Going for gold | TheNewsTribune.com | Tacoma, WA

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Going for gold
Is it fair for online gamers to pay big bucks to get ahead, or should they earn their wares through time and talent?
BILL HUTCHENS; The News Tribune
Published: February 12th, 2006 02:30 AM
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If you’re not a big fan of the whole “reap what you sow” thing, maybe goldfarming is for you.
Instead of earning wages through hard work and perseverance, you might be able to earn a decent living – or at least some extra spending money – by harvesting nothing more than “a bunch of ones and zeroes,” as longtime online gamer Dan Brunton puts it.
Goldfarming – playing computer games just to earn virtual currency and then sell it for real-world dollars – is part of a thriving secondary market in the gaming world. It’s getting something for nothing, trading game goods and gold for real money. And though the practice has been going on for a few years, the market’s worth may be poised to eclipse that of the primary game publishing market.
Some South Sound gamers are looking on with equal parts amazement and dismay.
“In theory … your game gear should be the result of your work and not your pocketbook,” said Brunton, a Lakewood resident and a systems integration analyst for Intel. He’s not a big fan
of gamers who support the goldfarming market by buying their game currency at Web sites such as eBay andIGE.com and then using their virtual wealth to outfit their game characters with high-level weapons and armor.
“The real-world issues of the haves and the have-nots are creeping into game worlds,” Brunton said.
Brunton’s game of choice these days is World of WarCraft, a “massively multiplayer online role-playing game,” or MMORPG. He’s not alone. WoW boasts more than 5 million subscribers. And a growing number of gamers are wandering away from the practice of earning gold, the game’s currency, in favor of buying it from farmers – those who do nothing but earn gold.
Kill some monsters, earn some gold. Finish some quests, earn some gold. Sell some weapons and armor you found, earn some gold. Farmers play for days on end, stockpile gold and put it up for sale online.
The transaction is simple. A recent check showed more than 200 auctions of WoW gold on eBay. Use a credit card or Internet payment service to order your gold, and a farmer will either meet you in the game or use the game’s mail system to transfer gold from his or her character to yours. Some players are paying $300 or more for a few thousand pieces of virtual gold that can be spent inside the game on new equipment for their characters.
“Having epic gear is a reward or a badge to say I’ve been through all these adventures,” Brunton said. “It cheapens the experience when people just buy their gold and then buy their gear.”
There’s a stigma attached to both the practice of buying gold and farming it, he said. On his server, suspected farmers and buyers are ostracized.
Eric Sayer, 16, of Auburn, and Joe Kulp, 20, of Lakewood, play WoW as often as possible in the Gamerz Hub area of the Thrill Zone entertainment center in Fircrest. They said goldfarmers have thrown off the game’s economy more than once on their WoW server. An in-game auction house for players who just want to trade in virtual goods is sometimes flooded with high-priced items sold by farmers. That sometimes makes nonfarmers jack up their own prices. Eventually, players who are unable or unwilling to spend their real money on virtual gold are priced out of the market.
Still, Sayer and Kulp are among a growing number of gamers who have tentatively accepted goldfarming and will readily admit to buying their gold.
“I’ve probably bought about 3,000 gold all together,” Kulp said, adding that he has purchased it a little bit at a time. “I just hate being poor. And there’s always something I want to buy.”
Many players on their server purchase gold, they said.
Both gamers have reached the top level for their characters and are working on the game’s final dungeons. They say they want to focus on those adventures without worrying about how they’ll pay for supplies and armor repairs for their characters. Kulp has even used “power leveling” services. He has paid someone to play a second character for him, get the character to the highest level and have it outfitted with top-notch gear.
So who is accumulating, or farming, all this game gold?
A call to the good doctor earned some answers.
Kun “Ken” Hu is Dr. Hu ofDr-Hu.com, a Web site that facilitates the trading of virtual gold and offers some of that power leveling for players who are too busy to play all day. Based in Fremont, Calif., Hu said he is a “middle man,” a broker who connects North American gamers with gold farmed in Asia.
“In China, there’s lots of farmers,” Hu said during a recent phone call. “They have, like, small studios with one or three people. But some have maybe 100 computers and players and play World of WarCraft 24/7.”
Some game companies approve of farming and some don’t, he said. Blizzard, the creator of WoW, does not. But it’s not illegal, so Hu keeps matching gamers with farmers for business.
“They don’t allow people to sell the gold,” Hu said. “It’s … a gray zone. There’s no law to say it’s right or not right.”
Because gamers know that many farmers work in organized groups in Asia, a side effect to the farming business has been a hesitancy on the part of North American players to group with Asian players. On Brunton’s server, many players, Asian or not, who simply don’t speak fluent English get lumped into the farmer category. Gamers often make lists of the character names of suspected farmers and post them online. In the game, those players sometimes have trouble finding groups to join for adventures.
“I have seen an obvious bias against people who are not English-speaking,” Brunton said.
Farming is going to take place one way or another, said Heather Gore of Internet Gaming Entertainment, the world’s largest marketplace provider for farmers and power levelers.
Gamers can go throughIGE.com to buy and sell their virtual gold, gear, characters and services.
“There needs to be a safe and secure, well-lit place to perform these transactions,” Gore said.
IGE has headquarters in Los Angeles and offices in Hong Kong, Shanghai and London. They don’t employ farmers; they just provide the marketplace. But they don’t condone what Gore calls “disruptive farming,” practices that negatively affect a game’s economy. Anyone who disrupts game play is removed from the IGE marketplace.
