The Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer (NYTimes article)

torrent495 · 06/17/07, 2:35 PM

Uh, I'm not sure if the mods are going to think this thread is appropriate or not, but I came across this very interesting New York Times Magazine article on gold farming in wow, just published this sunday. I did a search for old threads on gold farming, but none of them quite seemed to fit, so I'm making this new thread. The article comes from the point of view of a gold farmer living in China, and as a general interest article it doesn't touch on any points we as players aren't familiar with. However, it's a sort of unique perspective on the issue, and I think the article has a fairly good discussion of the implications of gold farming for future MMOs.

The article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/17/ma...gewanted=print

Some quotes:

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. It is estimated that there are thousands of businesses like it all over China, neither owned nor operated by the game companies from which they make their money. Collectively they employ an estimated 100,000 workers, who produce the bulk of all the goods in what has become a $1.8 billion worldwide trade in virtual items. The polite name for these operations is youxi gongzuoshi, or gaming workshops, but to gamers throughout the world, they are better known as gold farms. While the Internet has produced some strange new job descriptions over the years, it is hard to think of any more surreal than that of the Chinese gold farmer.

In 2001, Edward Castronova, an economist at the University of Indiana and at the time an EverQuest player, published a paper in which he documented the rate at which his fellow players accumulated virtual goods, then used the current R.M.T. prices of those goods to calculate the total annual wealth generated by all that in-game activity. The figure he arrived at, $135 million, was roughly 25 times the size of EverQuest’s R.M.T. market at the time. Updated and more broadly applied, Castronova’s results suggest an aggregate gross domestic product for today’s virtual economies of anywhere from $7 billion to $12 billion, a range that puts the economic output of the online gamer population in the company of Bolivia’s, Albania’s and Nepal’s.

Not quite the big time, no, but the implications are bigger, perhaps, than the numbers themselves. Castronova’s estimate of EverQuest’s G.D.P. showed that online games — even when there is no exchange of actual money — can produce actual wealth. And in doing so Castronova also showed that something curious has happened to the classic economic distinction between play and production: in certain corners of the world, it has melted away. Play has begun to do real work.

Of course, nobody expected the farmers’ equally rule-breaking customers to be punished too. Among players, the R.M.T. debate may revolve around questions of fairness, but among game companies, the only question seems to be what is good for business. Cracking down on R.M.T. buyers makes poorer marketing sense than cracking down on sellers, in much the same way that cracking down on illegal drug suppliers is a better political move than cracking down on users. (Only a few companies have found a way to make R.M.T. part of their business model. Sony Online Entertainment, which publishes EverQuest, has started earning respectable revenues from an experimental in-game auction system that charges players a small transaction fee for real-money trades.) As Mark Jacobs, vice president at Electronic Arts and creator of the classic M.M.O. Dark Age of Camelot, put it: “Are you going to get more sympathy from busting 50,000 Chinese farmers or from busting 10,000 Americans that are buying? It’s not a racial thing at all. If you bust the buyers, you’re busting the guys who are paying to play your game, who you want to keep as customers and who will then go on the forums and say really nasty things about your company and your game.”

For a long time the Donghua bosses, Fei and Bao (known even to employees as Little Bai and Brother Bao), could do no more than nurse their envy of the raiding guilds’ access to the end game. But Fan’s prowess pointed to another way of looking at it: raiding guilds weren’t the competition, they realized; they were the solution. Donghua would put together a team of 40 employees. They would train the team in all the hardest dungeons. And then, for a few hundred dollars, the team would escort any customer into the dungeon of his or her choice. And when the customer’s longed-for item dropped, the team would stand aside and let the customer take it, no questions asked. Thus would the supposedly unmarketable end-game treasures find their way into the R.M.T. market. And thus would gold farming, of a sort, find its way at last into the end game.

Then Brother Bao and Little Bai put their team together in April of last year, Min Qinghai, a veteran Donghua employee at the time, was among the first to make the roster.

“Before I joined the raiding team, I’d never worked together with so many people,” Min told me. They were 40 young men in three adjoining office spaces, and it was chaotic at first. Two or three supervisors moved among them, calling out orders like generals. A dungeon raid is always a puzzle: figuring out which tactics to use to kill each boss is the main challenge; doing so while coordinating 40 players can be dizzying. But members of the team raided just as diligently as they had power-leveled: 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, making their way through the complexities of a different dungeon every day.

