

It's really like people who sell vi4gra over the web; the interesting part isn't the 1 cent they spend to make the sugar pill, but why people buy this stuff over spam?

Posted by Tony V | June 17, 2007 1:50 PM

The gaming companies must lose money on the account subscriptions of the gold farmers they bann- a better solution is to mess with the economy in a way that harms the farmers disproportionately. Introduce some hyperinflation by making monsters carry 100x more gold than before, for example, or have money expire after a certain period (ie, issue new currency.) For entertainment players, it will be a challenge; for farmers, it would mess up their business plan. Would also make more interesting topics for economists to study- you can have a virtual Turkish Lira system.

Posted by SP | June 17, 2007 1:58 PM

$20 per 100 gold is way too high. Typical price is more like $20 per 250 gold.

Here's an example: IGE

Blizzard makes sweeps every 3 months to cancel accounts for botting programs and also gold sellers. That is a major cost for the middlemen.

There was a middleman in Canada that got caught on tax evasion charges for gold selling.

Botting and selling are against the terms of service.

I've heard that $0.30/hr + room/board is the typical day labor rate in China for cooks, construction workers, and the like. Is that true?

Posted by stm177 | June 17, 2007 2:00 PM

I'd also like to add, that the major cost in the game right now is the fast flying mount. It costs 5000 gold in game. IGE is selling 5000 gold for $440 dollars.

I have a fast flying mount on my character, but I had been saving gold for 8 months, even before they became available. So, you can imagine how much temptation there is for someone to just buy the gold using dollars, instead of saving up for 8 months like I did.

Posted by stm177 | June 17, 2007 2:03 PM

Personally I think it's silly for the companies to worry about it. While they should prevent the game from being impossible to enjoy without buying gold, I don't see any reason people can't buy and sell gold if they want to. Seems like a reasonable way to negotiate various desires and needs.

Posted by Mike Meginnis | June 17, 2007 2:04 PM

Yes, I meant intended by the designers. My personal opinion is that it harms the overall integrity of the game to have some players able to convert their real-world wealth into game-world wealth. Obviously, though, a lot of players have jobs and families and it's unreasonable to ask them to play 50 hours or whatever just so they can get that shiny pixel sword they want, and I don't begrudge gold farmers for what they do either.

Producing gold is definitely a constraint. Gold prices would be much lower if Blizzard Entertainment (the company that made World of Warcraft) wasn't actively going around and liquidating farmer and bot accounts.

As SP mentions, the most obvious way to kill gold farming once and for all is to make gold totally worthless and shift the game to a barter economy. That would be quite interesting, but it almost certainly make the game worse. Either currency means something, or it doesn't.

Posted by Korha | June 17, 2007 2:06 PM

Some other MMOs had barter economies, and people started using certain items as currency.

It sort of reminds me of the Incas using cocoa beans for currency. People find a way.

Posted by stm177 | June 17, 2007 2:24 PM

Mike Meginnis:
The problem is inflation. Most MMRPGs have markets for selling items. This provides an incentive to get skill with crafting items and such. These markets allow sellers to set prices which means that if a lot of gold is introduced, prices go up. The same is true for selling items that get dropped by bad guys.

So, essentially, gold buying needs to managed or things start to get really expensive. (I guess if prices got high enough the Chinese operations would shift to crafting or something). Now it could be managed by the companies themselves and some of them are starting to do that. But I can see why some players might object to others buying what they earned.

Posted by Greg Sanders | June 17, 2007 2:59 PM

It's old news, but if you're interested you might try Cory Doctorow's story Anda's Game

Posted by Chuchundra | June 17, 2007 2:59 PM

"One interesting thing is that as best I can tell the only reason the online retailer is making so much money is that the gold farming is against the rules of the game ... At the intersection of this reality and cheap Chinese labor, the most valuable commodity in the whole process is knowledge of the supply chain, rather than the gold itself."

As a good American, I would say the problem here is that labor is receiving too large a share of the pie.

Rather than paying exorbitant wages to the virtual gold farmers, their bosses ought to consider the more enlightened Chinese labor practices that the NYTimes uncovered earlier in the week.

Once that 30 cents an hour is squeezed out of the equation, we can finally get virtual gold at more reasonable prices.

Posted by Petey | June 17, 2007 2:59 PM

For example, I already outsource many of my blog comments to a team of folks working in an office park in Gujarat.

You maybe want to review the incentives in that contract? I'm just saying.

