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The Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer
An anonymous reader writes "This weekend's New York Times Magazine puts a human face to the 'gold farming' profession. Virtual world economist Julian Dibbell travels to Nanjing, China, for a look at the working conditions and first-hand experience of farming gold from virtual monsters as a way to make a living. From the article: 'At the end of each shift, Li reports the night's haul to his supervisor, and at the end of the week, he, like his nine co-workers, will be paid in full. For every 100 gold coins he gathers, Li makes 10 yuan, or about $1.25, earning an effective wage of 30 cents an hour, more or less. The boss, in turn, receives $3 or more when he sells those same coins to an online retailer, who will sell them to the final customer (an American or European player) for as much as $20. The small commercial space Li and his colleagues work in -- two rooms, one for the workers and another for the supervisor -- along with a rudimentary workers' dorm, a half-hour's bus ride away, are the entire physical plant of this modest $80,000-a-year business.'"
what is bad about gold farming? well, it allows some rich asshole to buy his way into a game he should have worked hard at. it destroys the concept of a meritocracy, and replaces it with aristocracy. hwever, there is no financial replacement for real skill. and so any such bad player behind a high level avatar will rapidly become apparent: a joke
furthermore, what is good about gold farming? well, some guy in china is actually feeding himself on the effort. this matters a whole hell of a lot more than some stupid game and the feelings of the players of that game in my book. real life survival is a whole hell of a lot more important than the romance of a MMORPG
so i vote: gold farming is fine by me
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I have no problem with some Chinese people making money off of selling "farmed gold" to rich gamers in the West, but the fact that more than 90% of what the customer pays goes to middlemen, rather than the "farmer", in a set of transactions conducted entirely on the internet is rather rankling.
Well in the case of something non-trivial, like the military, the reason why it's a Bad Thing is because then you end up with some rich incompetent running something that they have no business running. Which is not to say that the military is anything like a meritocracy in its current form, but it's a little better than cash-on-the-barrel-head.
That general point is true of more trivial activities, like games; if you destroy the meritocratic aspects in favor of pay-to-play (really, pay-to-advance; you already have to pay to play!) then you'll end up with a worse result, in most cases, overall. The difference due to putting people with either less skill, or less interest, in higher positions than they would otherwise occupy.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
100 gold coins takes this guy Li 4 hours to come across. He gets paid $0.30 for it. I pay the end seller $5 for the same 1 hour of coins (25 gold coins). So I'm basically saving myself 1 hour (or more, if Li is extra-efficient) for the low cost of $5. Sounds like a winning situation for me.
As for Li, it sounds like a good place to start also. It's a new market, and in all new markets people have to work for peas (or less) to until the market breaks open. We might see Li running his own show in 5 years (or we may not).
Until then, he gets to work indoors, on a computer, smoke as much as he wants (try that in the US!), and learn a skill that some may consider mundane, but shows a helluva lot of marketability with a longterm and bright future. Now it sounds like a win-win situation.
I really like the part where he was saying that he was making less money as a vehicle repairman. It really brings the discrepency of money accross the world to light. Although the shifts seems fairly excessive they seem to be able to live off of it decently. I really have a problem seing the downside to it. Besides the fear of taxation and policing by the providers of the game. They are providing a service for a fee. If people weren't willing to pay for it they wouldn't exist. Inflation works both ways. If people with more money buy the best gear its easy for the people not willing to pay up for their gold to make a lot of money selling the gear they get for profit. Really isn't it about finding what makes the game fun for you and doing that part of it?
If it were my game I would not mind that people were gold farming. But I don't own it, Blizzard does, so they get to define what the rules are. Although I think it's pointless to fight things like gold farming, it would seem more practical to embrace it and have some control over it. (like set up a currency exchange rate for it).