...

“Working together, playing together, it felt nice,” Min said. “Very . . . shuang.” The word means “open, clear, exhilarating.” “You would go in, knowing that you were fighting the bosses that all the guilds in the world dream of fighting; there was a sense of achievement.”

The end arrived without warning. One day word came down from the bosses that the 40-man raids were suspended indefinitely for lack of customers. In the meantime, team members would go back to gold farming, gathering loot in five-man dungeons that once might have thrilled Min but now presented no challenge whatsoever. “We no longer went to fight the big boss monsters,” Min said. “We were ordered to stay in one place doing the same thing again and again. Everyday I was looking at the same thing. I could not stand it.”

Min quit and took the farming job he works at still. The new job, with its rote Timbermaw whacking, could hardly be less exciting. But it is more relaxed than Donghua was, less wearying — “Working 12 hours there was like working 24 here” — and he couldn’t have stayed on in any case, surrounded by reminders of the broken promise of tanking for what might have been the greatest guild on Earth.

• Celenia · 06/17/07, 3:36 PM

Haha, wow, the raid farming idea would have been crazy. I could see it being outrageously profitable if they got it to work, but it would also be really easy to discover and ban. I bet there would be a lot of people willing to pay their way through set armor and the flashiest weapons.

(also, I really hope that we can discuss the article without the usual gold farming bickering)

Kyth · 06/17/07, 3:39 PM

Originally Posted by Celenia

Haha, wow, the raid farming idea would have been crazy. I could see it being outrageously profitable if they got it to work, but it would also be really easy to discover and ban.

Why do you think it would be worthy of a ban? What's the difference to paying someone gold in country A versus paying someone gold in country B, or someone with real-life profession X (lawyer) versus profession Y (gold farmer)? Plenty of guilds did (and still do) sell spots in raids for gear.

I'm not surprised the market was too poor for the time investment required, however.

Tee · 06/17/07, 3:49 PM

Originally Posted by Kyth

Why do you think it would be worthy of a ban? What's the difference to paying someone gold in country A versus paying someone gold in country B, or someone with real-life profession X (lawyer) versus profession Y (gold farmer)? Plenty of guilds did (and still do) sell spots in raids for gear.

I'm not surprised the market was too poor for the time investment required, however.

I think the idea was that the guild would be selling the raid spot for real money. I've seen plenty of raid guilds sell raid spots for gold but I've never seen them sell it for straight-up cash. I think that would be worthy of a ban no matter what country they lived in.

♦ Abradix · 06/17/07, 4:00 PM

Selling a spot for real life gold and selling a spot for in-game gold are hardly different. Afterall, the reason to get in-game gold is to resell it as real life gold. I reckon their problem was that if you had unlucky drops, you spent 30*4 = 120 manhours on making zero cash. The idea is quite brilliant though, because no matter how you put it, a guild that would be raiding 12 hours a day every single day is bound to make nice progress, and thus get alot of high end loot that can be sold for high prices. It's obviously not economically viable though.

Emeraude · 06/17/07, 4:05 PM

Distracted from his post for a moment, Min returned to find his hunter-class character at the brink of death, the scene before him a flurry of computer-animated weapon blows. The record was clear: the monsters hadn’t acted alone. In the middle of the fight another player happened by, sneaked up on Min and brought him down. Min leaned back and stretched, then set about the tedious business of resurrecting his character, a drawn-out sequence of operations that can put a player out of action for as long as 10 minutes. In farms with daily production quotas, too much time spent dead instead of farming gold can put the worker’s job at risk.

That almost makes me feel guilty....almost, but it doesn't. ^_^

Keline · 06/17/07, 4:05 PM

Says Blizzard sued IGE, so peons4hire is a subset of IGE?

Quigon · 06/17/07, 4:13 PM

This reminded me of this story I read a while ago about duping in Everquest 2. I know it is not on topic, but it is really a fascinating read.

http://plaguelands.com/?page_id=172

These guys earned a ton of money duping in Everquest 2.

