Slashdot Mirror
In-Game Gold Farming a $500M Industry
SpuriousLogic brings us this excerpt from a BBC report:
"Prof. Heeks said very accurate figures for the size of the gold farming sector were hard to come by, but his work suggested that in 2008 it employs 400,000 people who earn an average of $145 (£77) per month creating a global market worth about $500m. ... Already, he said, gold farming was comparable in size to India's outsourcing industry. 'The Indian software employment figure probably crossed the 400,000 mark in 2004 and is now closer to 900,000,' said Prof Heeks. 'Nonetheless, the two are still comparable in employment size, yet not at all in terms of profile.' Prof Heeks suspects gold-farming might be an early example of the 'virtual offshoring' likely to become more prevalent as people spend more time working and playing in cyberspace. "
We discussed the life of a gold farmer last year.
Might as well get it out of the way.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/02/16/
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/4/14/
I think they have stopped now, or got kicked out, I havent seen any more similar activity from the bunch....
Tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
Just another example that I don't deserve my nice house and cushy job. Some people are pretty desperate for the spare change that falls from American (and euro, there does that make you happy...) tables.
They worked all day for the same money I made reading this article at work.
Modding me -1 troll doesn't make me wrong.
Haven't the Calcutta brothers created something called Scrabulous thats of a similar business model?
And how about the gazillion Indian outsourcing garage-sized companies you find in sites like rentacoder.com and scriptlance.com?
slashdot rocks
When I was unemployed, I saw the gold farmers as a scourge, letting people pay to get stuff for nothing.
Now that I have a job, and next to no time to play the games I like, it pisses me off that I never have the in-game cash to get the stuff I'd need to play alongside my friends without letting them down.
It's a real shame on both ends of the spectrum. Them, for giving people the easy way out, and the game makers, for requiring so damn much of a time investment.
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
What is this? A reverse-psychology 419 scam in action?
46487 466780 252994 376409 96920 39622 205366 244315 622115 512361 668040 63608 259203 955314 811176 652718 166330 23922
It's called Bind on Equip.
Also, if you're only playing for gear, and you don't actually *enjoy* grouping for instances, doing quests, etc., then I will tell you right off the bat that you shouldn't be playing MMOs anyway. Who cares what some twelve-year-old has?
the existence of WoW is, overtly, to have fun
but if you are employing someone to heighten your fun, all you are really doing is distancing yourself from the true pleasure of the game. you are talking about people who do not know how to enjoy the gaming experience
why do people cheat in any game? its the triumph of ego over id. its people mistaking the pursuit of pleasure with the pursuit of heightening your self-regard. when you conflate the two, you actually destroy your own happiness (though you don't realize this) because you are no longer solely concerned with pleasure, but winning. of course winning is pleasurable, but winning at all costs deadens pleasure, it doesn't heighten it. this is especially true of your actions and their effects on the happiness of others, by warping how the game experience exists for them
gold farming indicates a philosophical and psychological disconnect between the point of something like WoW and what people actually do with it. they turn fun, into work
that's just wrong in some extremely fundamental way, and shows you why true happiness is so fleeting in this world: we destroy our own happiness by actively placing the pursuit of happiness secondary to the pursuit of some other, lesser goal, out of your own blindness and forgetting what is important, especially in the context of something like WoW
i'm not saying trying to use the game in ways not as originally intended is wrong no matter what. you can use WoW to do lots of interesting things that isn't what the game was intended for. what i am saying is that this particular unintended game experience, gold farming, is odious and toxic to the expeirence of everyone, including those employing the gold farmers, they just don't know it, as they are blind to their own philosophical and psycholigcal failures that lead them away from the pursuit of happiness and instead towards the pursuit of ego tweaking
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It's not the 12 year olds who buy high-level gear: the kids are the ones with more time than money. It's the busy thirty-somethings who want to have fun for a couple hours a week that pull out their credit cards to buy gold.
