Chinese prisoners forced to farm gold in MMORPGs

Post » Sat Sep 25, 2010 4:15 am

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:


Are you referring to the majority of the quests? Kill x, collect y, return to quest giver, repeat? Thats the reason I only played for about a month before uninstalling it. Very disappointed.
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FirDaus LOVe farhana
 
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Post » Sat Sep 25, 2010 7:01 am

Gold farmers in WoW are pretty rampant. Every few seconds in trade chat you see gold selling spams from different companies. It's sad.
The thing is though, they make their profit off of stolen accounts. They hack accounts, and vendor gear/take gold from your characters along with farming it. It's pretty shady.
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Alycia Leann grace
 
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Post » Sat Sep 25, 2010 9:36 am

I want to feel sorry for them, but I just can't. :laugh: Hilarious story.
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Rude_Bitch_420
 
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Post » Sat Sep 25, 2010 5:44 pm

There was a lot in runescape too , I remember seeing the default character running around chopping trees by the dozen. You couldn't get a yew log at all unless you were a member. Bots also spammed gold sites as well.
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Jaylene Brower
 
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Post » Sat Sep 25, 2010 12:10 pm

Sorry but this makes me LOL.

Its even more funny is that people actually pay $ to get virtual gold in MMOs.
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casey macmillan
 
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Post » Sat Sep 25, 2010 3:18 pm

Its even more funny is that people actually pay $ to get virtual gold in MMOs.

While I don't support gold buying because it trashes WoW's economy, your argument falls short if you've ever bought a video game with real money. You are paying money for something not real to entertain you in the form of pixels. :shrug:
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Jennifer Rose
 
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Post » Sat Sep 25, 2010 7:47 am

When I played WoW there were people in my guild that would buy 10 accounts every expansion because they were to lazy to level up each class to 80. They also spent hundreds if not thousands on gold to buy consumables and "bind on equip" items. That does not even factor in the pets and mounts they bought from the blizzard site and the redeemable reward cards from the WoW card game. One guy probably spent 10grand in 1 year on it.... hell... if he paid me 10 grand I would level the characters and farm [censored] for him! :P
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Anna Krzyzanowska
 
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Post » Sat Sep 25, 2010 11:59 am

While I don't support gold buying because it trashes WoW's economy, your argument falls short if you've ever bought a video game with real money. You are paying money for something not real to entertain you in the form of pixels. :shrug:

Indeed.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with buying virtual items or currency in my opinion, unless it throws a game out of balance.
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Star Dunkels Macmillan
 
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Post » Sat Sep 25, 2010 8:50 am

I forgot to mention the "army" of nigh elves that are all wearing exactly the same gear and constantly "farming" npcs in the same area for money... they would have nonsense names and would not respond if you tried to communicate with them. Was a pain in the butt to do quests in the regions being "farmed".
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Juan Cerda
 
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Post » Sat Sep 25, 2010 8:39 pm

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


I'm not saying it is fun to do, I am saying it is better than toiling in a field or working in a sweat shop, no?
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Mimi BC
 
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Post » Sat Sep 25, 2010 11:27 am

...Is that what my supposed Chinese "hackers" were doing in C&C: Generals?
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Brittany Abner
 
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Post » Sat Sep 25, 2010 8:19 pm

WoW or death? I pick the latter.

I can't stand the "exciting" aspect of playing that game, the act of simply farming for gold would be hellish beyond belief.
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saharen beauty
 
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Post » Sat Sep 25, 2010 11:20 am

People who buy gold don't realize that gold farming inflates the server economy and drives prices up, thus making their gold purchases worthless anyways.
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barbara belmonte
 
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Post » Sat Sep 25, 2010 6:51 am

People who buy gold don't realize that gold farming inflates the server economy and drives prices up, thus making their gold purchases worthless anyways.

Is there anything worth buying from vendors with all that money? Those prices never change.
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Lou
 
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Post » Sat Sep 25, 2010 8:57 pm

I feel sorry for the people who get beaten but I'd never play WoW since they decided to simply forget that Warcraft was an RTS game series.
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Alessandra Botham
 
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Post » Sat Sep 25, 2010 9:22 am

Some people don't have a lot of time on their hands, and make a decent living, so in order to speed up their progress in the game so they can enjoy it more ( say high-end PvP ) they buy ingame gold. They're not all stupid, some just value their time. I'd even go as far as to say that most are not stupid.
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mimi_lys
 
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Post » Sat Sep 25, 2010 7:31 pm

It's not that strange for regular players to sell gold either, and often times doesn't require a huge time commitment. Final Fantasy XI was a prime example. Veterans of the HNM scene (end-game) or high level crafters could make tens (or hundreds) of millions of gil every day, and with most of the very best buyable equipment/expenses topping out at around 100-200 million, you ended up with a lot of excess money after a while.

Around 2005 or so I believe it was something like $75-100 per million gil, $25 or so in 2009 when I quit. People selling a couple hundred million every few weeks or in a month, wouldn't even have to work a regular job (though, most of the folks I knew personally did). I bought and sold a few times, but never made it a regular thing. When I quit I sold everything and probably made back all the money I spent on subscription fees over the ~5 years I spent playing.

Would wanna do it as punishment in prison though. Or even be in prison. :P
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Sammygirl500
 
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Post » Sat Sep 25, 2010 7:06 am

If they wanted to make it a real challenge, using the same quota rules, they'd make the gold farmer farm gold in an area with a few hundred-to-thousand of competitive, kill-stealing gold farming bots, also the type you'd find running from someone's computer(s) in China. Hitting a large rock with a 99-Cent Store hammer (likely made from China) doesn't seem so bad then. ^_^
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lillian luna
 
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Post » Sat Sep 25, 2010 7:29 pm

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.


No matter what game you go to there will always be gold/platinum/currency sellers and the market in that game will dictate the price. At the moment if I had to guess anything from the mechanics they probably run multitudes of missions/quests or in WoW's case probably dungeons. They will then get X amount of gold and give it to a main supplier. The problem is currently gold is at a low due to the inflation and influx of new mechanics for the Cataclysm expansion. As a result more gold is needed to get certain items resulting in more gold needed to be awarded per real $ amount.

Sad thing is it isn't hard to earn currency in any game as long as you use the market to your advantage. There was a guildmate in EverQuest 2 that taught me a good deal about the market and how to use it to my advantage. As a result I pretty much tripled my profits thanks to him *turns out he was a market anolysis guy in RL* and i've always used those ideas in other MMOs.

At the moment whatever China does really wouldn't surprise me in the least. If you were to post a link to an article saying china was conducting human genetic experimentation to create the "Perfect Soldier" by altering their DNA I would probably believe it.
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Leah
 
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Post » Sat Sep 25, 2010 12:19 pm

...Is that what my supposed Chinese "hackers" were doing in C&C: Generals?


+1

I never really got much into WoW.

This seems like a futile attempt to make money by whatever prison is forcing the poor mites into this. I'd imagine the cost of running the machines would outweigh what they make.
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Roberto Gaeta
 
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