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Massively Multiplayer Sweat Shops
Computer Games World, part of 1up.com, has done up a fantastic piece looking into the world of Massively Multiplayer Sweat Shops. More than just a look at how it's done, it painfully illustrates that not all farmers are farming by choice and not all farmers are from Asia. From the article: "How does it work? The macros for World of WarCraft, for example, control a high-level hunter and cleric. The hunter kills while the cleric automatically heals. Once they are fully loaded with gold and items, the 'farmer' who's monitoring their progress manually controls them out of the dungeon to go sell their goods. These automated agents are then returned to the dungeons to do their thing again. Sack's typical 12-hour sessions can earn his employers as much as $60,000 per month while he walks away with a measly $150."
Remind me again why these exist in the first place. Are we that lazy of MMORPG players that we need to make sweat shops of people to do the work for us. I mean, a lot of us have to take the time anyway to earn up enough gold to even buy the stuff we needed, but they put a lot of efforting into what they are "farming", and they pretty much getting nothing out of it but a measly paycheck and flak from gamers about how cheap it is that they are camping common places.
I don't know, I kinda feel bad for them in a way.
The Galatic Freedom Force marches on! Defend!
This is an impressive bit of reporting, if true. But I've got to wonder:
1) Just how much of a travel budget does 1up.com have?
2) Why would the "sweatshop" owners allow them to take pictures?
Or did they send pictures to the reporter? Two of them? The whole thing strikes me as implausible. In any case, I certainly wouldn't take these guys' claims of enormous profits any more seriously than when we heard similar stories from spammers, day traders and porn aggregators a few years ago. They're not public corporations so they don't have to back up their yapping with real numbers.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
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Sack's typical 12-hour sessions can earn his employers as much as $60,000 per month while he walks away with a measly $150.
Let's be conservative and say they only make an average of $10,000 per month from his work. Now, why aren't there thousands of Americans making $10,000 per month by working 12 hour days on this game? I bet they're only making these incomes from the entire sweatshop, and not just from one guy's work, otherwise we'd all be doing it (or Sack would be sitting in a cybercafe doing it for himself after stealing their macros).
Secondly, is the market for gold in online games really that big? Are there really tens of thousands of players who would rather pay $250 for some gold than actually play the game? I can understand buying characters at the start, but who are these people who can spend thousands of dollars with the gold miners?
Yeah, I know I'm quite ignorant of the MMORPG market, but this all seems like craziness.
This article smells fishy.
I know the farmers exist but those numbers seem way exagerated -- just like any make money quick scam.
There's no "cleric" in WoW, they're probably referring to the priest class.
I used to do this kind of stuff but you always get undercut by someone who will sell for much less. I don't know if these places really exist, but it would make sense. If I sold for how much they were selling for I'd be making less than minimum wage.
The real money is in exploits. For some reason I have a knack for finding these holes, but they usually don't last long. I made $2000 in 2 weeks off an exploit in City of Heroes then it was patched, and I found a grouping bug in WoW that let me level insanely fast till they fixed it in this latest patch (still work but not as well).
I usually jump on new games for a month or 2, find bugs and exploits, cash in, then quit. If nothing else I'll at least make enough to cover the game and subscription fees so there's no loss.
Why do people spend as much money as they do to buy gold from these people! Really, have you looked at the price of gold on WOW? If it was say 20 bucks for 500 gold I could see people doing it, but it's more like 200 dollars! Why would anyone spend that kind of money for something in an online game? Something that you'll probably only have for a few weeks before you get something better?
Are Mommy and Daddy really not paying that much attention to the credit card? For the price of 500 Gold on WOW you could have a pretty good night on the town, even get laid! You could just get so much more out of your money and life than 500 gold will ever get you in an online game.
If someone could really explain this to me, someone who's done it, I'd really love to know why. It just doesn't make fiscal sense.
The article says, "He then uses three accounts to launder the gold: a duper account, a filter account, and a delivery account--each created using different IPs, credit cards, and computers."
It's hard to believe they can get away with that. It's not like the real world where you can use cash and other tricks to hide the money trail. The administrators should be able to trace down the gold and where it went in seconds if they store enough information on transations.