That’s when the money started pouring in. Rediculous money. Money that made me so scared I went and consulted with a lawyer and an accountant. Needless to say, neither of them had a clue as to what the hell we were talking about. Try telling your accountant you’re making money by selling pieces of gold in a video game. You’ll get a good 20 seconds of them just straring at you and blinking. Throw the words “swords” and “dragons” into the conversation, with a thick and fake english accent, just for giggles. Bonus points if you can say “WE RESCUED THE MAIDEN FROM THE BALDUVIAN ORC MASTER FOR THE WIN,” with a straight face.

kraj · 06/17/07, 4:15 PM

Honestly I can't see how they could stop it from happening unless they actually went through the service and found what raid group they got put in.

Guilds do this already with selling gear and vortexes and there's actually trackable gold passed around, but it sounds like there's no gold transfer with the raid groups--making it that much harder to stop.

• Celenia · 06/17/07, 4:31 PM

Originally Posted by Tee

I think the idea was that the guild would be selling the raid spot for real money. I've seen plenty of raid guilds sell raid spots for gold but I've never seen them sell it for straight-up cash. I think that would be worthy of a ban no matter what country they lived in.

Yeah, that's the type of activity I was thinking of. Imagine charging someone, say, $50 for a spot in an MC raid and in return they get whatever set pieces drop for their class. It seems so bizarre and almost funny because I think a lot of us view raiding as a form of personal and group prestiege, and putting a dollar amount on it is just strange.

If it ever did go into practice, I imagine that it wouldn't be very difficult to see a group of 24 or 39 people, all logged on from the same physical location, probably not talking to each other in the language the server uses, and dragging along a couple of people from a different guild who just happen to get any loot they can use. At least when you see some drone out in Tyr's Hand the rule-enforcers may give them the benefit of the doubt because they could theoretically be somebody with a high tolerance for tedium.

• Maestroquark · 06/17/07, 4:37 PM

Originally Posted by Keline

Says Blizzard sued IGE, so peons4hire is a subset of IGE?

No, there's a class action suit against IGE by players. Blizzard is not involved in that one.

Donjo · 06/17/07, 4:42 PM

This was the best line :p

A big, silent lug named Mao sat mesmerized by a very pink-and-purple Japanese schoolgirls’ game, in which doe-eyed characters square off in dancing contests with other online players. But the rest had chosen, to a man, to log into their personal World of Warcraft accounts and spend these precious free hours right back where they had spent every other hour of the day: in Azeroth.

It doesn't surprise me that the the selling of raid spots never took off. Since the practice is already done by a lot of the top guilds on each server (but for gold). Many people find it easier to just buy the 500 extra gold they need on top of the 600 they already have to get [Phat Lewts] from a well respected guild than to hand over their account to a bunch of farmers with no reputation and hope for loots.

Snowcrasher · 06/17/07, 4:49 PM

Originally Posted by Celenia

Yeah, that's the type of activity I was thinking of. Imagine charging someone, say, $50 for a spot in an MC raid and in return they get whatever set pieces drop for their class. It seems so bizarre and almost funny because I think a lot of us view raiding as a form of personal and group prestiege, and putting a dollar amount on it is just strange.

But there was no reason for them to sell raid spots/items for real money since they already have a mechanism to offload gold for real money.

They could have planned to sell raid items/spots for in-game gold. Once they discovered that the gold acquisition rate was inferior to those 40 players solo-farming gold the plan dies.

• Celenia · 06/17/07, 5:02 PM

Originally Posted by Snowcrasher

They could have planned to sell raid items/spots for in-game gold. Once they discovered that the gold acquisition rate was inferior to those 40 players solo-farming gold the plan dies.

Yeah, that's probably what they concluded. It's still funny to think about, though. Another aspect of paying to raid that could have cropped up if it worked is that it would be an alternate way to experience all the raid content. Imagine if there was a group of 24 players out there who would take you on a Black Temple raid, start-to-finish, and show you all the fights and events. Or how about if they ran you through SSC and The Eye to get you attuned for Hyjal? I bet you could even sell a slot on an uberguild's raiding roster. Clearly there are lines that most people don't want to cross, but it's a fun exercise to try and figure out where those lines are and the reactions to people who cross it.

