The Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer 553
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.'"
i look at it this way (Score:4, Insightful)
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
Military commissions (Score:3, Interesting)
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 h
Re:Military commissions (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Blame the game! (Score:5, Insightful)
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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 g
The disconnect is there because people want it. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Time is Money (Score:5, Informative)
Sony did a white paper on the Station Exchange economy [raphkoster.com] which noted that the largest sellers were 22-year-olds (who have plenty of time but not a lot of money) and the largest buyers were age 34. These older players have more money than time, and that fact drives the demand side of the virtual economy, creating a sustainable market for both power-leveling and game accounts.
Re:Military commissions (Score:5, Informative)
Always has been? You might learn a little bit about the history you misquote so freely.
Setting aside the use of influence and nepotism (which are fraternal - not identical, twins of outright purchase)...
Persons of wealth buying the positions (in the Church and in the Armed Services) isn't something that happened (or happens) in tribal societies - nor (in the Western) world does it happen today. (It was largely wiped out in the late 1800's to early 1900's.) It was rare in feudal Japan and virtually nonexistent in classical China. It was extremely rare in classical Greece and semi-common only in later period Rome. In fact in the Western world - the practice was only widespread from late medieval times to early modern times.
Or in short, no - it's not commonly the way of the world nor has it always been.
Re:Military commissions (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Military commissions (Score:4, Informative)
Actually it was not rare towards the end of the Tokugawa era for wealthy merchants to pay for Samurai to adopt them in order to gain that class status. (Actually to be fair, General Hideyoshi tried to get a descendant of the Shogun to adopt him even though he was older than the descendant so he could gain the official title for himself, but the descendant would not and he had to settle for a lesser title)
Although, by the end of the Tokugawa era, most Samurai had no true formal military training (and sometimes no swordship training either) and lived from hand outs from their feudal lord patron so were often more than happy to adopt anyone willing to foot the bill.
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Um lords were commanders and their sons became the lords/commanders.
Samurai was an aspect of lineage. Basically the whole thing was nepotistic and aristocratic, if you know people higher up (Through friends or family) they'll talk to you at parties, instruct you in the craft and want you as their backup.
If you were starting a company right now with a good idea you'd probably look to your friends or online aquaintences for employees rather than hiring someone who you may not get al
Re:Military commissions (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:there are 2 forms of acceptance (Score:4, Informative)
A cynic may ascribe the worst motivations to the actions of others, and may decry those actions -- but acceptance of them is antithetical to the cynical mind.
Sorry to get off on a tangent there, but as a proud cynic, I sometimes take it personally when people use the term to refer to a defeatist.
Re:there are 2 forms of acceptance (Score:5, Interesting)
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".
Re:there are 2 forms of acceptance (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:there are 2 forms of acceptance (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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No matter how you look at this, subscribers are paying money to avoid playing parts of the game. How much sense does that make?!?
Re:um (Score:4, Funny)
if a rich guy buys a +5 sword of icefarting in WoW, or whatever, who fucking cares
"Are there any Orcs around? Because my dagger is +10 against Orcs."
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Re:there are 2 forms of acceptance (Score:4, Insightful)
he's not talking about a game (Score:2)
in my parent post, i say as much: who cares if a rich guy buys into a game
but now read his comment again. he's not limiting is comments to a game, you're wrong. he's talking about accepting aristocracy in real life
Re:there are 2 forms of acceptance (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:i look at it this way (Score:5, Funny)
Re:i look at it this way (Score:5, Insightful)
Who, really, is getting hurt by gold-farming? I mean, we're talking about a game, after all. And it's not even a game with PRIZES. It's not even a game you can WIN. What could the gold farmers possibly be taking away from other players, besides time? Time which they are spending on a GAME that they aren't obligated to play.
The only way to win WoW (Score:5, Insightful)
Who is really being hurt by steroids in baseball? (Score:2)
But our culture hates cheaters, so we hate gold farmers.
Re:i look at it this way (Score:5, Insightful)
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Or in two words: small cocks.
Time is money friend. (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm curious though, do you wonder why the guy who takes his Ferrari to someone else to get it detailed bought it in the first place?
