Gold Farmers

Gold Farmers.
Every MMORPG that has some sort of “currency” in game has them. Gold farming is actually a legitimate business in some countries, usually China or Korea. At first thought, you might envy these individuals who get to play games all day. However, think a little bit about it. They grind all day doing the SAME thing constantly. They don’t play for fun. They can’t stop when they get bored or tired. The places they work at aren’t nice dorm rooms, or dens with plush chairs and refreshments or restrooms right around the corner.

Mentioning that makes my next musings seem… trivial and selfish.

Gold farmers (gold sellers, ISK sellers, spammers, etc) are found to be very annoying and disruptive to players. World of WarCraft has some of the worst. They implemented a “Report Spam” function in the chat window a while back. EVE has ISK sellers. ISK is the EVE currency (if you didn’t catch that right off). A main difference between gold sellers and ISK sellers is that the WoW GMs don’t always “kill” the spammer. They also have limited campaigns warning people to not purchase their products. EVE’s GMs actively hunt down the spammers and gleefully let all the players in that chat channel know when they take him down/ Additionally, EVE runs campaigns to actively discourage players from purchasing ISK, even to the point of running the little PR campaigns like those seen done by the governments during WWII.

Both games have made it “illegal” to purchase the gold/ISK from these sellers. The claim is that it disrupts the in-game economy. This is true to a point, until you realize that the farmers still made the gold in game, by doing what every legitimate player has to do. Most likely the biggest reason its illegal is because they are utilizing another’s work (in this case, either WoW or EVE itself) to make a profit.

Here is an article I had read some time ago.
--Eric
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/17/magazine/17lootfarmers-t.html