“Gold farming” is playing a massively multiplayer online game to acquire in-game currency, e.g. gold. This is then usually sold, against the wishes of the game's operator, to other players. People in China
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In addition, Gold farming brings several harmful impacts on the MMORPG environment. The main negative effect from gold farming concerns economic inflation in the virtual game, gamers are forced to work even harder to increase their gold for the purchase of various useful items for their character development.
ReplyDeleteExpensive items eventually become the norm, and the enjoyment of the game is reduced.
Another negative impact is the monopolization of rare, valuable resources by the gold farmers.
Monopoly pricing prevent the demand of game items by increasingly large portions of the MMORPG market. Entry-level players are especially vulnerable to such pricing schemes.
Additionally, gold farming can monopolize crucial computer resources as spam and email messages choke channels and mail systems. The game is become less enjoyable as the ‘real time’ quality of the game diminishes.
Unfortunately there is no way completely control gold farming practices, as it succumbs to an underground economy; so long as items can be traded inside the game, there will be gold farming.
Reference
Dave Rosenberg, Cnet News, China bans online 'gold farming' viewed 05 October 2010, http://news.cnet.com/8301-13846_3-10275180-62.html
Eric Caoili, 2010, Gamasutra, Zynga Suing Site For Unauthorized Virtual Currency Sales, viewed 04 October 2010, http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/28097/Zynga_Suing_Site_For_Unauthorized_Virtual_Currency_Sales.php
Thomas Claburn ,2009, InformationWeek, China Limits Use Of Virtual Currency, viewed 05 October 2010, http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/ebusiness/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=218101859
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ReplyDeleteA market where trading is conducted using cyber money has existed, and will continue to do so.
ReplyDeleteOne reason why gold farming cannot be resolved is that it is a means to an end. Allworth(2009) states that gold farming can bring a “consistent Return on Investment on time”. There are people who are willing to invest time for cash while there are others that are willing to exchange money for time. For example, teenagers with a lot of time would gladly play games with the extra benefit of earning money. Meanwhile, some gamers who are reluctant to spend their time to gain experience or to hunt for valuable artefacts may opt to use money to purchase what they wanted. Where there is demand, there will be a supply. It is also a type of underground transactions, much similar to the black market activities in the real world where governments are still unable to completely eradicate.
Gold farming has its benefits too – income and employment. These ‘gold farmers’ can easily earn the wage of a factory worker every month (Heeks 2010). In an article by Ward (2003), Julien Dibble, a MMORPG player, reports to “US Internal Revenue Service that his source of income is from the sale of imaginer goods”. It would be interesting to know how the taxation office deals with this issue. In Korea, the Supreme Court held that virtual money is equivalent to real world currency (Supreme Court acquits two in cyber money game case 2010). In a way, this case has legitimized online trading of imaginary goods. Thus, gold farming could actually spur economic development o a country as it provides income and employment.
Here is a working paper by Richard Heeks about gold farming that i think could be useful for your research : http://www.scribd.com/doc/4498890/Current-Analysis-and-Future-Research-Agenda-on-Gold-Farming
References:
Allworth, J 2009, WoW Gold Farming Survival Guide, EzineArticles.com, viewed 8th October 2010, http://ezinearticles.com/?WoW-Gold-Farming-Survival-Guide&id=3073185
Ward, M 2003, Making money from virtually nothing, BBC News Online, viewed 7th October 2010, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3135247.stm
Heeks, R 2010, Gaming for Profits: Real Money from Virtual Worlds, Scientific American, a Division of Nature America, Inc., viewed 7th October 2010, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=real-money-from-virtual-worlds
‘Supreme Court acquits two in cyber money game case’ 2010, JoongAng Ilbo, viewed 7th October 2010, http://joongangdaily.joins.com/article/view.asp?aid=2915126
Thank you for your comment Ling Ham Ung, I agree with, Gold farming may brings harmful impacts on the MMORPG environment. I do think that may effect on the economic inflation of the games and gold farmer can also make the developer of game downturn to close its sever since where gold farmer try to farming the items as much as they can and after enough collecting items they will sell the items with a high price so that makes another player suffer to buy the items as I know it’s hard to earn money by farming the gold on game to enable player make trade. It’s the trick or idea by gold farmer so the player will make trade with real money as the aims of gold farmer. A probably gamers will leave the game because they cannot earn gold of the game to make a trade or feel do not enjoy the game due to economic inflation of the game. So, if the situation continuing happened like this, I think the developer may lost its players on the game and at the end the server will close.