Posted by Bill Gardner | June 17, 2007 3:00 PM

"You maybe want to review the incentives in that contract? I'm just saying."

I don't see the problem. The current systems has explained in exquisite detail how John Edwards will ensure a plentiful supply of mattar paneer for all Americans.

Posted by Petey | June 17, 2007 3:04 PM

Gold is especially valuable for player versus player situations. Back when I played, some days I did nothing but battlegrounds and arenas, and then afterwards I'd farm for an hour or so to stock up on the necessary potions for the next time.

Posted by benny | June 17, 2007 3:16 PM

It's a shame Chinese gold farmers are prevented from unionizing by their oppressive government, and are stopped from drawing a decent wage for their work. Maybe we could start a campaign to draw attention to Chinese WoW labor practices.

Posted by Bender Rodriguez | June 17, 2007 3:37 PM

But isn't the problem that the game is designed so that players "want" to do hundreds of hours of tedious work to get to the (for the sake of the argument) fun parts of the game?

Games like these have a really odd obsession with parallelism ("Second Life" makes it explicit). The point of games (or TV/movies/books, really) is to use narrative techniques to provide experiences in less time than they would actually take in real life. But now we have games that require real-time accumulation of resources over periods of months. It just really seems to miss the point.

Why should someone care about his wealth in an economy that has been created out of nothing? In a game like this, I can imagine two uses for money: to reflect a player's achievement, or to facilitate the fun of the gameplay. Here it clearly does neither, but thousands of customers eagerly participate. Surely contempt for something so stupid has to always be part of one's response to this, rather than just analysis?

Posted by andrew | June 17, 2007 3:53 PM

"It's a shame Chinese gold farmers are prevented from unionizing by their oppressive government, and are stopped from drawing a decent wage for their work."

Again, the virtual gold farmers are already vastly overpaid.

More enlightened Chinese labor practices could reduce the amount of resources wasted on compensating the farmers.

Posted by Petey | June 17, 2007 3:53 PM

IGE basically has a monopoly on buying in-game gold in WoW (they've bought out all their competitors and most of the big fan/database sites), so that helps depress the wholesale price and inflate the retail price.

Posted by phil | June 17, 2007 4:16 PM

Andrew,

The player character is usually excluded from the narrative arc in MMOs. They are usually play the role of a mercenary or peace officer.

Let me give you an example. My character went to a ruined kingdom, and met an old man on an isolated farm. The old man invited me to spend the winter with him, so long as I killed off some of the more hostile wildlife near his cabin. After a month, the old man confessed that he had once been a lord, and that his son was a large part of a wicked crusade that persecuted good and evil alike.

He wanted his son to come back to the light, and had me track down three items that would remind his son of what he really should be. I found his son, and told him his father was still alive! Yet, on our escape from the castle, the son was killed by a powerful priest of the crusade, just as the father was riding up on his horse.

The father proceeded to slay the priest and all the priest's guards, then loudly proclaimed that he would create an new Order dedicated to the light, that would be above politics and pettiness.

This narrative happened to the father and the son, and over the course of a week's playtime, I was able to cause it to happen.

The point of playing the game for months, is that you can see many of these quest lines play out. Usually, each large castle, town, or dungeon that must be conquered is at the behest of someone else.

I'll also add that many people just like the idea of making a more and more powerful character that can go toe to toe with some of the lesser beings in that universe.

Posted by stm177 | June 17, 2007 4:33 PM

Jesus H. Christ, what kind of fucking moron pays $20 for WoW gold???? I mean, seriously, there are people starving in the world and these nerds are wasting their time, money, and energy on a useless pursuit. Fuckers.

Posted by Chinaman | June 17, 2007 4:42 PM

There is a third dynamic; Game popularity. A month ago LOTRO didn't have farmers, but you see them now. I anticipate that Warhammer will be the same way.

I'm in the Warhammer closed beta right now and of course there are no farmers in the beta, but LOTRO offered the ability to transition the beta characters into the live version. I wonder how long it will be until the beta's start seeing farmer infiltration.

For me the most important part of the article was about the break away farmers who had discovered that offering a power leveling service was much more fruitful. Bots and farmers will probably fade away and be replaced by the leveling services worldwide who offer a more complex service.

Posted by Thunderlips | June 17, 2007 4:44 PM

"Jesus H. Christ, what kind of fucking moron pays $20 for WoW gold????"

- Chinaman

Dude, chinaman is not the preferred nomenclature. Asian-American, please.

