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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."
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
Really...and I can't understand how people "sell" their accounts either and get away with it.
I mean, if they sell an account they give the account to someone else with the password for that account...then the new person has to set up payment for that account using a credit card with a new address etc etc. A simple trace of that would show a different person/credit card/name using that account which should send up a red flag.
On the other hand, the company that says they don't condone selling of accounts are still getting one monthly fee for one account. So perhaps they may publicly say they will kick/ban people for doing this, but in reality they turn a blind eye to it.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
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!