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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.'"
Wow is dying.
Office league slow pitch softball. Look into it.
What is the cost of living for that area? How much does that 10 Yuan a week compare to other salaries?
For longer that the US has been around, persons of wealth used to buy military commissions which often involved them taking over some pre-established regiment, naval vessel crew, or outpost. Likewise placement in religious orders, bishops and so forth, did not involve working ones way up the hierarchy but buying a position. A seat at the House of lords did not come from merit.
Why does this bother you that rich folks can pay to play. Why should they not if they can? It's the way of the world and always has been.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I say the same here, but I'm curious...$1.25/100 gold pieces is fine and all, but how is it that they make so little money in a week? Is gold THAT hard to come by in-game? I could rack up 10,000 gil playing FF12 in an hour. Is gold harder to make playing online games?
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
so that means that if he is earning 30c/hour then he is only collecting like 25 gold coins in an hour. Seems to me if he'd work harder he could make a bit more than that. I don't exactly know how common gold is in WoW, but it seems to me that after a month or so of work, his character would be of sufficient level to be making a lot more money than that.
What other job do you know of that putting extra work actually incurs better pay? How many of you wish you got payed on scale with how productive you were? (obviously joking since we are all at work wasting away on Slashdot)
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
What is exactly wrong with him paying someone else to do this for him? To gain gold for him? To level a character for him?
I mean are maids immoral to have now as well? House cleaners that come in once a weak? Gas station attendants? Car mechanics? Computer repairman? Lawyers? Accountans? Cooks? All of them are paid to do a task which someone else could do but for various reasons chooses to "outsource".
Blizzard et al have vilified gold farmers for one simple reason: they don't want to report virtual gold transactions to the IRS. The record keeping is expensive and fraught with legal peril. It's easier for them to ban gold trading albeit nominally, than it is to keep transaction records for the IRS.
The real problem is the intrusive nature of the Income Tax, not Blizzard or the gold farmers.
Just a thought.
"Man is nothing without the works of man" -- Helvetius
The game is only fun as long as it maintains its illusion as a game.
For example.
Paying 70 million in salary for a team that usually beats other teams is acceptable.
But going the next logical step and selling "successful bat swings" destroys the illusion.
The gross mockery of baseball that has 70 million dollar "aces" pretending to be equals of a 4 million dollar team of 3rd stringers (yet winning year after year) still has just enough illusion left of the original game.
Likewise-- buying gold is okay and buying an experienced but used character is okay. However, the day Sony or Blizzard puts a price of $10 per level and a formal price on all items and expansion/zone flags then they will destroy the illusion.
What is the point of just giving Sony $850 and then saying "I win". The rich people NEED hordes of poor people playing the hard way to get the good feeling that justifies paying that much money to "win" and play.
put another way
What family would play monopoly when you could buy a thousand dollars in the game for a dollar. The parents could win any game because they have more money.
It's not a fair game when you let people buy a winning position.
---
Another example... because of this money issue many real world games have limits. For example: in nascar, the track has a right to buy the winning car for a set price (so you better not spend more than that set price) and in drag car racing, there is a maximum speed you can run (890 class is 8.9 seconds). Only in the 'unlimited' class can you spend any amount of money.
What we "890" game players want is a level playing field.
Unfortunately... you still have the 80 hour a week players-- so what I want is a game where you can't buy a position or gold and where you can't play more than a certain number of hours per week. ("This is the 20 hour a week server-- all players on this server are limited to 20 hours a week" "This is the 30 hour a week server".. etc.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I understand your point, but I think that your problem really ought to be less with the prohibitions on gold-purchase or other pay-to-advance schemes, but more with the fundamental design of the game itself. Most MMORPGs are designed to be time-intensive, such that your advancement is tied directly into how much time you can afford out of your day to sit in front of your PC and play them.
That may not be everyone's idea of a good time. It certainly is for some people, as the success of Everquest and WoW has demonstrated. But it's probably not yours, and it's not really mine, either. (I had fun playing WoW for a while, but it's just too damn slow to keep me interested.) But that's the game. That's how it's designed. And that's what a great many of the people who are playing it, are playing it for.
People play MMORPGs because they want to escape reality; they want a world that's disconnected from how much money they make in their day job (and, thus, how valuable their time might be). They want a place where the $12/hr UPS package handler can beat the shit out of the $650/hr attorney, if he can play the game enough, gather enough widgets, go on more quests, whatever. That's the whole point of the game. If you reintroduce a way to capitalize on real-life success within the context of the game, it stops being a game anymore, and instead just becomes a pastel-colored extension of real life.