Posted by Petey | June 17, 2007 4:47 PM

the most obvious way to kill gold farming once and for all is to make gold totally worthless and shift the game to a barter economy.

Making money worthless (Or something along those lines, as in the case of, say, Diablo capping the amount you can hold at any one given time.) and shifting to a barter economy doesn't solve the problem at all. As stm177 points out, it simply causes a shift from gold as the medium of exchange to some other commodity. Whether that's ectos or pgems or SoJs or what have you. All you need to replace gold is an item that has value for nearly everyone (Especially if that value is extremely high relative to currency) and is found commonly enough for their to be a liquid supply of them in order to replace gold. Then, the value of everything in game can be measure in terms of how many of that item can be bought with it. You'd have the equivalent of people walking around with lumps of gold in their pockets rather than billfolds.

And that does nothing to stop farming because, then, the gold farmers turn their attention to producing quantities of that item. Either converting it into gold to sell or just outright trading it. And it should be easy to do that as whatever the players have mutually decided upon is both valuable enough to trade for and commonly found. If it's found commonly enough to be acceptable to the average player then someone can set up a sweatshop or a bot to harvest it repeatedly. It's worth their time because of the profits they can make doing so. That's farming in a nutshell.

As I understand it, there's not much farming done for actual gold. The farmers I've spoken to generally go for big-ticket items which can be quickly turned over for gold. You can get some good deals, if you're so inclined, when they're getting near the end of their shift and need to unload their inventories. So it wouldn't be too hard for them to shift from gold pieces. Devaluing gold wouldn't work. Even if you got rid of gold and items as factors entirely people would still trade real money for things like accounts or powerleveling.

If you could somehow cut off the demand for RMT services, though, gold farming would be a dead issue but to do that would require removing a lot of the things people enjoy about these games. The problem with gold farming is that you can't have the basic gameplay of WoW-type games without encouraging the accumulation of wealth. Whether that's phat loot or piles of gold or however it's measured, it's what drives the players. And every feature you include - like auction houses to facilitate trading or general chat channels to facilitate communication - to make things easy for the average player can be co-opted by people looking to game that system. Both the customers who are looking to skip ahead on the treadmill and the sellers who are looking to make a buck. The best a developer can do is police the RMT, spending a lot of time and energy to keep things to a dull roar (Making banned accounts and suspensions just a part of doing business) or incorporate it into their systems by offering RMT services of their own (Making sure those revenue streams flow into their accounts and not elsewhere). Eliminating the demand requires drastically rethinking these sort of game systems from the bottom up and that's not the sort of thing developers really excel at. And probably not the sort of thing players will go for.

Posted by Sausaletus Rex | June 17, 2007 4:53 PM

Chinaman,

Buying WoW gold gives a starving Chinese gold farmer a job.

Besides, most of life is a terrible waste of time - tv, movies, sports, reading blogs, making good food, hunting deer, chatting with neighbors -- all are a waste of time.

Unless you want people working 100 hours a week instead of 40 hours a week, the average person is going to find something fairly unproductive to do with that extra 60 hours. That is why it's called time off, or leisure time.

It's also possible you are just being a troll, in which case, you got me! I responded to you! Congrats!

Posted by stm177 | June 17, 2007 4:56 PM

Jesus H. Christ, what kind of fucking moron pays $20 for WoW gold???

Who drops $100 going to a concert? What's the point of buying tickets to a basketball game? Or to the movies?

People, for some odd reason, like to do things other than eat, sleep, and use their monies only for the basic necessities. Some, shockingly, are even less than altruistic with the funds surplus to their requirements. So, yes, they probably could spend their time more wisely and in a way which would benefit the whole of humanity better. But I'm willing to bet almost everyone could, say, buy a basic, regular cup of coffee instead of some gourmet cappuccino blend that they think tastes better or, in some other way, be more frugal with their money. Or devote their energies into a pursuit which isn't seen, by some, as useless - I could probably get more done at work today if I didn't have to spend all that time bowing and scraping in church, for example. But, my guess is, the average person doesn't make the majority of their purchases with that kind of karmic scorecard in mind.

There are lots of people who play these games and, among them, are many who'd consider $20 a small investment in order to unwind, relax, and have some fun. The point isn't that this money might be better spent but that people are willing to spend it.

It's also possible you are just being a troll, in which case, you got me!

Ah, got me, too.

Oh well. "All that it takes for lies to prosper is for the truth to remain silent" and so on...

