RMTeabagging

Interesting article in the New York Times Magazine about gold farming (Not exactly anything new – here's an article from 2001 about virtual economies from the San Fransico Chronicle. But it's nice to see coverage of such hot button gaming topics in the paper of record.). Not such an interesting post at Mr. Yglesias's.

Yes, Matt, they're called bots.

What I found interesting in the article, though, were two things.

First, that gold farmers are tempting PK targets. That makes a lot of sense as they're generally doing repetitive, easily predictable routines. If you wanted to go and kill them off and thereby singlehandedly end the scourge of gold farming, it shouldn't be hard to find the character of some poor Chinese person, laboring to meet a demanding quota, working twelve hours a day for thirty cents an hour, and to make their lives more difficult. There wouldn't really be a point in it since you'd might as well try and cut the grass one blade at a time. But I've often had the idle thought that online games might benefit from being more like Ultima Online and less like EverQuest. In other words, allowing players ways of settling disputes and policing themselves. UO allowed freeform PvP while EQ disabled any sort of player on player combat, of course, and while there are problems with each direction it seemed to me that the establishment and enforcement of unwritten rules of player conduct were better in UO while EQ was a griefer's paradise. I'm not so much saying that players should be allowed to slaughter each other all they want so much as I am that the developers are often slow to react to concerns and changes to a game are difficult to implement. Giving players systems which allow them to govern themselves might be a simple and cost-effective way of moderating the things they don't like, such as farming or griefing. In practice, however, it's very difficult to pull off as no matter what kind of system you make, people can and will exploit it for their own advantages.

But, really, if people had a problem with gold farming, say, in a game that allowed for PvP combat I wonder why they don't resort to, more or less, vigilante actions more often. Find a popular farming spot, get together a party of high level players with nothing better to do (Say, standing around waiting for a raid) and just mow down all the farmers around. Or give out bounties for players who run off these farmers, somehow. This vestiges of that sort of behavior are out there and, indeed, in some places it's a mark of honor to be battling against the gold farming hordes, so to speak, but it seems to me it could be a lot more organized. If people were really serious about doing something about gold farming rather than bitching about it, anyways. Of course, then you get the gold farmers hiring people to protect them from the various farmer hunting posses, and the PKers organizing even further to combat it but that sounds like the game is getting a lot more complicated and, potentially, interesting. Again, we're headed into a very UO direction where you have people who grief have people who fight against griefers. The problem is, in UO, it was a lot easier and more rewarding to grief than it was to combat it. Properly structuring things, it could conceivably work.

The second is the story about Brother Bao and Little Bai towards the end of the piece. How they were able to put together large groups of, well, Chinese sweatshop workers and break into the raiding game. Raids, of course, those huge 40 or 25 person dungeon crawls are the holy grail for the average WoW player (I mean, there's PvP, but that's something different). And that's because it's where you'll find the best loot. It's a market that the farmers have typically stayed away from, though, because it's so difficult to both get to raiding and perform well on it. Plus most of that loot is bind on drop or acquire, meaning it can't be traded. As far as I was aware – since I don't play much WoW – raids were the last preserve against RMTs. In retrospect, however, it was just a matter of time before the farmers got organized enough to tackle them. And to figure out a way to profit from it, of course. But they already employ people to play the game around the clock. And not just to play the game but to power-level up characters. They'd have a ready source of characters ready for the end game and a pool of players with tons of hours of game experience. So maybe they have to hire a few more people, the RMT business is still insanely profitable (Mostly for the companies like IGE but as I understand the economics, one worker farming gold easily pays the salary of several. And there's not much overhead, either.), but they can easily put together their own version of a raiding guild. People do it all the time, for fun, the difference here is you're actually paid to go on raids and learn the ins and outs of dungeons. Then, you sell spots in that raiding party and guarantee those people their pick of the drops.

Apparently it didn't work out too well. Mostly for lack of customers. But the potential is there. It's just no one's found a viable business plan yet.