Gold Farmers

This is a regular sight on my World of Warcraft server.

I know it’s not the greatest screenshot, but hopefully you can see that it’s a website address spelled out with corpses. As you might expect, the website is selling in game gold. I notice a lot less channel spam these days and I guess Blizzard must have managed to crack down on it so the farmers are forced to get more creative with their advertising. I’ve also received a few random tells along the lines of “Hi are you there?” or “Hi can you help me?” and when I reply I’m told that they have gold for sale. I’m not sure if these are bots or real people, or if it’s just some random guy selling gold or part of some organised promotional machine. One day if I’m really bored I’ll engage them in conversation and find out. Or maybe not.

I think it’s quite a clever trick with the corpses and it does show how determined these people are to promote their business. Of course, paying a porn star half a million dollars to tattoo your gold selling website on her breasts would probably be slightly more impressive. I’m rather disappointed that this story looks like it was a hoax. I suppose it is plausible given that some people will do pretty much anything for money (and I imagine Russian porn stars are no exception), and I’m sure there are companies in the gold selling industry who could afford it.

It’s interesting to contrast Blizzard’s view of gold farming with some of the current research on the subject. The reality of big companies with hundreds of employees and million dollar turnovers seems far removed from the image of scammers and fraudsters that Blizzard would have us believe. It’ll be interesting to see if Blizzard ever changes its stance against gold farmers or even legitimises RMT in the future. I remember back in the day SOE spent a lot of time trying to crack down on RMT in Everquest, yet they eventually bowed to the inevitable with their Station Cash system.

I’ve never bought gold or any other service in WoW as I respect Blizzard’s policy, but as someone who is developing a game with a microtransaction payment model I obviously don’t have objections to RMT in general. I think the negative effects of gold farming can be lessened through proper game design, and in many respects WoW already does this. The two biggest issues with gold farming are scarcity of resources and price inflation and these can be mitigated with more instancing which means less competition for drops and making more top gear bind on pickup to reduce the impact of price inflation on players who don’t buy gold.