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."

Comments

Feeling Sorry.

[VGMSupreme]

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.

I dunno...

[Otter]

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.

Doesn't add up to me

[Peter Cooper]

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.

Re:Doesn't add up to me

[MattW]

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).

Probably because 'Sack' is a goat farmer and hasn't the first clue about where to get a macro, how to set it up, and wouldn't know what to do with the gold when he got it.


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?

Yes. I have a friend whose business took in like $700k selling diablo 2 items in 2004. This is how many years after it was released? It's obscene. He and I duped some stuff back when the early exploits were out. I wrote some code to sniff network traffic and spot uniques in trade windows, then we moved up to wholesale duping using a login/logoff race condition bug that I exploited using 4 computers at once. I was raking in stock options at the time, though, and eventually grew tired of it, especially with the competition from the Korean farmers wrecking out profitability by flooding the market. But he went on and perfected the process, using exploit after exploit, and finally got someone involved who reverse engineered the entire protocol so fully automated bots could play.

Yeah, I know I'm quite ignorant of the MMORPG market, but this all seems like craziness.

MMORPGs are good at getting people to "want" what the MMO gives them - whether it is gold, items, higher levels, etc. When it ceases to be about "playing" the game and starts being about "having" or "achieving" something, or about "being" a certain level of power, people with money to burn start buying their way to the top. And frankly, if you're making $100k/yr, have limited entertainment time, and want your gaming experience to go a certain way, why not spend the money? Right now, you can buy 100 gold on the server I used to play on for WoW for $9. That's enough for a mount and more. I actually quit playing WoW a couple months ago, and one reason was that I was tired of walking around. (By no means the only thing I found lacking in WoW, but a significant one)

Now, for someone who is thinking: I want to get to L60, and I want phat l00t, and so on, $9 is a bit of a bargain. You're already paying $15/mo. How much can 100 gold "speed up" the process for you?

It was the same in Diablo 2. The golden items were ones that let people farm as fast as possible. At one point, my friend and I paid some guy like $200 on ebay for a ring which was maxed out life leech+mana leech+magic find, so we could dupe it, because it was golden.

Now, I think of all of this as a foregone conclusion. What *I* wonder about is: are there programmers who are making a *really* illegitimate fortune? If you were clever and, say, working at Blizzard, you might introduce some tiny error in the code that, if you knew how, could turn into a monstrous exploit. What would exclusive knowledge of such an exploit be worth? Especially if it was hard to track down, and hard to notice it being exploited? And hard to discover on your own?

The exploits in such industry become very carefully guarded secrets. In the early days, on D2, people in the know could wheedle the information out of people. Then people saw what happened - how quickly the information spread and how a competitive advantage in duping/farming was lost - and now people are tightlipped.

Anyhow, it's all an interesting exercise in examining why people do what they do. I'm more interested in how someone like Raph Koster looks at this privatel

Re:Doesn't add up to me

[vertinox]

I remember back in the days of Ultima Online about the GM Scandal of one of the red robes had been caught selling items on Ebay that he was actually making.

Hangs head in shame...

[Redlazer]

Well, coming from Lineage 2, i certainly understand the popularity of the market for its currency. The creators of a game determine how easy it is to accumulate money. In lineage 2, it is a bitch and a half to make money at all - your lowest items (D Grade) cost around 1 million a pop, which, while not entirely outlandish, is certainly a high mark to reach. Also, since the game has teired equipment, you tend to get people buying only the best of that grade, be it no grade, d grade, etc. Also a very important fact is that customization of your character is nearly impossible, aside from your equipment. You have skills, but they are completely linear in their development, and it is easy to learn all available skills at a certain level.

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

Re:Hangs head in shame...

[Moraelin]

"By making it so cheap for the lazy gamer to "level up", who is going to want to try to advance the normal way?"

You make it sound like it's just encouraging the lazy, but presumably the ones who advance the old fashioned way aren't really hampered in any way. If only it was that simple.

Since you link to those auctions for COH and Lineage 2, I'll assume you're familiar with those games. So let's talk about COH.

See, the problem with having lots of people with infinite money (or more money than they can possibly spend on enhancements) is that it sets a new standard against which everyone is judged.

And the difference between that standard and a normal player can be pretty damn huge in COH. E.g., having 1 million influence in COH at level 22, can mean that your fire tank hits the 90% damage-resistance cap _and_ has perma-Hasten _and_ does twice the damage per second. (It costs 1 mil to have all SO enhancements at level 22 as a tank.) A normal player, however, has might be at 70% damage resistance. I.e., from the same enemies he'll take 3 times more damage per second, _and_ take twice as long to kill them.

And again, the problem is that the honest player will be judged against the twinked one. He'll get kicked out of teams, because he doesn't live up to the standards of those running around with infinite money.

I've been in teams where the level 22 fire tank played honestly (i.e., without any extra money, just what that character honestly earned) got killed repeatedly, because some idiot set the difficulty to "invulnerable" on the assumption that surely _everyone_ is at 90% damage resistance. And without getting money from someone else, you just can't possibly be there. Then he obnoxiously lectured the tank along the lines of "you suck if you don't have the best enhancements", and kicked him out of the team.

(At which point I left too and went to group separately with that tank.)

I've seen posts on the boards along the same idea. Along the lines of "God, some of you tanks suck. I had to kick one out of the team yesterday because he couldn't herd on 'invincible'."

Or I've had tells along the lines of "whaaat? you only heal 200 hp?" with my Defender.

That's the real problem. If enough people run around with infinite money, that becomes the new baseline. That's the standard against which you're judged. You start getting insulted or kicked out of the team because you don't measure up to that standard.

Worse yet, that becomes the standard for which the devs balance the games.

E.g., have you tried doing the level 24 Terra Volta respec at level 24, with a team which didn't get any extra money, ever? Try it. It's fun. Even with a martial arts scrapper (+10% to-hit), and _some_ DO accuracy enhancements, I wasn't even hitting the overlapping +3 to +4 level shield generators.

To my shame, I gave up, transferred some money from another character, and tried again with SO enhancements in everything. Went _much_ better.