Um actually alot of these online games are loaded with boring timesinks, because the developers are to lazy too actually add fun things to do in these games. Essentially it takes alot of boring and repeditive monster slaying in order to actually get to a part of the game that is worth playing. (Star Wars Galaxies Was loaded with these if you are wondering what not to get for xmas) These gamers are essentially paying others to do this for them. If you have more money than time I can kindy see why.

I guess so... still, if you just are suddenly 30th level, have you even mastered the game's controls?

Well it's also about the Items too. Dunno about Warcraft, but in Diablo II (made by the same company) there are certain weapons and armors that are extremely powerful and extremely rare and thus highly desirable by gamers. And yah some will actually pay real cash to get them because the odds of finding these things themselves are very remote. Also, some like to use new types of characters, or various "builds" but don't wanna play the low level stuff - they wanna get into the higher levels & just start trashing bozos.

Dear God, I know way too much about this stuff.

it's more common to sell rare items or gold, that way you can uber-powerful without expending as much time and energy. It can actually be quite lucrative if you know what you're doing. I've known people who payed for college by playing these games.

If the game admins had half a brain they'd just allow gamers to pay them more for automatic leveling. The only issue qould be how to do it so that it doesn;t piss off all the other gamers and ruin the general atmosphere of the game's system.

Sheesh, pal. . . this stuff was old when *I* discovered this last summer.

Ace, we're both waaay behind the times. Pretty soon, us obsolete dinosaurs will be throwing snowballs at each other, like Roy Scheider and Jurgen Prochnow.

Cheers,
Dave at Garfield Ridge

It was bound to happen. The DNC pays people to vote. MoveOn pays people to troll. And the American Government pays people to have sex and eat generic supermarket cheerios.

I'm just glad someone got the prioroties right for a change.

"If the game admins had half a brain they'd just allow gamers to pay them more for automatic leveling. The only issue qould be how to do it so that it doesn;t piss off all the other gamers and ruin the general atmosphere of the game's system."

That would have the same effect on the game as printing more money would have on the national economy. Devaluation.

But it is only a matter of time before some clever and unscrupulous company geek figures out a way to take bribes for "black market" virtual +5 swords. Expect to see the first case along these lines in court soon. William Gibson couldn't make this shit up. The Matrix Mk I has arrived, and thousands of people just can't wait to plug in.

I don't play these MOOs, but lots of my friends do. I think the article may be slightly mischaracterizing how it works, based purely on the excerpt.

It isn't so much that wealthy people actually pay some dude in China to play for them. Rather, the dude in China plays and build up a character and amasses some money and equipment and then sells them on Ebay, even the character itself.

Incidentally, there are also a lot of scam artists working this system. They were actually hijacking paypal accounts, "buying" legit players' gold and stuff from them, and then of course paypal would withhold payment when it was challenged and the player would never get paid. Those guys were always from China.

My buddy got scammed by them and started digging into their feedback histories, and they have this complex system where they sell each other things for $.01 and build up incredibly high feedback histories to make the scan easier to pull off.

On a serious note [laugh track]

When is someone going to figure out the economics of this. What is the exchange rate of real gold to gold in, say, Warcraft.

You should start to forget about crazy blog money, Ace. I'm thinking there's got to be a way to get the spread of Warcraft gold vs. Elfquest gold.

"My buddy got scammed by them and started digging into their feedback histories, and they have this complex system where they sell each other things for $.01 and build up incredibly high feedback histories to make the scan easier to pull off."

All succesful systems attract parasites. Buyer beware.

In my day we'd just find the stupid cheat codes. Kids these days are spoiled.

Online gaming is notorious for this stuff. And it really is because developers have created some excruciatingly boring games.

One of my early experiences of a cyber-economy based on a game was Ultima Online. Players would use macro systems to mine resources in the game (leave them run overnight to mine iron ore, for example). The company banned the behavior. No, they wanted you to sit right there and hit the same three keys on the keyboard yourself for hours on end. Right.

So, people began simply buying gold and resources on e-bay. It was a big story in the gaming world at the time, but someone sold a UO account for $2000 on e-bay. Then someone worked out the U.S. dollor to UO gold piece exchange rate and discovered the fictional money was worth more than Vietnam's unit of currency.