One thing gold farming does is exploit a weakness in a games economic system. Which can introduce imbalance through inflation. But this is countered somewhat because NPCs don't participate in the free market and have (generally) fixed pricing. But the price for things you can't buy from an NPC just sky rockets as the gold farming persists. the buying power of your gold will just keep going down as long as it is easy to get. just shell out the price of two months subscription and you are set for a good deal of time on gold, at least for normal in-game purchases.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
You need to hire your own Chinese guys to farm gold for you! There's a 1600% markup on Chinese gold, if you go through the retailer.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
is to not play.
Here's a challenge to all of Slashdot: Cut out the middlemen.
Gold-farming isn't going away, but at least it could be a positive social force, fighting global inequality while building IT capacity in the developing world. As it is, most of the money is going to middlemen. But the product is virtual, and we can bring farmers to markets at potentially no cost. If 100 gold (or whatever the unit) retails for $20 in the west, then let's transfer that money into technology cooperatives in developing countries, who use their non-gaming hours to provide email, web access and other vital resources to their communities. Wouldn't you rather buy 'gold' from a fair trade source? Given the enormous markup, it might even lower prices. And here's the kicker: A community center could have kids playing for free in exchange for donating "gold" to pay the bills. Along the way, maybe they take attend a class on HTML programming, and start thinking more like IT professionals than farmers. Suddenly buying "gold" starts feeling a lot less exploitive.
So have at it:
1) We need a web portal to connect buyers and sellers directly. Can ebay do it? If not, how?
2) We need to explore a certification model, such as TransFair USA's fair trade certified produce.
3) We need a start-up information kit with instruction on how to open a community technology center (such as Room to Read's), but financed by gold farming.
4) We need a micro-credit source to pay for hardware and software.
5) We need a marketing movement within the gaming community.
...that people pay to avoid it? It's interesting; skill in other games in non-transferable. You can't sell people your muscle memory from playing an FPS or fighting game. I don't see anything wrong w/ gold farming, and I don't see it subverting a 'meritocracy.' It's just circumventing time spent, to which we should be asking: why are we making/playing such laborious games?
Relax. Have a muffin. Enjoy the show. --Slick, Sept 13th, 2007.
The problem with these types of games is that in their effort to be "massive" they link everyone together in the same type of game with the same type of players. Associating "worth" with your character's stats and fake digital possesions has been the bane of these types of games (and even going back to some MUDs, Telearena, BBS, etc). You will get a good crop of obsessive "gotta have it all" type players, but it really alienates the casual type of player who might like to have access to the high-level content but doesn't have the same amount of time as everyone else. Now, you're saying, "well, that's fine, he'll just take longer to get there", but in a PvP world, you're behind the curve if you're not on all the time raiding with your guild. Really what they need to do is set up "weight classes" for players. Let some servers have time limits on the amount of stuff you can do per day - BBSs used to have thsi stuff out of necessity, but I think actually only allowing an hour or two online on a server would keep things fair and more interesting to casual players. People who want a more "immersive" experience can play on the "heavyweight" servers and spend as much time online as they want. Other things that could help would be adopting a more Eve like approach to skills where you earn them per day, but maybe tweaking it a bit so the power players can still level up by doing tasks, etc. I just think MMORPG makers need to think a bit more about the casual gamer who really doesn't want to spend all day online - 5-10 hours a week for busy people with jobs, families, other hobbies, etc. There's a lot of money to be made from subscriptions outside of the hardcore, powergamer scene.
Except thats NOT what is happening. The proper analogy is your friend spending $50 on a really nice bowling ball while you use the one from the bowling alley.
Tyranny isn't the worst enemy of a democracy. Cynicism is.
It's the way of the world and always has been.
Thing is, see, this isn't the world. Its a game. Games have always been distorted to an extent by financial interests, but games always *resist* this distortion. In theory the fastest man wins the 100 yard dash, not the richest, the best chess player wins the tournament, not the richest, etc.
Sure these players use their wealth to their advantage. They don't have to work other jobs, they can hire coaches, and personal trainers etc... but on the PLAYING FIELD, its just them. That is part of the appeal of games.
