Gold Farming Not Cool

Article bigs up the gold farming industry, ignoring the practices that drive it.

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By John Gillooly on 6 March, 2009

One of my World of Warcraft guild mates had her account hacked this week. We aren’t sure just how it happened, but it was most likely done through malicious software installed on her PC. Some guild mates twigged to what was going on when a large number of items were taken from our guild bank, and the character in question was using hacks to mine ore while not responding to questions.

In the past, getting such a character recovered took months, but two days later Blizzard has sorted out the account. The character was essentially naked, with anything of value sold, and bags full of ore indicated that the hacker was stopped midway through a mining run. While this quick response from Blizzard also included mail with the missing items (and the guild bank contents), it is pretty obvious that the account was stolen in order to facilitate the practice of real money trading.

This is the fancy name for what is colloquially known as gold farming. The practice of paying a third party to supply you with in-game gold is supplied largely out of China. This article from The Guardian in the UK gives an insight into the industry, largely as a promotional piece for an upcoming documentary called Play Money.

Read the article in isolation and it seems to portray a bustling growth industry, yet another example of the industrial heartland of China serving the menial needs of the Western world. However, what it completely glosses over is the very illegitimate nature of this kind of trade. It is a practice whose legitimacy varies from game to game, however, it is mainly focused upon World of Warcraft, where real money trading is prohibited by the end-user license agreement (EULA). It is a practice that is driven by compromising players’s accounts, taking their stuff, and getting as much in-game gold out of a character before the account gets suspended.

The fact that Blizzard now fixes such problems at a rapid pace indicates just how common this practice is. Everyone in the guild knew others who had suffered the same fate, and while the more cynical may highlight the security breaches needed to get a keylogger onto one’s PC, the fact is that when you are dealing with the most casual-friendly of MMOs, you have large numbers of people that don’t have their PC security set to Defcon One.

While The Guardian may portray the gold farmers of Wow7gold as underpaid providers of a necessary service, they do so by underhanded means. While some people do, indeed, happily buy gold with their hard-earned cash, the gold has to come from somewhere. That place may once have been Tyr’s Hand, where uncommunicative rogues used to spend days farming in vanilla World of Warcraft. But it has, for a long time, come largely through pinching other people’s virtual stuff.

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