So, the combination of all that makes for the stratification of equipment - buying anything less than the best available is a tremendous waste of time, money, and energy. Which are also all very valuable things in Lineage - leveling is stupid slow, soloing is next to impossible for 90% of the classes, and nothing has a high resell value.
This is where the Bind on Pickup/Equip system in WoW really shines - it really helps to control the market from shaking itself apart, which has happened a couple times in my old server for Lineage.
But for Lineage, sieges are fun as all hell. But its reserved for only the hardcore - playing less than 5 hours a day is impossible - youll never level, and youll never be able to do anything on your own, lest you be an archer.
The gold market offers value to people with short attention spans, who are greedy, or who are lazy. I, personally, happen to be lazy with a short attention span. In Lineage, i did not have the time to farm mobs that i got no XP for just for cash -especially since my class was strictly support and could not solo worth a damn. (56 Elven Sword Singer when i left). Same goes for WoW - some people dont want to farm, and since there is demand, there is a company supplying what i wanted. Its really a fantastic idea.
Also, it is important to note that if you gave the people in these other countries the US's minimum wage, it would make the employees ungodly rich, and would screw everything up in the 3rd world country. If they are paid to scale with the rest of the country, then the country will develop, because now people have JOBS instead of being unemployed.
-Red
Guns don't kill people, "with glowing hearts" kills people.
Sweatshop? How? To me it looks like a bunch of teens and college students who are doing an easy job (and even on computers! how fun!) to make a little extra cash while their superiors profit massively. Sounds like the typical teen job. Go look at a grocery store or a fast food resturant, heck, even an internship. It's making the company a lot of money (even indirectly, think how much money they save in productivity if an intern is getting the coffee), and yet the student doesn't get much cash. So where is the outrage on our side?
WASTE - The Secure P2P
I guess it's only a matter of time before people overseas start hiring out their services as TK'ers in FPS games :|. $10 and you can have somebody you dislike followed and TK'd for a couple hours...
Perfecting the art of insanity since 1982
Sack's typical 12-hour sessions can earn his employers as much as $60,000 per month while he walks away with a measly $150."
If this is true, why don't the employees immediately start their own similar business with higher profit sharing. The startup costs are probably not very high and they know the operation. Even if they are severely economically disadvantaged, a few employees could team up together.
[troll]who or why would anybody spend cash on something so intangible as online gaming "goods"? [/troll] 1. Cheap chinese/asian labor 2. Profit Same as always
Usually located in dark alleys, these cyber-cafes are usuallly a room without any door sign outside, in which you could find boys and girls crowded together to earn that little .56 cents. Windows and doors are closed to evade laws enforcement official, usually no air-conditioning...
However, consider the cost to stay online is just 2 renmin (~0.24 cents), that's almost 100% profit margin.
That's quite different from those sweat shops in which kids are forced to work for their living because in these cyber-cafes, they would love to stay for no money, let alone earning that little cash...
I agree with "MMOGs are bad, but it's a compelling enough genre that people suffer through.". I agree with that because I've played the game poorly at times, and it can be a drag.
But the point of MMOG is to emphasize the teamwork and camaraderie. If you're just grinding solo all the time, it's no fun. Socialize a little though and open up to some folks and the game just changes entirely and becomes fun again. Solo can be fun too, but my best experiences in WoW have occurred in a group. Having even just one other person along for the ride makes a ton of difference.
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
Why would they have flat screens in those pictures? It's not like space comes at a premium in china, so CRT monitors would be fitting the bill better. Frankly, the pictures look like taken in a typical chinese internet café at a moment when nobody was looking happy.
Plus the story is so full of holes... $60,000? C'mon, for that money, I would do it!
People are always asking why should selling gold/items for real money be illegal? This is precisely the reason, at least in my opinion.
Blizzard has announced several times that they have caught and banned/suspended some of the gold farmers, but the hard truth remains: You will never catch all of these people. If Blizzard starts monitoring large sums of gold in in-game mail, the farmers will just start setting up fake auctions, where they sell a grey (vendor trash) item for thousands of gold. Those would be easy to spot, but again, there are always more creative people out there to come up with more ideas.