THAT'S NOTHING... I farm Karma on Slashdot for $0.12/hour
While gold-farming does go against the game's policies, there is not much that Blizzard can legally do about it. Gold-farmers are stationed mostly in China and Japan, and players are willing to buy buy their products such as gold / armor and items. it is disappointing but I don't see how that should affect gameplay, as some people do not have the time to farming gold and armor. Players use their virtual money to enhance their character, yet Blizzard feels that this is against the game's policies, which in many ways it is, but people do what they want, no MMORPG has ever been perfect, and i seriously doubt that blizzard can do much about stopping the spread of gold farming and gold selling. Players do what makes them happy, even if it may violate the GUI's and so forth.
If that money or the items bought with that money could be destroyed or lost in game.
You mad
Why don't anyone hire them as NPC. You could pay for dynamic quests.
The principles of economics could not be contained by the iron curtain, nor will they be by the digital or legal curtain.
The agricultural economy had it's currency, as did the industrial economy. The digital economy is no different.
The foundation of micro econ is marginal utility, so as long as there is one sniveling 13 year old (or 31 year old for that matter) that says "I want", there is real economic value in the virtual gold in them there iron hills.
That's right folks that nice shiny new digital dagger contributes to the real GDP.
Hope is the currency of fools
I'm sorry, you meant Bind on Pickup. That's okay. You haven't played MMOs in a while, I can tell. And you didn't have a Slashdot account when you posted that.
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
either
A: force all transactions through a NPC vendor and charge a incremental tax on all transfers between non linked accounts transfers.
after the first few transfers your tax rate gets up past 30% - 40% and its no longer profitable. this will also work as an excellent gold sink, keeping the economy in check.
B: the company sells gold for less than the farmers, making it no longer profitable.
this of course would kill the games economy.
This just in! People get paid to do work others don't want to do! Details at 11.
To Blizzard and friends. Seriously, the party that owns the world can make anything they want, in any quantity, for essentially zero dollars, and they see that half a billion worth gets sold every year?
Sure, they currently make money on the gold farmer's accounts; but they just have to be salivating at the prospect of cutting them out of the action. They'd take flack for it, though, so a means of laundering would need to be developed.
Fashion designers, Dry cleaners, Professional Athletes, Nail salons, and now, virtual gold miners.
Bless you all - as long as you are earning money and keeping off the welfare roles, I applaud you.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
http://www.answers.com/topic/my-heart-bleeds-for-you
the idea of grinding killed mmo's for me. please someone show me an mmo based on skill, rather than who has the most free time!
Cory Doctorow wrote a cool short story incorporating gold farming in his collection Overclocked.
Free downloads of the html version and
PDF version.
There are games like that. They're call real-time strategy games, or first-person shooters.
Where can I find the company that will let me out-source by posts at slashdot? I don't have time to make clever witty comments, and the quality of my postings were low anyways. By out-sourcing my posting my productivity will jump 100%!
Out of the 50 million total MMO players worldwide, is this suggesting that every player drops $10 a year to gold farmers?
3laws: No freebies, no backsies, GTFO.
If they want to quell gold farming they need to introduce Postal worker as a profession. All mail from that point on is handled by an in-game post office. As an added perk, all Postal workers are always in PVP while making deliveries, and if they're killed while doing their route their mail can be stolen by whoever killed them. That'd add a new fun element to the game at least.
Then when it comes to other players physically transferring farmed gold to one another in game, Blizzard could just make some sort of verification key system. For example if a player wanted to accept a 10 0000g transfer the verification would be they'd have to throw a Kara run and say 'We wiped because I'm a noob'.
Problem solved.
I have nothing compelling to say
Excerpt from Brandon Sheffield article on Gamasutra :
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=18510
It was Blueside who first introduced the idea to me, cynically stating that consoles won't succeed in Korea until players start just playing games for fun, instead of treating them as work. I laughed then, but subsequent meetings only served to confirm the theory.
Companies from Gravity to Ntreev to Nexon agreed that a very large number - varying from 30 to 50 percent, depending on who you ask - of players in South Korea are playing games as a job. Generally, people didn't feel too good about it either, which at least indicates that people aren't designing them with that as a goal. But it's still disconcerting.
And as any player of Lineage2 can attest, some Korean MMOs really ARE designed to be grindfests and farming prone.
