Fair Trade Goldfarming

Erin Hoffman investigates how gold farming has evolved, from the sweat shop to the home business.

Goldfarming.  It's despicable, insidious and irritating; it disenfranchises the honest hard-working MMOG gamer, sending our play overseas and wrecking economies.  It's cheating.  And any game maintainer with a shred of integrity would want to stamp it out right at its pestiferous roots.

Wouldn't they?

The Hardworking Small-town Goldfarmer, Monsanto and the Mob
In May of 2007, regulators in Korea passed a law against the "unfair" real-money trading (RMT) of virtual items.

"Great!" Western gamers exhort.  "It's about time!  This'll be good for games.  Right?"

Maybe not.  It turns out goldfarming actually helps a game's stability, effectively providing "endgame" gameplay that will keep a player engaged even after they've exhausted the "fun" factor of a game's content.  The RMT threshold for the previously casual player gives them something to do after they've maxed out and reached "professional" level, meaning that players stay playing - and paying subscriptions - longer.  And because they're earning money, usually more than the cost of their subscription, it's easy for them to rationalize continuing play.  The game developer doesn't have to burn resources generating high-end content for a minority hardcore, and the uber-hardcore gamer is gainfully employed. Everybody wins!  With most hobbies, it's possible to become so proficient that you start turning your hobby into a small business; online games are no different.  This effect on gameplay in Lineage II was documented by a pair of Korean researchers - Jun Sok Huhh, a lecturer in economics at Seoul National University, and Sang Woo Park, a researcher at Seoul's Game Industry Institute.

So why did Korean lawmakers pass the "Virtual Asset Trading Ban"?

"Scamming and freak violence related to the virtual under-economy has made RMT an area of societal concern in South Korea. Steven Davis describes a recent scandal and suspects that the 'law grew out of these agencies desire to appear to be "Tough on" ... something.' Thus the regulation might not actually be designed with the game industry's benefit in mind."

After the law was passed in Korea, NCsoft, makers of the hugely popular Lineage II, responded: "We don't think the ban will severely damage us, because gamers will find another way to trade."  In other words: Can't stop the signal.  NCsoft's statement is typical of MMOG maintainers in Korea, who take it as a matter of course that RMT is a healthy thing for games - so much so, it would seem, that its removal could be potentially damaging.

But not all goldfarming is a good thing.

When goldfarmers get to the industrial level, their behavior gets tougher, their methods more ruthless.  On a macro level this is where we see "outsourced"' goldfarming - citizens from other countries paid to farm gold in sweatshop-like conditions; the Monsantos of the goldfarming world.  This kind of market competition injures the "good" goldfarmers; as does any "unethical" goldfarming involving exploits or inside jobs.  One EverQuest II goldfarmer tells a tale of small business woe, a mom-and-pop operation driven out by suspicious market-glutting behavior by mysterious new sellers.

These kinds of goldfarming impact the economy, but unregulated, aggressive goldfarming in some virtual environments has a more direct impact on players.  When powerful goldfarmers are dependent on a steady, high rate of currency income to maintain their business bottom lines, they'll take action against other players to protect their assets.  In Final Fantasy XI, this frequently means camping spawn points for monsters that drop exclusive weapons, and killing anyone who approaches:

"Let me tell you. The -sole- reason why I left FFXI was rampant inflation and gil sellers. FF is a very gear-dependant game. Want a Jujitsu Gi, O. Kote, or a Monster Signa? Too bad! Gil sellers are camping them 24/7. If you want them you have to buy it from the AH." - Ragingnemo, 2006

So game maintainers don't actually want all goldfarming wiped out; just the mega-corporate, spawn-camping kind.

What they want is fair trade goldfarming.

The Anti-Goldfarming PR Machine
The proof for fair trade goldfarming is in the mechanics.  It would be entirely possible to design a game in which players did not trade in-game items; if, in World of Warcraft terms, everything was bind-on-pickup.  But developers want players to exchange items, and want them to do so fairly, so they provide an auction house.

Online games actively desire item exchange; it promotes social interaction, creates a more complex game, and strengthens the social ecology that nurtures guild formation and other connection-maximizing factors that will keep a player subscribing even when he's irritated with some dimension of the game's design or content.  The problem is that you can't have your cake and eat it too; once you've allowed item exchange, you can't possibly control how players make the decision to engage in that exchange.  There is no way for Blizzard's software to know whether I'm getting a sword from Player X because he's in my guild (or maybe he's my real-life friend) instead of because I paid Player X a dollar.  

Goldfarming is an easy target because it's readily identifiable as an activity by the players themselves; outlawing "nepotism" or unfair advantage (because isn't it also "cheating" if I have an equipment advantage because my brother/cousin/boyfriend gave me 5,000 gold when I joined?) would be far more abstract.

But Blizzard, for example, wants you to think that it's combating goldfarming, all goldfarming, on the basis of principle.  Like the agencies Steven Davis describes in Korea, it has a vested interest in maintaining the loyalty of its player base, which means responding to these emotionally charged battle cries of "they're cheating!" Even if, by its mechanics, World of Warcraft seems to want you to exchange items as often as possible.

The Times They Are A-Changin'
The problem with a system-wide approach to banning goldfarming is that it results in a lot of collateral damage.  Because it is not possible to trace a person's intent or their activities outside of the game, this kind of damage - which is wrenching to an honest player, as if he received a speeding ticket in the mail without owning a car - is inevitable.  And it doesn't curb RMT or goldfarming significantly; its effects on the professional goldfarmers, who make a living off of adapting quickly to economic trends, are brief.

Instead, Blizzard has been most effective in curbing the kind of FFXI out-of-control RMT through its system of acquiring rare items (bind-on-pickup).  These kind of design solutions are ultimately vastly more effective than wide-blanket account bans.

Player opinions toward goldfarming have also changed in the last couple of years:

"Well... they are earning some money, why not, some people are spending them and it's not my money, should I care? I don't." -Yakito, WoW-Europe.com

"their target market is people who do not have the time to farm gold themselves, or have a lot of money...when i see it like this i do not really have much of a problem with it, some people do not have the time or find farming gold ‘boring' so they take get their gold using their time doing something else." -Grimah, WoW-Europe.com

These opinions grow increasingly common as players in the west settle down to the idea of RMT and its inevitability in a system that generates population and value.  Sure, RMT can cause problems - but just because griefing is a problem doesn't mean you disable PvP.  You design smart, and you solve where the actual abuse is occurring.  So please, next time you rag on goldfarmers, think of the children, whose hardworking parents put food on their table farming Azeroth.

Erin Hoffman is a freelance contributor to Giant Realm. Her book, Settlers of the New Virtual Worlds, is on sale now.

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