And they said zombies weren't real!
Its a simple concept. Most people have an excess of one of two things, time or money. Most people believe that time IS money, so people spend whichever they have more surplus of.
The part that I think its funny is that I've played WoW for over 4 months now, have a level 60 priest, and alts of various levels. The only thing that I've ever really needed money for was to train in my spells. Almost never have I had to borrow money from anyone, except about 20g for my horse when I hit level 40. I promptly paid that back within 2 days. (Again, I didn't NEED a horse, but it was a nice thing to have.)
Point being, what do these people do with all this money? I'd rather have REAL money to spend on REAL things. I don't NEED to have all that WoW money. Buying that extra cool sword or mace at the in-game auction house, or that piece of armor isn't going to *snap* level your character light that. Nothing in game is *THAT* unbalancing to allow a few farm-bought pieces to completely change the game. Frankly half the fun for me was getting into those big dungeons to get the items. Even then I'd end up playing my alt after it was done, who couldn't even use that equipment.
I'd actually like to alter my original statement some... Its still true that people spend time or money, but those who spend lots and lots of money on things they don't need are just plain foolish.
And they said zombies weren't real!
I can only assume that whatever it's protestations to the contrary, Blizzard likes farmers. They pay fees, and they attract players to want to pass others (even if they cheat). They might even farm themselves! The dire pronouncements and trophy busts are to quieten the rule-abiding masses.
So how can I get in on this?
...but is it art?
I think a single person, with a small set of built characters could farm perhaps $1k-$2k/month...
Keep in mind a single person can supervise 6 or 10 or more sets of characters simultaneously, since each set only needs attention periodically. I wrote software for running missions in Star Wars Galaxies and sold it to a gold farming company. That software ran almost totally unattended, only needing attention every 3 hours or so when buffs wore off, or when armor or weapons broke. They ran the software with one person monitoring every dozen characters.
For them, the limitation wasn't manpower, the limitation was in marketing their service, assigning the resources to the servers where demand was greatest, and so on.
- A bunch of computers, say 30 (we wanted to make a good amount of money per day, right?)
- Network infrstructure, and a dedicated internet line
- Good software, and knowledge of how to use it (the sweatshop employees could probably get this without much trouble)
- 30 copies of the game, and 30 subscribed accounts
- Potential customers to sell to, along with the marketing infrastructure to reach them
- Characters built up appropriately, spread out across all the servers/games where we will farm
- A web site for conducting the transactions
- A strategy for avoiding detection and money laundering
It's easy to set up a small operation that won't make much money, but it's a big deal in terms of time and money to set up a big operation.The article indicates how complicit IGE is when it comes to gold* farming (and even accepting duped gold, laundering as necessary). Is it possible that their actions constitute intentional interference with a contract (or intentional inducement of a breach of contract)?
( * by gold, I mean the form of currency in any given game)
I ANAL, but from what I've been able to dig up on the web, proving such a case usually requires proving that (a) the defendant is aware of a contractual elationship between the plaintiff and a third party; (b) the defendant successfully took actions resulting in interference with the execution of the contract; and (c) damages were incurred.
See http://www.pumilia.com/articles/article3.htm for more info.
If you accept that EULAs form legally binding contracts between the game company and its customer, then it's easy to prove (a). Every person able to sell gold must either own an account or have access to an account; in the first case, selling the gold violates the EULA, and in the second case, sharing the account violates the EULA. It is impossible to honestly deny the business relationship between the game company and its customer, and it would be easy (given the article in the OP) to prove that IGE is aware of that relationship.
If you accept the reasoning behind (a) as proof, then proving (b) isn't much more difficult. IGE is party to a transaction with a game account holder (bound by the EULA) involving the exchange of in-game gold for real-life cash. By participating in the transaction, IGE is inducing the account holder to violate the EULA.
The tricky part is (c), proving the damages incurred. Game companies could argue that there are additional customer service costs incurred in tracking down EULA violators and terminating their accounts, cleaning up after gold dupes, and performing other miscellaneous and sundry bits of work. One could also argue that there is in-game economic damage caused, which results in dissatisfied customers (an argument best taken up by companies who have suffered large losses in customer base, like Lineage I/II). Just parade witnesses and affidavits, as many as are required, to establish the damages.
