I was reading http://www.1up.com/news/tortured-chinese-prisoners-forced-farm-mmo-gold over at 1up.

It describes chinese prisoners being forced to farm gold in MMORPGs so the virtual gold could be "sold" for real life profit. If they did not meet certain gold farming quota they would be physically tortured for their sub par performance The article also describes "gold farming" as a real problem for many mmorpgs because it ruins the ingame economy.

I've never played an MMORPG, so some of these concepts are pretty foreign to me. And it is crazy for me to think that the practice of online gold farming is so profitable IRL that prisoners in chin are being forced to farm gold.

After reading the article and others linked to it, I'm still not sure how people can really turn a profit w/ online gold farming. Can anyone give me any insight to this practice? There are actual companies whose sole goal is to farm and sell online gold to players? WTF is going on w/ today's mmorpgs?

And as I mentioned above, I've never played an mmorpg, so I'm clueless when it comes to this realm of gaming.

Beats breaking up rocks with hammers.

Gather a bunch of virtual gold/money, sell it to other gamers who are willing to pay real-world money for it. It's not that difficult a concept.

And then steal it back so you can resell it.

I dunno who would be stupid enough to buy in-game gold from those shady groups. Some people take these games way too seriously.

People.

The WoW slave trade.

Has a ring to it, doesn't it?

Tch, it's always people. :swear:

The idea is that the "gold farmers" collect in-game currency (usually by grinding enemies, collecting whatever money drops, and selling everything else to a vendor), and then offer to sell it to players for real money. Because it takes forever to get anywhere or get anything done in these "games," a lot of players are willing to take shortcuts, so the farmers have some potential customers. Naturally, because many devs and players consider it to be cheating, it can mess with the in-game economy, there's a lot of potential for scamming and identity theft, and because these guys can cost the developer money (they want players to take as much time as possible and pay the subscription in the process) the practice is both looked down on and prohibited in a lot of games.

Well what can I say. If you really don't know who could be stupid enough to buy virtual money from one of those groups then you haven't been on the Internet long enough.

Not that the concept is difficult, as a gamer it seems silly to pay for it when part of the game is doing it for yourself. I guess there's always those looking for short cuts. The concept is difficult for me to understand cause I find it stupid to pay real money for online gold.

I hope people are getting a good exchange rate

What I found puzzling was the article said that a gold farming company was bought and sold for 10 million, is the practice that common where most mmorpg gamers are doing this and companies are making that much profit that such a company can be bought/ sold for 10 million?

So, crime does pay!

They already paid for the game (and to play WoW they have to constantly keep paying) anyway, by extension it doesn't take much imaginative power to see how some of the players would be willing to pay to try to get easy success in the game.

It's only successful because their plying your morals and emotions. If the guards knew no one would buy it, then they wouldn't have any reason to torture people to farm it. Hahahaha.

[/sarcasm]

I guess I could have phrased that "You'd have to be pretty stupid to ". But I really don't know anyone that stupid... are you saying there are communities of really stupid MMO players that I totally overlooked!?

Ha ha well said.

MMORPGs kinda weird me out I think. Makes me sad that any potential Fallout mmorpg will likely be ruined by the same type of gamers.

You can always depend on gamers ruining games for other gamers. Bummer.



I guess I have no imagination. :mellow: Or maybe I just know nothing about mmorpgs, oh wait, I mentioned that. Just thought I'd mention that again because I wouldn't want to come off as sounding condescending. :rolleyes:

If I was in prison, I don't think they'd have to threaten me to make me play MMOs...

Not communities of really stupid MMO players, but communities of really stupid people. Members of these groups suffer from various types of real-stupidity. Some are really stupid in the sense that they are willing to purchase virtual money with real money, others are really stupid in the sense that they're censored on these forums.



You can depend on people ruining anything for other people.

Their not really playing the games though, just killing enemies over and over, it sounds really boring really.

However, I would certainly prefer to do that than some other things I could be forced to do.

Yea , hell the price of cloth alone is highly inflated about thirty frostweave cloth sold to a vendor will get me maybe 1-5 gold , sell it in a auction house 75 gold. Yea there is something wrong.

In the case of WoW, the auction house price is always a lot higher than the vendor price. Otherwise people wouldn't bother and just vendor everything.

Still, I can't remember frostweave going for more than 30g on a good day. It's been a while since I played though.

I have heard of this before.

Seems like a pretty good job to have, for a slave that is.

it's better than when they sold for next to vendor price


a game is no longer a game if the only thing you do is repeated hundreds of times every day :facepalm:

Sorry but this makes me LOL.

I've been paid to do worse than that. Frankly they should be grateful.