Wensleydale · 06/17/07, 7:21 PM

Originally Posted by Snowcrasher

But there was no reason for them to sell raid spots/items for real money since they already have a mechanism to offload gold for real money.

They could have planned to sell raid items/spots for in-game gold. Once they discovered that the gold acquisition rate was inferior to those 40 players solo-farming gold the plan dies.

Well, the article estimates that the workshops earn $3 for every 100 gold farmed. So an in-game transfer of 500g is worth $15 to the workshop but $100 to the person paying the gold if it costs $20 per 100g on WeSellGoldLOL.com (presumably most people who would pay $$ for raid drops are also buying gold). The real benefit of selling raid spots is that you aren't dependent on the middlemen to make your product known to players on the server: a 40-person farming shop can't get a significant Web presence with which to advertise, but a farmer guild with good raid progress doesn't need any additional advertising: they can just stand in Shattrath with some nice epics. Once they've made raiding guilds on a few servers, they can take two paying customers every night and make $200 perhaps in 3-4 hours. That's better than 75-100 man-hours at 75 cents an hour, although overall it may be worse due to the time invested in gearing up, learning the encounters, farming for consumables, and playing well enough to win with a raid below full strength.

mutagen · 06/17/07, 9:28 PM

Originally Posted by Celenia

Another aspect of paying to raid that could have cropped up if it worked is that it would be an alternate way to experience all the raid content. Imagine if there was a group of 24 players out there who would take you on a Black Temple raid, start-to-finish, and show you all the fights and events.

Yes, this would have been much more tempting to me than buying raid epics. Guided tour of the Naxx fights I didn't see!

DarKNecross · 06/18/07, 2:17 AM

I think it'd be pretty interesting, not from an economical point of view, but rather a raiding one. You wake up and for 12 hours you and 24 people around you are focused on nothing other than progression. I wonder how far and how coordinated you could actually get.

moowalk · 06/18/07, 2:40 AM

Originally Posted by torrent495

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.

He's only making 25g an hour?

Mizerok · 06/18/07, 2:44 AM

Originally Posted by DarKNecross

I think it'd be pretty interesting, not from an economical point of view, but rather a raiding one. You wake up and for 12 hours you and 24 people around you are focused on nothing other than progression. I wonder how far and how coordinated you could actually get.

Example: Nihilum

Tipme · 06/18/07, 2:49 AM

Originally Posted by moowalk

He's only making 25g an hour?

I don't think these farmers do daily quests. They just grind, Tyr's Hand style.

In fact, I think the new thing is Hunters farming Thousand needles. If you /who thousand needles on your server, how many level 40ish Hunters show up?

Mizerok · 06/18/07, 2:53 AM

Originally Posted by Tipme

I don't think these farmers do daily quests. They just grind, Tyr's Hand style.

In fact, I think the new thing is Hunters farming Thousand needles. If you /who thousand needles on your server, how many level 40ish Hunters show up?

4, but they are 35-40ish

Copernicus · 06/18/07, 3:56 AM

Originally Posted by Tipme

I don't think these farmers do daily quests. They just grind, Tyr's Hand style.

In fact, I think the new thing is Hunters farming Thousand needles. If you /who thousand needles on your server, how many level 40ish Hunters show up?

Farming accounts are often banned. A level 70 character can clear a ton of gold/hour, but there's the cost of having the account banned when Blizzard does its purges.

Touf · 06/18/07, 4:39 AM

Originally Posted by Tipme

I don't think these farmers do daily quests. They just grind, Tyr's Hand style.

In fact, I think the new thing is Hunters farming Thousand needles. If you /who thousand needles on your server, how many level 40ish Hunters show up?

Whoa, you're right. 2-3 of each class, 15 hunters.

Starbucks · 06/18/07, 5:35 AM

Generally they seem to progress as they level to different areas:

- Thousand Needles
- Hinterlands Turtles
- Azshara Blood Elves

Then by that point they go to whichever level 60 area they intended to go to.

Schneeb · 06/18/07, 5:35 AM

The little video is really interesting, the computer room was particularly interesting. Some of them seemed eager and keen like a scene from a LAN party, others seemed to be rather less enthusiastic like what you would expect from a 'slave trade' worker.