What about the person who has someone else do all of their pool maintenance?
For many gold farming is one aspect of a game they don't consider "fun" but other aspects are enjoyable enough that they are willing to part with $$$ so that when they log in they can focus on the things they like to do.
Re:Time is money friend. (Score:5, Funny)
No, because the person buying a Ferrari bought it to drive it, not clean it. Presumably if you pay to play a game, you're paying to play the game. Paying someone else to play a game for you is bordering on absurd. It would be like buying a Ferrari and paying someone else to dress up as you and drive it around town in your place.
What about the person who has someone else swim in their pool?
"Who's that swimming in your pool, Bob?"
"Oh, that's my pool boy. I don't have time to swim in it myself so I pay this Chinese guy to swim in it for $.30 an hour. Pretty cheap compared using my much more valuable time to do it."
"Gee, Bob, don't you think it is kind of silly to own a pool, not use it yourself *and* pay someone else to use it? I mean, shouldn't your pool boy be paying you for the privilege of swimmin in it?"
"Privilege? Swimming is a lot of work. My time is money. Swimming in that pool would actually be a loss of money above and beyond the cost of purchasing and maintaining it. It is much cheaper to pay my pool boy to do it."
"Then why'd you buy a pool then, Bob?"
"Because the pool looks good in my back yard and having someone swimming in it makes me seem more active to my neighbors. Did you notice that the Chinese guy kinda looks like me from a distance?"
"Oh."
Our friend Bob likes to sit around the pool and watch the pool boy swimming.
-matthew
Give this man a cigar! (Score:3, Interesting)
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 ex
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So, I stand by my original comment that the game seems badly designed.
Re:i look at it this way (Score:4, Funny)
For the most part, they use them to get something to show off their "e-peen".
If that's all it is, why not allow players to purchase a literal e-peen. For $20, your night elf has a conspicuous bulge in his/her pants.
Re:i look at it this way (Score:5, Insightful)
Who, really, is getting hurt by gold-farming? I mean, we're talking about a game, after all. And it's not even a game with PRIZES. It's not even a game you can WIN. What could the gold farmers possibly be taking away from other players, besides time? Time which they are spending on a GAME that they aren't obligated to play.
There is much more than meets the eye about the negative effects of gold farming.
In MMO games there is a lot of space shared by players. If player X is killing mobs in the same area as me, we'll have to share or fight for spawns, that's fine if we both use ingame tools. Now enter gold farmer with bots, insane knowledge of spawn patterns and times, and you won't find mobs to kill. In WoW for example, you can go around in zones and mine ore for your weapon that you want to craft as a blacksmith. Good luck, gold farmers are on ore veins the moment they appear. Gold farmers make it nearly impossible in many cases for legitimate players to collect items/resources/gold for themselves because gold farmers can (and do) monopolize entire regions of the game. People who played WoW can surely remember zones like Tyr's Hand being perma camped 24h a day by gold farmers.
Also, every time an exploit or bug is found, gold farmers exploit it massively and force the game company to bring down servers and fix them causing downtime for players. Not to mention you can kiss the game economy good bye. How many games have had their economy ruined because of gold farmers. Gold farmers abusing bugs/exploits not just flood the economy, they have no problems in griefing players (Final Fantasy Online) and monopolizing game content (WoW). Even if they get banned, they are back operating within hours. To them a ban from game is the cost of doing business, just like Microsoft and lawsuits against it.
And finally, in game currency can be used to gain advantage in PvP (buying gear, potions, consumables). PvP is competitive, maybe you don't care because it's a "game" but some people care because they want a leveled playing field. You know, having a game that's fair and fun
Gold farmers are a cancer to MMO games. Some people might not care, but these people negatively impact everyone's enjoyment of the game, be it because they destroy economies or hack or monopolize content. It's not healthy for games.