From L2 official boards :
PushyCat on official boards:
So, Koreans play and sell in their own servers and it covers the cost of their PC Room and meals. This is a normal aspect of Korean games. Listen to me while I say this. Ebaying is NOT CONSIDERED CHEATING in KORea. It is an important element of mmporgs. With game money, not only can you sell it to make cash, you can also order pizza, buy computers and accessories (like auto mouses, keyboards, macroprograms), and pay for your monthly fee (for those who play at home). In Korea, game money is an accepted tender for Real Life. Noone posts on message boards about cheaters, ebayers, and bots because EVERYONE does it. In Korea, the game is played much differently than in North America, and asians have different cultural backgrounds that make gameplay different as well.
If you're willing to think about the game you're playing, try EVE online.
It's NOT for the instant gratification crowd, eve takes time, both due to complexity
and the scale of it.
But it balances those with time and without, and rewards thinking more than just who has the coolest uber item.
YOU can swap ISK(gold) for cash indirectly (you can buy game time and re-sell it for ISK as long as you follow thier rules).
What you can do depends on both your skills and 'gold'. Skills take time to train, and only time. Though getting the skill in the first place (except those you start with, dependent on char creation) costs in game money.
Once you start a skill training it keeps on going till you finish training to the next level or change what your training. you don't have to be online or even have an active account for this to occure (some have saved some real world cash by starting a LONG skill (some can take over a month!) suspending their account, and reactivating it about time the skill finishes.
Of course if you aren't actively playing you can't earn money (except from items you've already put up for sale, those stay for sale for as long as you put them up for untill you pull them or they sell).
And things are highly interconnected, especially the skill and ships. At first some of the skills seem kinda weak compared to the benefit (other than a pre-requisits for some things and some skills) but those 15% bonuses for 3 weeks of training a skill plus the ships bonus per level of skill plus the other skill, etc. add up better than may be obvious.
I like it because a) it requires more thinking than most, and b) working 50+ hours a week limits online time.
Mycroft
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
To have a long term MMO where there isn't a set script and people aren't really "role playing" in the sense of writing stories and pretending events occur you have to have grindage or quests that are not easy. Both have huge negatives associated with them. This has been known for close to the 20 years that muds have existed.
It's quite simply just the nature of the game. In a game without a set storyline, where the players make the story the only real reason to play is to reach higher levels than everyone else or to get strong enough to kill that NPC. If you can reach the highest level in 10 hours of play the game ends at 10 hours of play. As the developer is interested in your monthly fee the game is structured to make reaching the next level take twice as much time as the last once your past the first 10 levels or so (you have to make roughly the first 10 easy or you lose the first time players). The only method to accomplish this difficulty is by making the game take longer. So to reach level 20 you have to spend 1024 (2^10) times as much time playing as level 10, to reach level 30 you have to play 1048576 (2^20) times more time than it took to reach level 10, etc. The biggest problem long term for the developers is to keep adding NPC's and Levels so that players that reach the top keep playing.
This need to spend time playing to advance creates demand to avoid/reduce this time, either through character sales or sales of items that equate to time, such as gold in the game. Those players with money and little time will trade small sums of money to avoid large time commitments. That's human nature because as everyone knows, Time = Money.
Why buy a game then pay somebody else to play it?
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
what, is it too much to ask for actual content instead of grinding the same mobs for days or weeks on end?
Jesus loves me, he loves me a bunch, because he always puts Jiffy in my lunch.
The game is a mess and one of the messes is items you "have" to buy ingame.
If you want extra inventory space you need to buy bags but most important are horses since the game has very little instant travel.
250 gold for the highest level mounts in total (might be 300 forgot exactly) and 3 gold for your first set of horse and riding skill. Problem? When you reach the level for your first mount you got maybe, if you sold EVERYTHING and saved up constantly and grinding some gold 50 silver.
So paying a gold farmer makes sense. Early prices made your first horse cost 10-15 dollars. Not to bad.
But when the game had launched I did the math from the constant gold spams and a level 80 mount would have set you back 1300 euros.
Prices dropped of course BUT when I left you still looked at several hundred euro's, for a horsy.