Unfortunately, the actual damages caused are probably insufficient to convince IGE to put a halt to their business. A game company would have to land a large punitive judgment against IGE to shut them down (or to ward them off from their game, at least).
There's also the issue of jurisdiction - whether IGE is a U.S. or Hong Kong-based company appears to be somewhat unclear (they claim one subsidiary, the website company, to be U.S.-based, and another, the gold-handling company, to be H.K.-based; the status of the holding company isn't mentioned on their webpage). IGE probably has taken steps to reduce their legal liability through jurisdictional issues, so a game company may not see a dime of a judgment against IGE anyway.
Any thoughts? Would anybody with more legal expertise care to chime in?
Evaluating this purely from an econ standpoint, not meaning to endorse it. His labor is a very minor contribution to the value added. The setup (capital) and the business model (entrepeneurship) are much more important inputs into the process -- take the macros and the guy who speaks enough English to negotiate with IGE and you can make a new farm farm with any "lumpen proletariat" you choose, but take the labor and lose the macros and contacts and they're just a bunch of poorly educated people trying to play a game that they have no experience in and trying to sell to people they can't speak to.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Well, here are some reasons why people would want to pay for in-game stuff with their out-of-game credit card:
1. To cheat. That's it: pay to cheat. If that real money can buy an undeserved advantage (as in, an advantage you didn't work for), and especially if it's a massive advantage, some people will pay for it.
E.g., before I use City Of Heroes as an example, let me say that COH _doesn't_ have a real-money market for in-game money. (Ok, "influence.") The economy of COH is such that money is so plentiful at higher levels, that you can get a million off a level 50 player by just asking. (In WoW money, that would be about 100 gold.)
But I'm familiar enough with COH to illustrate the difference that that extra money can make, and why you might want to get that extra money. To fully equip a level 22 Tanker with the best possible equipment ("enhancements" in COH lingo), it costs about 1 million. Make that anywhere between 1.5 and 2 million for some other classes. The problem is that even if you bought nothing since level 1, you'll have made about 200,000 total by then.
And the difference that equipment makes is huge. It can peg your damage resistance at 90% as a tanker, _and_ pretty much double your damage output as any class, _and_ give you a good 50% or so boost to your endurance (think "mana") regeneration, _and_ shorten your travel time. It can make the difference between yawning at a group of 10 enemies and getting summarily executed by 2 of them.
The problem is that that huge disparity in equipment isn't just making it tempting to beg, it's increasingly making it _necessary_. It's a vicious circle. So many people are basically too powerful for their level on money they didn't earn, that the game is increasingly becoming balanced for those. Which encourages more of the rest to go beg too.
2. PvP griefers are a huge segment of this market too. There are people who'll pay ridiculous sums just to harrass a newbie. There are people who not only are insecure enough to only attack people who are 10 levels lower, but also need the absolute best magical armour and weapons to muster the guts to do that.
3. Some people just want to brag about their virtual possessions. ("Yeah, but my UO castle is bigger than yours!")
It's some people for which their character's level, or the value of their equipment in gold coins, is like it's the size of their penis in cm. Not just "reflects" their penis size, but as if phyiscally their RL penis will shrink to half an inch if they start at level 1 like everyone else, or grow to 20 inches long if they're level 50.
Well, ok, maybe that was too strong a metaphor, but you get the idea. For some people it's like their RL worth is measured by their virtual achievements in their game.
And they'll pay for that all right.
4. The tread-mill effect.
See, all MMOs are built on a dope pusher model. Or the boiling a frog alive model, if you wish. (They say that if you drop a frog into hot water, it will jump out. But if you put it in cool water and very slowly raise the temperature, it will stay in until it's boiled alive. The trick is that the change towards the worse must be very slow.)
So let's get back to MMOs. In the beginning you get everything almost for free, travel is short, it's all easy, rewards are plentiful, etc. And a lot of people like that. They're happy as a frog in a pool of cool water.