Re:i look at it this way (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:i look at it this way (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:i look at it this way (Score:5, Insightful)
I think of it this way: a rich guy buys a top-of-the-line $5000 Digital SLR camera, and then he takes fifteen snapshots of his beagle, and doesn't really scream when his silver-spoon daughter drops it down the country club's marble terrace staircase a couple months later. The guy was a boor when he showed off this camera to his friend, who busted his ass to get through photojournalism school with a $500 camera. The guy was a boor when he recounted the complete "horror" story of how the insurance company denied his claim for full replacement. But you know he'll buy another $5000 camera when that beagle has her pups.
How has this honestly changed the profession of photography? His friend probably felt uncomfortable with the rich man's effortless and pointless consumerism, but his friend wasn't actually denied other opportunities when it came right down to it.
The MMORPG is a smaller economy but it works the same way. The real issue is the design of that game, and whether it can withstand such tilted gamesmanship. If the gold farmers or the insta-knighthood characters are really clogging up the playground by camping at all the spawn points and inflating the price of dragon eyeballs, then I would point to the playground designers, not the farmers and not the insta-knights.
mod parent up (Score:2)
Re:i look at it this way (Score:4, Insightful)
The boor with the $5000 camera is in no way competing with the up-and-coming professional with his $500 camera. So sure - there's no impact to the profession. Moot point.
I agree to a large extent. Good game design goes a long way. However, ultimately you have to deal with the very nature of the game. At some point you have to allow for rewarding luck and (to a larger extent) time with some sort of gains. If you want to maintain a social structure... you have to allow for trading of some form of token. As soon as you do these two things, you'll have individuals looking for a short-cut and a market willing to supply them with one. Once that shortcut involves influences outside the game, then are you really playing the game any more? Or are you simply cheating?
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"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"
That's completely wrong.
What can lots of gold buy you in WoW?
1) an epic mount
2) two professions, which yeild 3~4 epic gadgets
That's it. Nothing else. Nada.
You c
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Gold-farming itself creaets inflation. Thus casual, and even not-so casual players, cant afford items they should be able to afford considering the time they spent online playing because of this inlfation. Thse people then considering buying from farmers and leading to even worse inflation.
Also. Gold farmers dont just farm gold. They also sell items. That messes with groups (ninja looters) and with the game economy.
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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.
Wow... those are SOME assumptions in your lead-in. I was firmly middle-class, not rich at all, when I bought plat for EverQuest. Why? Because I was playing with a guild which had demands on my time, and at the same time helping several friends get established in the game. It was the best way to trade a commodity that I did have (modest amounts of money for a hobby) for one that I did not have (time to further invest in the game). I spent about what I would have spent on any other hobby, I imagine. My frien
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yes (Score:2)
i really don't care that some rich kid thinks their expensive distraction is being hurt. as far as i am concerned, they are wasting their lives away in a fantasy game. really, i am completely uncompelled to care about how a fantasy game's
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What's bad about gold farming?
Gold farmers occupy areas, often en-masse, making it tricky for regular players to complete quests.
Gold farmers have to advertise and they do this by spamming in-game. That is arguably the most irritating aspect of their business. They take very intrusive approaches such as randomly inviting you to a group or filling your chat window with a wall of shite. With this in
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At least you learn how to sew
If its an assembly line system then they don't really learn how to sue. They learn how to repeat a single task for 12 hours a day.
and PRODUCE SOMETHING REAL.
*looks at google* God dammit, someone better tell them to close up shop since only making "REAL" items can ever make you successful.
What good can come of learning how to kill virtual deer?
You learn how to use a computer which is more useful in modern urban society. You likely learn about as much about sewing in a nike factory as you do about computers as a gold farmer. Possibly you also learn some things about social behavior and b
and... (Score:3, Insightful)
increase the spam 100%, decrease the game experience 100% for regular players, etc.
i am completely unmoved
why?
just one, just ONE guy who is FEEDING himself on a gold farming effort is a whole HELL of a lot more important to me than 100,000 rich kids leading idle pointless lives playing a stupid computer game
and you ARE rich, by ANY world standard if you have ANY time to play WoW for leisure
so frankly, i couldn't care one fucking tiny bit out of any of the
Cost of living? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Cost of living? (Score:4, Interesting)
A sad state of affairs (Score:5, Funny)
They've built a mom's basement in China where they can all do it better for half the price. Even geeks aren't immune from outsourcing.