It's really only gotten worse from there.

I haven't played MMORPGs seriously in some years. Not sure if it's because I've grown up a little, or I couldn't be faced with the sheer tediousness of leveling in yet another new game that is exactly like every other game. (I reserve the right to negate this sentiment when Middle Earth Online is released). I tried playing WoW, but found myself reading books, watching TV, talking on the phone, etc while barely paying attention to the repetitive process on the screen.

These games feel like work. But they're classic exercizes in pellet psychology. Press buttons, receive pellet. And slightly bigger pellet. And then another slightly bigger pellet. The potential for (and reality of) addiction to this stuff is epidemic.

And that's not even including Korea, where people form real life gangs and kill each other over in-game items.

DeeDaGo:

Economists learned about MMPG economies years ago. Some economist who had specialized in a dead-end area of economics and whose career didn't look too promising drowned his sorrows in Everquest. After a while, he realized the scope of the game and learned about the eBay auctions selling gold, characters, and items for hard cash. He decided to investigate further, and discovered that Everquest's GDP was higher than some real nations', and that the exchange rate of Everquest gold pieces to the dollar was about the same as the Mexican peso.

The possibility of this becoming a real economic activity for poor third-worlders occured to him, and now it looks like it's actually happening.

Hmmmm. Professional gamers, eh? Who'd a thunk it?

Oh, well! Next!

My 13-year old loves World of Warcraft, but at least among his friends, there is a code of honor about earning your own way.

I played Anarchy Online for a while. It was very pretty and very boring. As you reached higher levels, you got better weapons and fought tougher opponents, meaning the game always felt exactly the same no matter how experienced you were. It was tempting to endure the repetitious character-pumping via liberal quantities of beer, but then you'd eventually get your fool self killed and have to go through the painful process of recovery. I saw enough to satisfy my curiosity pretty quickly (but, man, if I'd had something like that at 14, I'd have disappeared into it forever).

I do wish I could run for hours through a huge, beautiful alien landscape with a protector robot at my elbow in real life. That would be neat.

I don't doubt this at all. I already personally know one person who shelled out $250 for a built-up game character on eBay a couple years ago. Basically an expert gamer was creating new characters, rapidly building them up to a high level, then selling them to people who didn't want to put the time/effort into doing it themselves. That let them waltz into the game with a badass character, giving them a big advantage.

Given that, I'm not at all surprised to find that the next logical step has been taken, that you can pay someone to work on your existing character.

Less said about my overall experience in these matters probably the better, but money has been getting made from this for years and years. As mentioned above, Diablo II, its probably the granddaddy of em all. Now there is actually a good reason to pay someone if you have the dough, also aforementioned. Its quite simple really (pathetically in some respects) it took me weeks playing 16hrs a day everyday to get waaaaaay up in Diablo II on my own and have enough to equip my character and equip others and sell, yes weeks at 16hs a day and Ill admit there were (and still are) quite a few 24hrs shots in there, put 3 or 4 of them together and playing for 96hrs anyone would think I was addicted. Anyways, even with all that, ummm, 'commitment' I still never had a lot the most expensive stuff.

Anyone finding this trend worrying should not go to the Project Entropia game where lately a virtual space station was paid for with 100,000 very real US dollars, in fact its all based on real money and you can buy plots of land and stuff for very real sums.

Yea I play that now, 29 going on 12 ...

Should probably add a chinese dude killed his chinese best friend in china with a real sword after his friend sold their jointly owned virtual sword for real money ... Yup, people kill each other over the economies made from online gaming now.

I play WoW and I must say that I find the farming activities dishonorable but understandable. One of the most important items to get is a mount, so that you can get around much faster. This may take up to 70 gold, a very difficult sum to amass since you're also spending on upgrading your skills, conducting normal repairs, and buying materials for your profession. Because I tend to spend on anything I'm eligible for, I have only had 70+ gold maybe once and that is after 10 months of playing (not every day mind you).