I think gold farmers don't so much get 10 bucks from every MMORPG player but a 1000 from people with more money then brains.
Sure, you can say that for some people money == time but seriously, who is willing to pay so much money just for a game that you obviously don't actually want to play?
Now Age of Conan is a bad example as it is an incredibly badly designed MMORPG, want horse mounted combat, try Mount&Blade and give this game a wide birth but I think it is an accurate way of seeing how gold farmers work, they don't even pretend to offer a reasonable product, they basically offer the same service dog-walkers offer. All the fun of having a dog without doing anything with said dog. It is for people that want an epic mount but never play with it.
But I am not entirely suprised by these figures, after all the korean "pay for ingame items" approach makes gold farming a natural extension, if you are paying for items already why not buy gold as well.
For some games, like WoW and AoC it seems logical because if you make a decent wage why not pay someone to grind for you.
But I think most gamers would rather game themselves since gold is hardly cheap if you are still making minimum wage.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Because grinding isn't playing. Why pay to not play?
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
China's good at farming Olympic gold too!
There's a difference between what the industry pays its workers and what the industry is worth. In an industry where costs and wages are so low, it's probably a difference significantly larger than that of more traditional businesses. Who knows though, the article is far too light on details to make even marginal guesses.
N/T.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
...who make a justification to violate the rules(and ruining the game). It happens about every time goldfarming comes up.
This is the developed world, and it has no obligation to assist developing nations in any way. That includes those who aid and abet them. It also includes those who wish to obstruct the US/(pre-expansion)EU, within and without.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Lineage II in NCNA isn't being enforced with a large enough hammer. There's your problem.
Keep the banhammer running and start doing some serious blocking(read: the few that get through get banned) of botting countries. It has worked in the Philippines, it can and will work in farmer-infested parts of NCNA.
1.4 billion(and more) people are a problem solved by permanent exclusion from the game.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
If, on the other hand, one is in more of an ... mind set, Blizzard could license gold farmers and let ....... forces take their course.
However, force is quite swift at removing them, and solves the problem.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Some people LIKE to grind. Don't ask me why, I'll never get it but I know a number of WoW players that enjoy grinding. So WoW provides grinding for them to do, and rewards for it. Blizzard's theory seems to be that whatever you like to do, they are going to give you plenty of it to do and rewards for doing it. You want to do 5-mans? Go to it. Want to PvP? Sure. Whatever you like, you can do it.
The problem comes from people who aren't playing the game for fun, but playing because they want to be better than other people. The want to have the best gear, most stuff, etc. Thus they run in to things that are grind rewards. They don't want to do those, so they buy gold instead.
The grind isn't the problem, the people who don't play to have fun are.
However, it fails when force is required(read: banning/blocking them to manageable, and bannable numbers).
It's a shame that economists are the fifth column of our nation.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Block them, and have enough proxy detection to reduce them low numbers. Then hand the accounts to verified US citizens by a contest.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
...and both shall be banned, the former blocked.
There is no obligation to assist or permit assistance towards the developing world. It is more an obligation to hold them to the same standard - their population does not make it any more correct.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
The only thing goldfarming does is ruin a game - full stop. The only proper response is to make the bans easier to effect on known and unknown goldfarmers. We do not have any obligation to assist them, nor anyone who does so.
Blizzard would prefer not to lose customers as any other company would.
Time for regulation to put some teeth into those bans, ala Korea.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
I don't trust the numbers. There are about 10 million people playing WoW, and WoW has ~80% market share. That works out to about 1 farmer for every 30 players.
But most of those 30 only play a few hours a day, and they only need to level up once or twice, many choose not to use a gold farmer at all. Farmers work more than 40 hours a week. That does not compute.
This sig is just as redundant as the rest of this posting
While goldfarming is a problem and in my opinion hurts the game in the long run, there's something that bothers me more. Account hacking. Account hacking is a professional business these day and it hurts players directly. Their accounts are robbed from every penny their gear which they obtained over hours of doing dungeons or farming, playing the game gets sold for a bit of cash and they're left with one ore more naked Characters. While people may say: gold buying is harmless, it's from Chinese farmers anyway, that's not true. If you are buying gold, you are paying someone else to hack into your fellow players accounts. Think about that.