Then it gradually goes downhill. Gaining a level is no longer a half an hour affair, it becomes several hours, then days, then eventually you're looking at weeks until your next level. It becomes more and more work, and less and less rewards. More and more stick, and less and less carrot.
E.g., look through the older blogs on Penny Arcade for what Tycho thought about COH. Everything he liked about it is everyhing that basically disappears at higher levels. I wonder if he'd have praised so much the lack of penalties for death, if he only knew that it becomes 20k xp debt per death in the 30's
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
A couple of years ago, I had played this crappy buggy web-based pay-to-cheat "strategy" game. Well, if you think paying 200 dollars is too much, there was this guy in that game who allegedly paid over 20,000 US dollars for various in-game equipment and other benefits. Yes, that's not a typo. Over TWENTY THOUSAND dollars.
"Are Mommy and Daddy really not paying that much attention to the credit card?"
Well, that's the thing: games aren't just for kids any more. The guy above allegedly had his own company or something.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
What got me thinking recently was going back to my old COH account, only to find the game (A) flooded with people running around with 10 times more money than they can possibly earn at that level, and (B) the game increasingly becoming balanced for those. Now generally I like COH, and in COH you don't even need to pay RL money for it. You just need to ask a max level player, or I've even had a few ask me if I wanted any money.
But still, it got me wondering: why not elliminate money at all?
E.g., COH seems to increasingly assume that you've been given an infinite supply of money at any given level. Not literally infinite, but more than enough to buy any enhancements you want. So why not do away with currency and let me just pick any enhancements for free, then?
It seemed to work well in other games.
E.g., in Planetside, you're a soldier. You don't have to _buy_ your own tank, you're just given one. But since you're a soldier, you're not allowed to get any equipment you're not certified for. So the balancing factor becomes (A) the certification points, which you get at level-up, and (B) availability: if you just ran a new tank off the cliff, you get to wait half an hour before someone lets you drive another one. It worked ok in Planetside.
E.g., think about City Of Heroes for a bit. In COH you don't have "equipment" in the sense of armour and weapons like in WoW. Your "superman"-like character doesn't buy a new breastplate or brass knuckles. What you buy in COH are "enhancements" to your power. That superman clone might enhance his punches to hit harder, or be more accurate, or whatever. It's closer to what other games solve via skills, than equipment.
So why have to buy those? The game would work just as well if those improvements were picked when you level up.
Etc.
I'm sure pretty much any game could be transformed into something that doesn't require gold. E.g., in the Warcraft universe you could be a soldier like in Planetside, and be given your equipment based on your level, rank or solved quests.
And it would stop this kind of gold market in one fell swoop. You can't sell gold when doesn't even exist in the game, or weapons when anyone can get the same weapon by just talking to their quartermaster.
So why don't more people do just that?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
You do realize the sole purpose and effect of having an 'economy' at all, is simply to produce exactly this chain of mercantile effects? You also realize that the only reasonable way to disallow it is to make every character earn their own stuff? e.g. everything binds on pickup, NPC merchants don't resell player sold items, etc.
Game economies are a baffling, out of place concept in an RPG or Action game. Geez, if you're that keen on playing a merchant just BE one in real life...
I don't understand the folks who buy the farmed items/gold and have thus created this "industry". Games are fun, you don't "win" by having huge piles of crap you didn't actually earn in-game, why are people spending real money on this stuff?
I've recently started playing City of Heroes (check the news archive for a free 14-day trial if you're interested) and I wouldn't pay for in-game items even if they were offered to me... I'm playing for fun, not to "beat" some other nerds.
I did appreciate the Influence (that's $$$ in CoH terms) some friends and one totally random player gave me, but I wouldn't have hated the game without it.
- chrish
How in the world is this sweatshop conditions? Are they being charged by their employer for room and board for more than what they're being paid? Are they only being paid $1 a day/week/whatever?
Seems to me that for a 12 hour gaming binge, $150 is way more than the $8/hr minimum wage.
I'd say if they're unhappy getting paid $12.50 to play video games, go flip some burgers for a few weeks and then decry. If they still don't like it... Well, it still doesn't make it sweatshop slave labor.