Posted by Sausaletus Rex | June 17, 2007 5:06 PM

I wrote a script to play MajorMud for me a long, long time ago using the scripting language in the telnet client I played it with. I'm not sure what set of tools you could even use to start working on a warcraft bot.

Posted by Ed Marshall | June 17, 2007 5:37 PM

The article was fascinating -- and the photo spread that followed it (of players and their avatars) was freaky. The oddest part of the article, IMO, was how the Chinese gold farmers, after a 12 hour shift, would go down to the Internet cafe to relax -- by playing the same game. Chinese can be some strange ducks.

Posted by Fred | June 17, 2007 6:04 PM

I'm not sure what set of tools you could even use to start working on a warcraft bot.

I'm not sure how one could create a bot to farm for metals or herbs, since they respawn at different locations. However, to write a program for a character stationed at an auction house whose sole purpose is to buy and sell trade items, I think the logistics for that would be rather simple.

Posted by benny | June 17, 2007 6:04 PM

"Making money worthless (Or something along those lines, as in the case of, say, Diablo capping the amount you can hold at any one given time.) and shifting to a barter economy doesn't solve the problem at all. As stm177 points out, it simply causes a shift from gold as the medium of exchange to some other commodity."

You're right, I wasn't thinking clearly. Oh well.

Posted by Korha | June 17, 2007 6:42 PM

There was one for a time, called bottomfeeder, though the author has rewritten it to require user interaction per Blizzard's requests.

I don't mean to defend an activity too much that is about as socially redeeming as wanking, but it's got to compare favorably to some other rather popular pursuits like USian football. Now there's an activity that proceeds at an artificially retarded pace. (One week per game? Why not just play them all in a couple weeks like March Madness, chronologically compress all the brain injuries, and get it over with?)

Posted by phil | June 17, 2007 6:44 PM

How is spending $440 US to get a flying mount different from spending $440 US for a driver and putter that will make you able to play better golf? In either case, the activity is about having fun, and the question is what makes the game more fun. Maybe you're a purist who wants to earn his gold "honestly," or who takes more satisfaction in watching her golfing skills gradually increase with hundreds of hours of practice over a period of months. Maybe you just want to get right to the fun stuff and be able to keep up with your friends, and a few hundred bucks is a small price to pay. It's no more irrational than the concept of recreation in the first place.

(And for the record, I do not buy, nor have I ever bought, ISK.)

Posted by Dave Pooser | June 17, 2007 6:57 PM

Botting is a well-developed craft in the MMO world. People have been doing it for a long time. I don't know how they code them, but someone who's curious might well want to ask at Terra Nova, a multi-contributor blog devoted to academic, technical, and personal study of MMOs and other simulated worlds.

Posted by Bruce Baugh | June 17, 2007 8:19 PM

The oddest part of the article, IMO, was how the Chinese gold farmers, after a 12 hour shift, would go down to the Internet cafe to relax -- by playing the same game.

I was trying to figure out how that worked since a WoW account costs more than they make in a month, then I remembered nearly all non-gold farming Chinese players use private servers.

Posted by Ed Marshall | June 17, 2007 9:43 PM

Nerdiest thread ever.

Posted by gswift | June 17, 2007 10:12 PM

Gold farmers have a lot in common with illegal immigrants. It's tough to fault a man willing to work 12 hours a day, every day, just to get ahead.

Getting rid of them would be easy enough. Blizzard could stop offering free trial accounts and make it so you have to be at least level 10 to communicate with other players, send WoW mail, or participate in the auction house.

They could eliminate the auction house and make it a Soviet-style economy where Blizzard plays the role of the omnipotent State.

They could flood the market with powerful uber epics that anyone can get with just a few hours of grinding, and then speed up the development process to keep the hardcore gamers entertained.

But all those things would probably make the game less fun. And most importantly, they would cost Blizzard, a large corporation, lots of money. That's the real reason nothing gets done.

Posted by Jalmari | June 18, 2007 12:13 AM

Getting rid of them would be easy enough. Blizzard could stop offering free trial accounts and make it so you have to be at least level 10 to communicate with other players, send WoW mail, or participate in the auction house.

You gotta flesh that out for me, to gold farm you are going to have to have a seriously high level toon. Trial accounts no matter how many people play them 24/7 would only get there at the end of the trial. Trial's can't trade or mail people. That was actually something I was wondering about was if they get paid some sort of flat wage to level up or what.

Posted by Ed Marshall | June 18, 2007 12:24 AM

You can use the mail, I think I've figured it out.

