Posts with tag GoldFarmer

You may recall Julian Dibbell's recent piece in the New York Times where he traveled to China and visited some World of Warcraft gold farming operations -- giving us a good look at life on the other side. However, just as interesting as his words is his recent publication of pictures from the trip on Flickr. If you take the old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words, then this gallery has quite a bit more to say than the original article.

[via Game Girl Advance]

Mowing lawns is so passé, delivering newspapers is totally last year. These days kids have found a new way to make money: selling WoW characters on eBay.

But how, might you ask, can they get around the fact that this is clearly against the TOS? Evidently they are posting disclaimers on their auctions, letting bidders know that they aren't selling the characters (which are the intellectual property of Blizzard,) but are instead selling the time it took to level that character.

In a CNBC segment on the topic, one kid mentioned that he gets around $400 for a level 70 character. He puts his profits right back into the business as any bright entrepreneur would, reinvesting in characters he will then level up again to sell to – you guessed it – Chinese gold farmers. Now, as much as I like the idea of news we have been writing on for weeks getting mainstream coverage, I have to wonder if this disclaimer business isn't just a loophole to get past Blizzard. What do you think? Is it breaking the TOS to sell the characters even with a disclaimer, or is this just a novel workaround enabling kids to make a profit off their play time?

[via Jane Wells]

Frybread over at Notaddicted yesterday posted about a chat that he had with the owner of an American gold botting company. Evidently the massive gold farming bans that went through on Monday hit his company especially hard. First of all it's interesting to note that there are such companies in the US as well, so China doesn't have complete monopoly on the illegal gold selling market. So what is it like inside a botting business?

Well, the anonymous business owner runs an office with about 150 computers. It sounds like a lot for a guy who runs his business using bots, but he explains that all tells need to be made by actual people since they are monitored constantly. When asked how many accounts he lost in the ban sweep on Monday, he says 100. All of his characters were between levels 40 and 70, which answers a lot of questions I've been having about all those people I have been competing with over primals.

The question came up, why do it if you risk losing your business? The reply was clear and without hesitation: I'd rather deal with the risks then [sic] work a normal office job. This is now the third time I have read an interview enlightening the reader to the plight of the poor goldfarmer just trying to make a living at the game he loves. But if you love the game that much, why do you abuse its rules and harm the player base to make a profit? Sure he lost 100 accounts, but he'll have those back in a month, and will be out skewing economies once again.

[via Notaddicted]

No, this isn't something Blizzard is telling us -- they're still out there fighting with the issue of people buying and selling gold. However, Jeffrey Steefel, executive producer of Lord of the Rings Online, who seems to think that in the future, how MMO's handle the secondary market of gold, item, and character sales is going to have to change. In an interview with Eurogamer, he says:

But, we all know that something will happen in the next two to five years to business models in general, so we're paying attention to what's going on [with the secondary market]; watching what's going on with Sony Station whose servers support and manage this.

Does Steefel have a point? In the long run, is the only way to fight the secondary market to legalize it and integrate it with our games? But even if you look at Everquest II, where Sony provides an official method for selling gold, items, and characters for real cash, there's still a secondary market. And I've got to say, if Sony's method doesn't stop secondary market gold sales, I've got to wonder if any method of legitimizing the trade will. And while we wait to see what Steefel decides to do with Lord of the Rings Online, we can watch Blizzard approach the problem in their own way -- in the courts.

[Via Joystiq]

In response to Blizzard's upcoming spam prevention in 2.10, there has been tons of speculation by forum-goers at whether or not the methods being implemented will really work or not.

According to Drysc, a Blizzard CM:

• Players will now be able to report chat and mail spam with the click of a button. A "Report Spam" option will now be available by right-clicking on a player's name in a chat channel, whisper, or mail. Using this option will quickly and easily report the player to our in-game support department for review.

Ok, fairly easy, but you could easily abuse this feature on people you don't like, whereas the reporting process was usually drawn out and people wouldn't abuse it.

• When you report a player, he or she will automatically be added to your ignore list for your current session. You won't see any chat or mail from that player until you log out and back in.

What if your ignore list is already full? Is Blizzard going to increase the number of ignore slots or make it unlimited?

Tobold reports that in patch 2.1.0 Blizzard is planning on getting rid of gold farmers in just three simple steps. So in patch 2.1.0, you should expect the following:

• The ability to send items, gold, or CoD packages via mail will be removed. You will only be able to send letters via the in-game mail system.
• The ability to freely set prices in the auction house will be removed. Since players could transfer gold by putting up a worthless item for a high-price buyout, the minimum bid and buyout amounts will now be set automatically.
• The ability to transfer gold via the trade window will be removed. However, to allow people to market tradeskills, the trade window will be transformed into a tradeskill window -- allowing the crafter to select a recipe and the buyer to insert materials, for a pre-set fee. When the buyer provides materials and the money, the crafted item winds up directly in the buyer's pack after crafting.

With no ways to transfer gold to potential buyers, the gold farming industry will quickly go out of business. Huzzah to Blizzard for finally solving this problem!

Yesterday we saw the first episode in TotalHalibut's Chronicles of a Goldfarmer series, and today we're jumping straight into the second. (Sorry, folks, there's no episode 3 lined up for tomorrow. We'll just have to wait for TotalHalibut to put together another one.) So sit back, relax, and enjoy more goldfarmer stalking at its finest.

Previously on Moviewatch...

Last week we saw a couple of entertaining ways to deal with bots. However, the entertaining is not always the practical - and if you don't play a priest on a PvP server, the methodology contained in those videos isn't going to help you much. For my part, if I encounter an obvious bot I'll tend to look for somewhere else to grind - it's not always easy to beat the speed of an automated hunterbot, and trying to tends to just be frustrating. But how do you deal with bots? And do you, perhaps, have advice for the rest of us?

I wrote a while back about an odd lack of farmers on my own realm at the time. And, with yesterday's additional account closures, I wonder if other realms are starting to see similar relief. Will Blizzard's continued efforts against the gold selling community really have a long term impact on the game's economy? Or will the farmers simply continue finding new methods to avoid Blizzard's watchful eye?

I personally think it will be a constant battle on Blizzard's part - but if they stick to this sort of approach, they can make farming sufficiently difficult that it may become a less lucrative business. But that's a long-term view - the important thing for current players is how are conditions today? Does your realm seem to be lacking in farmers since all of these account closures?

I'm not sure if this counts as racial profiling or not, but the official Blizzard forums have an interesting thread on ways to spot a bot farmer. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, a bot farmer is a program, running without direct human control, used by lowdown, cheating gold farmers to collect money in the game without even having to actually play it.

The thread lists several different, highly debatable (all alliance bots are Night Elf females?), criteria for spotting a bot , and even gives some screenshots & video examples to back them up. I don't know how close to the truth it actually is, but it's an interesting read. I've never knowingly come across a bot myself (although I probably have & didn't realize it), but I'll be keeping a curious eye out after reading this...