There is room -- and probably, demand -- for 'games' that take different approaches on the amount of disconnection that they demand from the physical world. I think fantasy worlds like WoW are on the more disconnected end of the spectrum, and I'm not sure that there's any inherent unfairness in making it entirely meritocratic and letting people decide how much of their real-life time they're going to invest in advancement. On the other end, or more towards the other end anyway, you have Second Life type places, which have currency that's exchangable to real-life currencies on the open market. If you're rich in real life, you can be rich in Second Life, too -- from a certain point of view, you already are, in the same way that you'd be rich in any other country, subject to cost-of-living and exchange rates. There's no inherent unfairness in this, either, because it allows people to "play" SL more casually than WoW: if you have a successful RL occupation, you can spend your time doing that, and use the money you make there to buy nice stuff in SL, you don't have to spend 20-hour days questing to get mods.
Neither of these approaches is objectively better than either, at least in any way that I can really see or argue. (I suppose you could argue, depending on your feelings of the inherent fairness of our capitalist real-life economy and labor market, that the WoW one is a purer meritocracy, though.) They each have their strengths and weaknesses, and if you don't like the design of one, rather than trying to subvert the rules and "break the fourth wall" that's so carefully constructed (and desired, desperately, by many people who play them) in some online worlds, it's probably best to find an online world that's designed to be less disconnected from that giant MMORPG called Real Life.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I haven't found any really concrete numbers or sites, but it sounds like a living wage in china is $3/day.
... hardly any chubby dark-skinned people to be found at Trader Joe's. Lots of skinny light-skinned folks, though ... in their pretty, hippie dresses and John Kerry bumper stickers on their SUVs. I like Trader Joe's. Ramble ramble ramble ...
The notion of a "living wage" is completely bogus and here is way.
Living according to what kind of lifestyle?
That question is left out. Instead, it is merely assumed that a certain "comfortable" lifestyle will be attained. But what, exactly is "comfortable"?
There is an interesting series in the travel section of my local newspaper about an American female expat living in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She makes a "living wage" working there. This week, she detailed the things that she dislikes about the city (next week she will list the things that she likes about living there). One of the things that she dislikes is that ATM machines don't always have money, don't always give you all the money you asked for (even if there is money in your account), and Buenos Aires is still almost a completely cash-based city. What this meant for her is that she had to visit a series of ATM machines at odd hours every single day, gathering up only small amounts of money at a time, in order to gether up enough money to pay her rent. The task of "gathering up rent money" from scattered ATMs all across town became part of her daily routine. Do you think this would hamper your lifestyle if you're used to living the the USA or in Europe where cash-on-demand is a no-brainer?
That is but one example among countless other ways to measure the value of one's own lifestyle. The fact that Americans are so fat is merely evidence that they have buttloads of free time (due to not having to spend their time on frustrating, mundane tasks) combined with an abundance of food (not to mention little knowledge of good eating). Keep in mind that the majority of overweight and obese persons in the United States are described as "living in poverty". The more wealthy you get in the USA, the thinner you get, statistically speaking. Is that weird? Not at all. It's just that our notions of "poverty" and "abundance" need to be reexamined, particularly in light of the notion of wealth envy. I.e., "I'm poor because I don't have as much stuff as my next-door neighbor!"
An interesting exit question: what are the demographics of the anarchist movement in the USA?
Demographics fascinate me
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
This person enjoys video games but like many finds the grind annoying. Now his time is worth a lot to society and he has money so he pays someone else to do the grind for him.
I wouldn't say there's anything wrong with it necessarily, but if that's the case he should probably find a game that's better suited to his interests. Paying someone else to perform what is supposed to be a leisure activity, because one finds a large portion of the game to be tedious seems like the height of stupidity.
Find something to play that's actually fun, instead.
The libertarian solution to the failures of capitalism is to apply more capitalism til the failures are fixed.
Even if the money input into a game is the same, the amount of time a person plays is not. The college kid who can spend 70 hours a week playing WoW is -not- equal to the guy with 3 kids and a wife, and 2 jobs. Oddly enough, the very same process that you say makes the game unfair would make the game more fair for him.
I'm the guy with the kids and the wife who plays WoW. I'm never going to be in a high-end raiding guild or a top-ranked arena team. I've accepted that and moved on, while still having fun playing the game and living vicariously through videos downloaded from warcraftmovies.com. The people who buy gold to get epic gear aren't going to be in a high-end raiding guild or a top-ranked arena team either. They are just kidding themselves and helping wreck the server economy in the process.