Still strange that so many people work for something virtual, that could just be generated without any labor.
My spirit takes a journey through my mind...
If I want to pay extra to have more fun, more power to me. Maybe you find grinding in the Outlands for seven hours just to get the gold you need for an epic mount to be fun, but I don't.
put the words "free tibet" somewhere in the game.
Most gold farmers are not hackers (apparently, many of the hackers are located in Russia) and some are victimized by the hackers themselves. The gold sellers are the markets for the hackers, it's true, so they are connected indirectly. But the guy who is killing things in game to sell for gold to sell to players isn't the guy who stole an account and liquidated its virtual goods to sell. The first is a behavior that is generally consensual for everyone involved (after all, everyone has an equal "right" to repetitively kill bears and wolves - or rather, repetitively killing bears and wolves is within the rules and meta-rules of the game) , the second is a mugging.
Your attitude is more like saying you'll never go to an Italian restaurant again because you were once assaulted by a mafioso.
And the ISK farmers give the highsec pirates someone to prey on who isn't me coming in to empire for implants.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
How exactly do you grind from level 1-60 without getting your very own level 38 world drop ... which you can then sell for enough gold to buy one.
I dunno - I'm 32 and I've never bought any gold, but I've managed to buy 4 epic mounts/training on 4 characters (thats 20,000~g for those who don't play - and one of the main reasons I'm sure people buy).
Its the 12 year olds who always ask me how I make so much money - its really simple actually (and I don't grind for the most part) - do quests and don't spend it on crap. You'll never make money selling stuff in WoW - typically the materials for making anything are worth more than the items usually sell for.
There are grinds in WoW but most of them can be combined with quests, dungeons and raids - which I enjoy doing.
someone said something like: "build a system even an idiot can use, and only an idiot will want to use it."
A few months ago, Jagex solved this problem in Runescape and now bots and gold farming is basically non-existent. I've found the game to be more enjoyable with real players to chat with rather than competing with bots using free accounts for limited resources. The key to what they did was stop unbalanced trading. You can still give away items, but it's been limited, yet scaled to your experience level. They also added a cool feature where you can loan (or rent) items to other players. The gold farming was apparently creating a huge underground economy and funding organized crime. With real world trading, they'd also have to be concerned with international banking laws and money laundering. If you want to play a game and have fun, do that. If you want to grind for money, get a real job.
They were obviously incorrect, since the systems even an idiot can use (elevators, A/C units, fans, cameras, ipods) are frequently by far the most popular. Maybe most people are just idiots ;)
Hard to use is not the same thing as powerful. Hard to use is simply hard to use.
Most of the best operating systems used by hundreds of millions of people a day are used with very little training at all. Were you trained to use the OS that operates your car? How about the software the powers your crosswalk? DVD player? Home telephone? Pacemaker? All these items have grown from extremely simple devices to incredibly complex devices with very little change in interface. The power has grown dramatically (anti-lock breaks, dynamic traction control, pressure sensing stop lights) while the interface has remained so simple as to be nearly intuitive.
An OS is not there for you to use - it is there to enable you to do something. Every minute you spend aware of the OS is a minute you could have spent doing something more useful to you (unless you deliberately tinker with the OS, like I do).
Linux is a great example. Not simple. Not easy. Not powerful. It's fun, and neat, and does cool stuff, but it constantly reminds you it is there. Vista is the same. Well designed operating systems are nearly invisible.
An operating system should be like a light switch... simple, effective, easy to use, and designed for everyone.
people who don't play as much as others.. a way to keep them in synch. What you need is a device that allows more casual gamers to stay somewhat on par with other players, as to character level. It's also a clever device to encourage less-active players to keep their accounts, making players want to come back and play some more after some time away from the game. Rest also adds more value to the subscription fee. In light of the controversy of game addiction, rest also gives players reason to cease play. Blizzard has also indirectly stated that World of Warcraft play should be taken in moderation according to loading screen tips.