Posted by Ed Marshall | June 18, 2007 12:31 AM

I feel like I've already this article by the same author, published in a different venue.

Posted by washerdreyer | June 18, 2007 1:12 AM

The ironic part of this issue/thread is that WoW is to real MMORGs (i.e., EQ1 in its original form and early expansions) what checkers is to chess. EQ1, back in 1999 and the early '00s, separated the men from the boys (as well as tens of thousands from sleep). Any moron or 8-year old can max their WoW character easily and quickly--and without having to learn how to properly play it, especially in a group. Unfortunately, the runaway success of WoW has served to dumb down all all subsequent MMORGs. The recent failure of Vanguard, created by the key designers of original EQ, was due in part to the CW on the Web that it was too hard for those brought up on WoW, even though it was consistently dumbed down during development to being only moderately harder than WoW. (In truth, though, Vanguard failed primarily because the game design was poor, as was performance--even on fairly good gaming computers.

Posted by Marlowe | June 18, 2007 1:54 AM

Blizzard could stop offering free trial accounts and make it so you have to be at least level 10 to communicate with other players, send WoW mail, or participate in the auction house.

The free trials are there for the fence sitters. So that's not going to change.

Anyway, you can get to level 10 in a day if you really wanted to. Besides, pretty much everyone has a low-level alt character who lives at the auction house, and no one considers that cheating.

Ed Marshall, are you saying that you're able to send mail on a free trial? How?

Jalmari is right, it's just like illegal immigration. If there's someone willing to do a particular job for those wages, it will happen. Blaming people for being poor is a bit unfair.

As is blaming people with full-time jobs who are willing to pay real money in order to stay competitive with teenagers who have the luxury to be online 24/7.

I'm sure those gold farmers would love to do their fair share of ganking themselves. In fact, they probably do on their own time, which would explain why they keep playing even after their shift ends.

Posted by benny | June 18, 2007 2:14 AM

The one thing I really noticed about the article is how pissed-off I was at the gamers who harass the farmers. These are people getting paid thirty cents a day for 12 or more hours of work, for crying out loud!

Posted by Keith M Ellis | June 18, 2007 3:34 AM

To Sausaletus Rex and stm177:
I'm not a troll, but I disagree that paying $20 for WoW gold is the same thing as paying $20 for a quickie with a nice hooker or $100 for a concert. The thing is, you get something physical out of the latter two, which you don't get from having fake gold in a fake game. I agree with the person who said it's probably better to design a program that'll make the gold for you. Then you could sell that program and make decent money. Then buy some hookers.

Posted by Chinaman | June 18, 2007 4:20 AM

You gotta flesh that out for me, to gold farm you are going to have to have a seriously high level toon. Trial accounts no matter how many people play them 24/7 would only get there at the end of the trial. Trial's can't trade or mail people. That was actually something I was wondering about was if they get paid some sort of flat wage to level up or what.

Now that you mention it, I have to wonder about that. Trial accounts expire, but they're free, unlike real accounts. Is gold farming really profitable enough to offset the cost of an account? Well, I guess I should read the article to find out... but anyways.

However, that's not really relevant. Even if the actual farming is done on a real account, trial accounts still matter to gold farmers because they use them for in-game advertising, by spamming players at random from level one characters created just for that. (This, in turn has led to mods that ignore all messages from players below a certain level and stuff.)

Posted by Cyrus | June 18, 2007 11:49 AM

Ed: Chinese people can afford to play the game because in China, WoW doesn't have the same payment system. People pay for time instead, like a cell phone. It's cheaper for them all things considered.

It's why you must take Blizzard's "8 million subscribers+" number with a grain of salt. They are not raking in $14.99 times 8 million a month (that would just be obscene).

EverQuest was the first game in which a lot of these dynamics entered the fray. An economist calculated that someone who played a lot and sold their character was making about $5 an hour for their time. Not bad for a hobby, but not a way to support yourself. Enter the low-wage outsourced worker.

I think IGE and the like will slowly die as companies themselves sanction this. Sony already has a server that lets you buy and sell in-game currency and items for EverQuest II. I imagine other companies including Blizzard are not far behind. EA lets you pay $30 for advanced Ultima Online characters. Fact is, these games are designed for endgame - every add-on and update is for endgame dungeons and items. Does it really matter if someone pays to get a headstart? I don't think so. It's a timesink up there too.

Posted by Joshua | June 18, 2007 2:03 PM