While Blizzard is trying to ban farming, having recently canceled 18,000 accounts of suspected WoW farmers, Sony Online Entertainment has taken the opposite approach. The publisher of popular MMORPGs EverQuest, EverQuest II and Star Wars Galaxies, Sony brought farming into the fold and created its own marketplace for it. At the online Station Exchange, players can buy and sell their virtual goods with Sony’s blessing.
“We feel that really validates our business,” Gore said.
Emotions run high on both sides of the issue, she said. Some gamers appreciate the freedom of being able to focus on improving their characters without worrying about how much new weapons and armor might cost. Other players see it as cheating or giving an unfair advantage to those who can afford to spend real money on “a bunch of ones and zeroes,” as Brunton of Lakewood puts it.
Referring to a combination of internal research and a recent Nielsen study commissioned by IGE, Gore said goldfarming is becoming an accepted practice in North America. Only about 20 percent of gamers disapprove, she said, but they make up a “vocal minority.”
“South Korean and Chinese markets are so far ahead of us because they don’t see this as a debate,” she said. “They don’t see it as a problem.”
IGE is a privately held company. Following common practice, Gore did not give any information about company profits. But she did say the secondary gaming market could be worth $9 billion to $10 billion annually by 2009, when it likely will surpass the game-publishing market.
Buying your gold and then outfitting your character with high-end weapons and armor might be fine for some players, but Brunton said it takes more than that to get the most out of your chosen MMORPG.
“Just having the best gear in the game doesn’t necessarily make you a good player,” he said. “You still have to have some talent.”
goldfarming 101
Step 1: Play a “massively multiplayer” online game on your computer. The most popular these days is World of WarCraft, a role-playing game, or “MMORPG.” In WoW, hundreds of players can log in to the same server, or “realm,” for simultaneous adventuring. There are hundreds of WoW realms all over the world, and more than 5 million people pay monthly subscriptions to play the game.
Step 2: Slay some enemies (also called “mobs”). When you do, you can loot their corpses for items you can later sell to a computer-controlled merchant. In WoW, if you slay a bear, for instance, click on its corpse and you might see a column of icons representing teeth, fur, meat, claws, etc. Click the icons to add them to your inventory. Some enemies yield, or “drop,” weapons and armor as well as copper, silver or gold coins.
Step 3: In WoW, players can carry as many as five backpacks, each with more than a dozen “slots,” or spots for loot icons. When your packs are full, head to a town or city and find a computer-controlled merchant.
Step 4: Click on the merchant and then click on your backpacks to open them. Click on the icons in your backpack to sell them to the vendor, who will give you coins.
Step 5: Slay, loot and sell about a million times.
Step 6: While you’re out slaying enemies, keep an eye out for rare items. These can be weapons, armor, trinkets or even crafting patterns that other players might want. You can tell how valuable an item is by looking at the color of its name. Green items are “uncommon,” blue items are “rare,” and purple items are “epic.” In most parts of the virtual world, epic items don’t drop very often.
Step 7: If you get some of these green, blue or purple drops, put them up for sale for gold on the in-game auction house. Sometimes epic items are sold for real money in online marketplaces such as eBay orIGE.com.
Step 8: When you have collected about 1,000 pieces of gold (that can take many days of nonstop killing, looting and selling), put it up for sale on eBay,IGE.com or some other online marketplace.
Step 9: Here’s how the sale goes on eBay, for example: Someone who plays in the same realm as you wants to buy your 1,000 pieces of gold. He has a winning bid of $75, and the cash moves from their credit card to your account. You arrange to meet him in the game and give him your gold. WoW also has an in-game mail system for sending notes, gold and items to other players.
Step 10: Repeat this process 100,000 times. Or, as some have done, open a factory in China, and pay 100 people a few U.S. dollars per month to do it for you. GLOSSARY
Blizzard: The game development studio that makes World of WarCraft (WoW)
Bot: Short for “farmbot,” a playable game character programmed to automatically slay enemies and loot their corpses. Creating bots usually involves hacking, a practice most game companies do not endorse.
Drop: Noun: A single piece of loot. Verb: To appear, as sellable items do, in a loot window when a player clicks on the corpse of a slain enemy.
Goldfarmer: Or “farmer,” one who plays a MMORPG solely for the purpose of harvesting and selling loot, accumulating gold and then selling that virtual gold for real money in online marketplaces such as eBay orIGE.com.
Loot: Noun: The items that drop from slain enemies. These can be common items such as pelts or cloth to more valuable items such as armor or weapons. Verb: To take dropped items.
Loot window: The window that pops up when a player clicks on a slain enemy. The loot window displays the items (as icons) that can be looted from an enemy’s corpse. Looted items are added to a player’s personal inventory.
MMOG: Massively multiplayer online game, a game played simultaneously by hundreds or thousands of players
MMORPG: Massively multiplayer online role-playing game, a MMOG that focuses more on fantasy role-playing and adventuring than, say, World War II shooting action or the re-creation of battles from ancient history.
Mobs: Computer controlled enemies. In WoW, mobs are a mix of common animals, fantasy creatures and monsters and human or humanoid foes.
Ninja: A player who, when grouped with other players, steals loot from the corpses of cooperatively slain enemies instead of waiting to divide it fairly.
Ninja Farmer: A player who, when grouped with other players, steals loot with the intent to sell it.
Thottbot: A Web site that categorizes and cross-references the loot dropped by WoW enemies. Thottbot also gives rough estimates (percentages) as to the chance that particular items might drop from particular mobs.
Vivendi Universal: The publisher of WoW
WoW: World of WarCraft, the current top MMORPG with more than 5 million players worldwide
Bill Hutchens: 253-597-8460
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