First-- it would need a name..... rested bonus?
http://www.wowwiki.com/Rest
nah-- that's lame-- that could never work..... and it would certainly never be the same MMOPRG I know.. Could it?
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
WOW uses an SQL database. They could just make a buy using a plant, then find the user that sent the gold, find all the other users that that person sent gold, then find out who those users have purchased gold from in the past. Do that a few hundred times and you get your pattern for all the mules that transfer gold to buyers. Now do a search and find out who is sending, or dropping the gold to the mules, because the mules are worthless level 1 newbies usually.
Once you have the suppliers just cross reference credit card names and numbers to find all the accounts those users own, what IP addresses they are coming from, and for the heck of it cross reference those to accounts as well.
Granted you would have to have some algorithms to weed out false positives, but that wouldn't be difficult.
It wouldn't get rid of the gold farming, but it would drive the cost of gold sky high, and make it very difficult to do business.
I write reports to find suspicious behavior for debit and credit cards. It seems to me the problems are very much similar to one another.
Last time this topic arose, I saw Anda's Game . Quite an enjoyable read.
Right, time for the cluebat.
It's quite simply just the nature of the game. In a game without a set storyline, where the players make the story
The players don't set the story in any MMO. No action the player takes will affect the storyline or lore. The players are immersed observers, if you like.
the only real reason to play is to reach higher levels than everyone else or to get strong enough to kill that NPC.
No, the reason to play is to see more of the game, face more difficult challenges (tectically/strategically), and a sense of shared accomplishment from having done these things with your friends.
If you can reach the highest level in 10 hours of play the game ends at 10 hours of play. As the developer is interested in your monthly fee the game is structured to make reaching the next level take twice as much time as the last once your past the first 10 levels or so (you have to make roughly the first 10 easy or you lose the first time players). The only method to accomplish this difficulty is by making the game take longer. So to reach level 20 you have to spend 1024 (2^10) times as much time playing as level 10, to reach level 30 you have to play 1048576 (2^20) times more time than it took to reach level 10, etc.
What planet are you on? Seriously. You've obviously never played an MMO, nor can you even envisage what it's like to play one.
The biggest problem long term for the developers is to keep adding NPC's and Levels so that players that reach the top keep playing.
Wow, you prove the million monkey theory right. You actually did nail something.
This need to spend time playing to advance creates demand to avoid/reduce this time, either through character sales or sales of items that equate to time, such as gold in the game. Those players with money and little time will trade small sums of money to avoid large time commitments. That's human nature because as everyone knows, Time = Money.
You've skillfully avoided the point again. Having a vast amount of gold in an MMO does not give you a significant advantage. There is little money can actually buy, except vanity/prestige items (including faster mounts), and a few craftable equipment pieces. Most decent equipment has some sort of prerequisite on it (PVP rank, bind on pickup, etc), which money can't affect. The best craftable items are only equivalent to the best PvE/PvP obtainable items. A gold buyer will only have items that cost the most, not the ones that perform the best, nor the ones that are most sought after. A typical gold buyer is one who wants to play for 2 hours for the best equipment, rather than 20.
Not to say gold sellers don't wreck an MMO's economy, but that's due to inflation of prices of standard trade materials, not because someone is hogging all the gold.
I think what's often overlooked in these discussions around gold farming is the extent to which it's basically a fundamental flaw of game design. See also Is Gold Farming a Game Design problem?
"You'll never make money selling stuff in WoW - typically the materials for making anything are worth more than the items usually sell for."
I've found the opposite to be true, when it comes to the higher levels of professions.. i make a couple of items right now that cost me 3g for materials to make one that I can sell for 7-10g. some of these i sell upwards of 30-40 a day (if i can ever get enough materials :P)
You just have to find what sells, what the price point is, and how much markup you can get away with.. it took me a while to find the high profit margin items but now i have over5k of gold and haven't even hit 70 yet (that's with buying all of the lower level mounts and such).
There are several professions that are easily profitable at the higher end, BUT it also depends on your server, one server i used to play on sold wool cloth at 2-3g a stack, on my current it's as high as 8-10g for the same cloth.