Nobody wants to play a game that simply rolls over to rich folks paying for *in-game* advantages. Its one thing to buy books about the game, hire someone to learn to be a better player, buy a faster computer, or to have enough money not to need to work so you can spend more time playing the game. Its something else to just buy advantages INSIDE the game.
In chess for example, no matter how much wealth you've expended in honing your ability to play the game itself you still can't drop a thousand bucks in someones pocket and add another queen to your side. Its simply against the rules. And that's all a game is -- a set of arbitrary rules. If you disregard the rules there is no point to playing the game.
If you want to disregard some of the rules, that's a different game. And its ok to play different games under any rules you want, but if you are playing the game with someone else, you can't just decide to which rules you want to ignore mid-stream whether they want to or not.
In other words, if you want to play games that let you buy your in game items, fine, find or start a game that allows it and play it. But don't play games that don't allow it and then break the rules.
That's part of the problem but there are two more. Let's examine this by seeing what happens if Blizzard were to sell gold or endorse gold farmers.
The first is the legal system: A player now has a reasonable expectation to the gold on their account. This has two meanings. The first is that if the server were to ever go down or be banned then Blizzard is denying you your property and access to it. In other words, Blizzard has just "stolen" from the player. The other is Blizzard would have to start protecting that gold as an asset against theft and fraud and all that entails. Recently in EVE, a player ran a scam to take money from other players. If that money was tied to 'real' money then that player could be charged with fraud and theft.
The second is the banking system: Banks have to go through a lot of hoops because they hold people's assets. By tying real money to their money, Blizzard could be expected to start acting like a bank. This can include everything from data retention, transaction monitoring, international banking laws, fraud protection, personal security screening, redundant servers, near 100% access, etc.
Ultimately there is one major reason why Blizzard will not sell or support selling of virtual gold: Control. Currently, Blizzard can do anything they want, including banning players for little to no reason, and the player truly has no recourse. Especially if the account is worth nothing (After all it's a service and NOT an asset). Transversely, if it was worth USD 1,000 then a person can take Blizzard to small claims court and expect a judgment. Current court argument, "We can stop, suspend, alter or modify service at anytime since it is a pay per play services. The account is not an object of value and is the property of Blizzard." If money was tied to the account, "The account is an object of value owned by the player who cannot be denied access to it without due process. Blizzard is expected due diligence in maintaining and protecting the object and ensuring all applicable laws are adhered to."
The problem is that these games have taken a leisure activity and then stretched out the time to play them artificially to where there is not much fun for some activities.
The 22 hours I put into getting my "jboots" was just a pointless and artificial limit to slow the rate jboots entered the game. People who could play 12 hours at a stretch got jboots in about 11 hours-- those of us who played shorter periods often took longer to get the same rewards.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Let's put that in cold perspective.$20 for 100 gold? Which planet are you living on? IGE is the biggest and arguably the most expensive, because they tend to shy away from affiliates which use excessive numbers of bots and account hacking. Even there, however, $20 would get you about 200 gold. Go to the shadier sites, however, and you'll find $20 would get you almost 400 gold; in one case, nearly 1000 gold.
Odd, that, isn't it? You couldn't possibly hire even a Chinese gold farmer for that kind of wage. So what's going on?
Simple. Someone used a handier and much cheaper way of obtaining gold than by hiring Chinese people; steal it from another player.
All those keyloggers on the WoW forums and buried in advertisements to some sites, with web browser exploits attached? Yup, that's right.
To a black-hat, right now, a stolen login and password to a World of Warcraft account is worth more than a stolen credit card number, and it's a lot easier to sell on to an affiliate.
That's where we're at now - people buying gold are directly funding the creation of malware... Still feeling good about it? Thought not.
No matter how you look at this, subscribers are paying money to avoid playing parts of the game. How much sense does that make?!?
I lost my sig.