If any of you have access to good prices for bulk tissue and lotion, I have a great idea for the next activity to outsource to China. Access to a tiled area with good drainage a must.
Internet commerce, but 90% goes to middlemen. (Score:5, Insightful)
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The workers in this sistuation do not have the contacts or capital necessary to get the required permits to run a business like this, let alone the capital for equipment and workspace. This is compounded by high unemployment in areas of China, so that workers are easily replaced.
It amuses me to no end (until I think of the hardships endured) that a nation
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Re:Internet commerce, but 90% goes to middlemen. (Score:5, Funny)
"This is Chang Lee. He helped bring this WoW gold to your local store. He works over 12 hours a day, part of which pays back the microloan he used to purchase the lvl 20 paladin he uses to harvest gold..."
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90% is a heck of a good deal for the originator compared to real physical goods examples in the world. Look at how much diamond miners in the Congo and Sudan are paid: they get not shot for digging up diamonds. Comparatively these Chinese guys, who work in an office and get company housing, are living like kings. I spent over a month in China last year and 30 RMB goes a long way; you can eat out on the local equivalent of
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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, othe
BF2142 (Score:2)
Ultimate simulation (Score:2)
In this respect, it's just like real life.
The thing I found most amazing was that after a 12-hour shift grinding, some of these guys played their own toons for fun.
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That proves it then, crack's got nothing on WoW!
Putting things in perspective (Score:5, Informative)
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Hm...
Could they maybe send some of that to the US, where it definitely costs more than 80 cents/gallon?
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100 gold coins for $1.25... (Score:2, Interesting)
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
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Re:100 gold coins for $1.25... (Score:5, Informative)
1g = 100silver = 10,000 copper
When you start. You start with copper coins.
Your mount at level 40 costs ~100g.
Your mount at level 60 costs ~600g.
Your mount at level 70 costs ~1000g.
Your fast mount at level 70 costs ~6000g.
6000g = 60,000,000 copper
The game is designed with a rudimentary economy that despite the unlimited gold from killing things is designed to eat up money for repairs and other equipment costs. It is easy to spend all your money on shiny objects.
Top end quests are worth 10-20g for completing.
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Right now the prices that are getting paid to suppliers are about $30-40(on a good day) for 1000g so it is more like $3. Sometimes it spikes higher. The real money comes from european gamers, where gold costs a lot more.
Of course, sales to game
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Yeah, 80 hour weeks in small offices for 35 cents an hour. Romantic.
I'll feel sorry for these Chinese people, but in the end I'll still gank them in game whenever and wherever I find them.
How valiant of you.
Sounds like a great deal for us Westerners... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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smoke as much as he wants (try that in the US!)
With the added advantage of now he doesn't have to worry too much about saving for retirement ;)
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And don't forget he get's a free WoW account.
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Yeah. I'm sure "extensive knowledge of epic drops and mote grinding" will go real big on the resume.
Very hard to imagine (Score:5, Insightful)
No problems here (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
The lesson here is an obvious one (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Living wage in China? (Score:4, Informative)
-Rick
"Living Wage" is bogus and must die (Score:4, Interesting)
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
Obligatory Hap Hap! (Score:3, Funny)
not as bad as it sounds? (Score:2)
Seriously, for $0.30/hour, you only have to work 1 hour per day to afford three meals of delicious ramen noodles. So with 1 hour of work, you have food and housing, and the other $3.30 you earn per day is free to be spent on hookers and blow. A good life.
Re:Wages misrepresented? (Score:5, Funny)
My two copper. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
If they wanted to make more (Score:2)
Oppertunity for pro-poor development (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
The 'web portals' exist already (Score:3, Interesting)
Inaccurate (Score:2, Insightful)
why are we making gameplay so laborious (Score:5, Insightful)
So it would seem (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
Another perspective (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Gold Farming is A-OK with me (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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 prot
Re:brought to you by ... (Score:4, Interesting)
getting a winrate better than 1.25/hour is trivial. you could do it playing 2 tables of