ReplyDeleteHello there,
ReplyDeleteI had been a “gold farmer” myself before.
In my personal experience, I think that “Gold farming” is the best way for MMORPG players to earn income and quit their full time job. The online game I played is Ragnarok Online which is popular a few years ago. The demand for Gold (In this game, the currency is called Zeny) is high at that time, there are gold farmer everywhere. Generally, I used to deal with buyers through bank-in. In the MMORPG gold selling norm, the buyers usually have to pay first before they receive the gold. From my observation, the amount of players who would deal with gold farmer is very high in Malaysia. Other than that, I had seen many examples of entrepreneurs who make a living by gold farming. Some of them could even earn rm6000 in a month. However, gold farming could be further enhanced if combined with the use of bot software. Bot software is software that replaces player in the normal game routine such as killing monsters or gathering gold. With this program, the players could set the software to automate normal game routine without even having to sit in front of the computer. The in-game character will automatically kills monsters and gather gold. This makes the players to gather more gold faster and to make more sales of gold. In my personal experience in Ragnarok Online where bot software is not highly restricted, gold farmers tend to use multiple bot software to automate multiple in-game characters to farm for gold. So, do you still think that gold farming is impossible for the player to make a living? I say it’s already a fact that gold farmer makes a living by selling gold in MMORPG. However, this comment is only based on my personal experience in MMORPG.
Hi Ryan Lau….Nice to share your experience with us, I personally agree with your point said that many people who make a living by gold farming. By the way, regarding your question is impossible for the player to make a living because they can play with bot software? Based on my experience, I agree that use bot software enable the player without controlling its avatar to do farming automatically. Because of that it is offering the advantages to the player by to gather more gold faster and boost their level. But somehow there is still possible risk to play use bot software , sometimes you can’t play with bot because mostly the developer of game have protected their games from people to play unfair by using bot software. According to my experience, the developer of games have used trap in the game. So when people try to bot, it will automatically catch him or her and blocks their account. I don’t think that gold farmer want to take this high risks, because when you had get block by GM of the game, they will block your IP address and MAC address to log in into the server that means you cannot play that game anymore by using your current laptop or PC. For the special case, if you play and use bot software in the private server it works and legal because they allow player to do that. Thanks to drop your comment in here, we are relaly appreciate it.
ReplyDeleteHi all! Thanks for the comments!
ReplyDeleteI am agree with Stella! The gold farming practices are growing continuously because of the supply and demand in the market! When there is demand, there will be supply, and vice versa. Who should be blamed for the unethical practices? Suppliers or buyers? That's the question in my mind.
Ryan, thanks for your real experience and it really help us to understand more about the gold farming in Malaysia.
Hi Friend,
ReplyDeleteNowadays, making money from playing the MMORPG such as World of Warcraft online is very popular and possible. According to the article in people who enjoy to play the MMORPG is not simply because of the fun and excellent computer game, gain the extra money also one of the major motivation for them to spend the time on it.
In World of Warcaft, the money that you obtained is called gold. Gold can be collected from different ideas such as harvesting and mining the resources in the game and sell the gold that you have in its own marketplace inside the game. Moreover, another way to make real money through “Power- Levelling” which means using the selected character to fight to other players and improving the personal character level if you win.
Reference:
Making money playing of World of Warcraft, viewed on 10 October 2010, http://www.paid2review.co.uk/make-money-playing-world-of-warcraft.html