Gold Farming: Part 1
By blog on May. 16, 2009.
Anyone who has played an MMO for longer than ten minutes will be familiar with getting messages – either in the form of tells or across public channels – advertising the purchasing of gold. In any MMO, there are going to be a few ways to make your own gold, or whatever the in-game currency is, which you use to purchase any item. In LOTRO, for instance, your main expenses will be your horse, your house, and any armour or weaponry you might purchase off the Auction House.
Turbine, the makers of LOTRO, are strongly against this practice, as it can severely effect the in-game economy. Gold Farming is against the user agreement that all LOTRO players have to agree to, and as such, many accounts that have proven to be held by those just farming gold have been deleted.
Gold Spammers are those who try to sell you their gold in-game, they stand about advertising their website where you can make the transaction, but Turbine have included a function in-game where it is very easy to report the offending character as a Gold Spammer, at which point they end up on your ignore list and you never see another message from them again.
Gold Farming has become an actual industry, current estimates for employed Gold Farmer range between 400,000 to 1 million, in China alone, with the revenues generated coming out somewhere between US$1billion and US$10billion. These are huge figures for something that is illegal in nearly all MMOs. World of Warcraft is the largest MMO in the world, currently, with over 11million subscribers. They are against Gold Farming, having clearly stated in their rules of conduct that it can lead to accounts being banned and other actions. Yet they are accused by some of not really enforcing this rule, which is part of the reason that they Gold Farming economy has the chance to flourish.
I am somewhat astonished that this issue is being treated as an up and coming industry when it is based on an illegal premise. But more of my opinion later.
Category: Technology