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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."
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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.
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