"Gold farming", for those that don't know, is the sweatshop business of this new century. It is the selling of virtual assets, usually virtual gold, in MMOs for real money. As an MMO developer, I know how pernicious it is: sellers are hard to track down, because they create disposable accounts faster than you ban them. Ban one, and they already have a lineup of other accounts ready to go. They spam chat channels, they spam players with the in-game mail system, they farm resources with a ruthless efficiency, which makes legitimate players angry.
And now Blizzard has won an injunction against one company, in what one hope is the first blow that kills the whole gold farming industry.
Peons4hire has been enjoined from selling gold, from mentioning World of Warcraft, from looking sideways at Blizzard employees, and so on. As gold farming has boomed since WoW came on the scene and attracted 10 million players to the game, it has been an unwelcome sign of the worst of the internet, in a place where one would hope for escape from things like advertising and spam. You should be dealing with elves and dwarves and such, not a Chinese bot-avatar standing in the middle of town continuously advertising a website.
I hope this makes further attempts at cracking down on this industry easier, and that we can finally see the last of it.
Comments (5)
Oh brother, Blizzard would be better served fixing the bugs in their games, preventing mass mailing and preventing individuals that cause problems from creating accounts rather than chasing after bad-old capitalists that aren't doing any harm to them or their games.
Posted by Chris | February 7, 2008 12:16 PM
Posted on February 7, 2008 12:16
That is great news Harry. I am an EVE Online (a space MMO game) player. Like all of the MMO's, Eve has its share of the bots and macro-miners. Thankfully eBay cracked down to eliminate some of the gold seller's business opportunities to sell in-game MMO gold. This ruling you describe will hopefully be the last straw to kill this industry.
Posted by Walter McCannon | February 7, 2008 2:49 PM
Posted on February 7, 2008 14:49
"which makes legitimate players angry."?
From my knowledge of free-market capitalism, there must be a pretty large segment of "legitimate players" that use and enjoy goldseller's services, or the industry wouldn't be thriving as it is now.
How can you praise one more limitation of freedom, one more market destroying government regulation? This is all based on the expanding un-intuitive notion of 'intellectual property' that does nothing but stagnate economic progress.
congratulations judge, one step backward for mankind...
Posted by Peter Wright | February 7, 2008 3:23 PM
Posted on February 7, 2008 15:23
Chris, I would guess that the lawyers in charge of pursuing this case are in no way detracting from the developer efforts to fix bugs. Those sorts of "they need to get their priorities straight" comments that one sees absolutely everywhere really don't put your argument in a good light.
Peter, it's hard to know where to begin, in addressing your comment. Clearly you commune with our Austrian economic friends. However, there are few free market principles that apply in this situation.
It's a managed world, owned by a company. You sign a contract to enter, and that contract forbids this economic behavior very explicitly. If you're a true free marketer, then honoring contracts would rightly be a primary virtue for you.
There are the practical issues involved with farming resources in-game that infuriates non-gold-buying players, to in-game spam (that is an incredibly difficult problem to eradicate systematically: just look at how hard it is to deal with email spam in regular mail). Gold selling dramatically affects auction house prices for resources, at the very least, so right off the bat, legitimate players are seeing incredibly high prices for items that are driven by folks buying gold. That's simplky one issue among many, where legitimate players have their game experience negatively impacted by gold farmers: I can come up with many others.
In other words, you don't understand all the issues involved, all the problems created, and are blindly applying a religious view of free markets without understanding the environment you're dealing with.
Posted by Harry | February 8, 2008 3:27 PM
Posted on February 8, 2008 15:27
Wow, you're calling us blind? As someone who works in a technical field, I assure you that resources are always an issue when it comes to development and support. I stopped playing WOW about a year ago because it became boring for me. Blizzard chooses to concentrate their resources in the court room to chase after 'an incredibly difficult problem to eradicate systematically' rather than make the game more interesting. Don't get me wrong, Blizzard's creative people have come up with some terrific ideas, but when their managers and lawyers take over they start to look really dumb. It's a Dilbert world.
Posted by Chris | February 28, 2008 12:37 PM
Posted on February 28, 2008 12:37