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
...that I'm getting ripped off in my purchases, mostly by the various middle-men. Even accounting for the cost of a computer, the WOW account, the electricity to power the computer, and the space in which the computer and the farmer sit... it seems like a lot of people are making money for just connecting two people.
This article makes me want to, more than any other solution, reach an open-ended agreement with a single farmer to provide me with full-time farming services in exchange for a much-closer-to-retail rate. Figure a target of eight-hour workdays, flextime (since I don't care when they farm up cloth, leather, ores, gold, signets, etc. for me), for 2-3 times what they're making. I'll even pay for the account. Just a steady stream of all the treadmill shit that is in the way of the actual fun part of the game. They get a closer-to-living-wage, IGE goes out of business, I get pretty purples. Everyone wins.
So... anyone speak cantonese or mandarin? Or failing that, any off-duty farmers (of any nationality) speak english and read slashdot comments?
I have. It ain't hard.
A Few Facts:
1.GM's don't bother me.
2.I do error checking, if one fails I start another not necessarily the someone.
3.I use bots in botz teams (if you writes botz - you know what I mean)
4.They are not obvious to the casual observer.
5.Anyone who does this manually is ignorant and can't compete I don't care if they have 9 man teams or not.
6. WoW, EQ, or which ever software don't even know what going on cuz I compile my own names. Let them scan all they want.
7. Microsoft Windows use to install a program call "Recorder" in Win 3.2 that made botz but decide not to include it in there later OS's. So Microsoft must approve as some level.
8. Someone who writes a script to automate a task (there by eliminating Carpaltunnel Syndrome) is a hero in my book.
If an individual in China posted his "isellgold.ch" web site and asked for your credit card number, would you give it to him? If he doesn't farm your server, would you do a google search through hundreds of hack, warez, and cheats sites until you find one with a link to someone who farms your server and accepts credit cards?
The middlemen act as a "legitimate" front to a distributed back-end operation. I don't think there's any doubt that they are necessary for this operation.
Now, regarding the price, other posts have established that the farmers are paid a little better than the going rate for unskilled labor in China. US customers pay the going rate for gold, based on years of market experience on the part of the middlemen. The middlemen pocket the difference because neither end complains.
The free market doesn't work to minimize prices. It works to find a balance between bid and ask price in a transaction. In this case, ask prices on the farmer end are low, and bid prices on the consumer end are high, so the market acted to create middlemen to absorb the difference.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
why don't they play online poker?
.50/1 limit or 1 table .25NL, and there's lots of room for advancement.
getting a winrate better than 1.25/hour is trivial. you could do it playing 2 tables of
The problem with MMO's is they are designed to limit the amount of skill required to play them. A level 60 cleric played by a 12 year old is vastly more useful than a level 30 cleric played by the most skilled player in the world. But as they try and avoid the need for "skills" the only way to win is Time.
Let's face it grinding, grouping, and raiding are BORING. So when you can spend money to skip Time there is nothing left in the game. Or think of it like this...
Let's drop the concept of time from the game. Make an MMO where you can only level for 5 hours a week and there are no items. AKA at 10 weeks you can level a toon for a total of 50 hours. Now a new player can play 20 hours a week for a few months to catch up to the oldest player on the server at which point they get capped at 5 hours a week. Well what's the point? Basically you just built Guild Wars vs. a MMO.
Gold farmers are a cancer to MMO games.
Which is why the leveling system itself is the carcinogen.
Gold farming is a sign of a broken game that allows too much disparities in levels and lack of skill being used for game play. When all game play on MMOs is time sinks, then the developers see all problems as "not enough time sinks".
The Diku mud style of play doesn't work well for server with more than 100 players and the model is completely broken when you scale to games like WoW.
The only MMO that got it right the first time was Ultima Online.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
It's much more interesting to focus on the game design instead of only discussing the act of buying versus grinding.
IMO, MMOs are still in their toddler stage. Single-player games also had lots of grind 10 years ago. As the genre matured, repetetive and boring gameplay has largely been removed.
Though there is some deeply rooted satisfaction in repeating activities to gain power in a virtual world. So it may take awhile before someone tried to make a non-repetitive MMO. Not to mention it would be insanely expensive. Repetetive content is obviously much, much cheaper.
I lost my sig.
Gold Farmer whispers to you, "water now" You notice there is no gold in the trade window... they want it for free. That is why gold farmers are despised...
Orignator of the Miserable Failure Googlebomb