Even for max-level characters combing through the most lucrative dungeons, you may only get 15 gold worth of stuff after 2-3 hrs of play MINIMUM. This number will vary depending not only on the rarity of the item, but its demand in the auction house. Certain classes may not be particularly willing to spend cash on a good weapon, simply because it or something similar to it drops fairly often enough to get it on their own time.

All this is to say that getting money is very time consuming, and the server admins haven't figured out how to prevent the external free market from penetrating into their virtual economies (WoW is played on several different, non-integrated servers). As long as money and items can be exchanged between players, I don't see how it is possible to prevent this sort of activity.

Roughly half of my infantry company plays WoW or EQII, and some of them have the nerve to make fun of the eight or so tabletop RPG gamers (like myself). Fuckin' hypocrites ;)

I am owed an enormous apology from every human.

Sheesh. I'm not even a gaming geek yet I remember reading this story nearly a year ago.

FORTUNE magazine had an article on this a couple weeks ago. It's available here. It starts out as follows:

"Paul" and I are seated on a plush couch in the atrium-style living room of his starter mansion north of Dallas. A 71-inch flat-screen HDTV dominates the far wall. His Porsche 911 Carrera and his wife's Lincoln Navigator nestle in the garage. It's a good life and would not be a surprising one for a 33-year-old corporate litigator like Paul, except that he quit his law partnership two years ago. Since then he's been self-employed at an even more lucrative calling: He plays a medieval-themed online videogame called EverQuest. Because so many young people now spend so much of their lives immersed in the simulated 3-D worlds of games like this one, the noncorporeal emoluments they accumulate in these environments—virtual swords, cloaks, gauntlets, in-game currency, etc.—acquire real value to them, and they will pay real U.S. dollars—and euros, yen, won, and yuan—to acquire them. So Paul buys and sells virtual items and currency for a living.

It's pretty shameful the number of excuses that can be found for cheating in any given situation.

No wonder the word 'integrity' was the most requested definition on Merriam-Webster's website this year.

Eric the Red ain't lying about buying a mount in WoW. It's like you have to freaking save up for college to get one. It's absolutely not surprising that people pay real money to get the gold you'd need to get something critical like that. I'm surprised that the mounts don't come with financing like a car. That might actually make the game interesting, not only would I have to dodge enemy players, I'd have to avoid the REPO MAN!

Honestly, I don't mind some of the tediousness. I get a perverse thrill out of spending an hour digging up ore and gathering materials to craft a set of blunderbusses and earn some much needed in-game money. Makes it feel like I earned whatever silly magic trinket I dump that coin on.

Sure, I could piss $40 real dollars off on a farmer and get all the gold I'd need, but what's the point then?

Speaking as something of a WoW addict, I can understand the entire phenomena, but it appears to be generally frowned upon by the players (at least on my server, anyway). Ads for "Gold Brokers" are uncommon and tend to get reported by torqued players approximately .5 seconds after they appear.

The two worst insults on WoW you can be called are "Ninja" (as in a "Ninja Looter", somebody who grab the really phat lewt and then quits the party, running for the hills) and "Chinese Gold Farmer". Nobody will willingly admit to actually buying gold via these services, because to do so would bring pretty massive shunning from anybody else who found out.

They are right about saving up to buy a mount. It's pretty tough, especially if you're on a PvP server (where, generally speaking, anything goes, no-holds-barred, and you face the ever-present threat of being ganked by bored Level 60 players out to harass the lowbies). Turns out my server, Azgalor, is one of the older servers, with the majority of the players (41% at last count) being Level 60's. This tends to introduce pretty severe inflation on the economy. This is both good and bad, as items in the PC economy tend to be higher-priced then the same item on a younger server, but I can also sell the same item for the same inflated rates in Auction, helping me along to the price of certain items sold by NPC's (like a mount) that cost the same no matter which server you're on.

And, for what it's worth, you don't have to click your mouse for every swing of your pick-axe when you're mining. You click for every "round" of mining, and each mineral vein only lasts a certain amount of nodes before it's exhausted, making you search out a new node.

That being said... one of the best parts of playing WoW is exploring the world itself. I'm still finding new things every day.

The reason for this is that, seemingly, no one has designed a major MMOG that isn't one giant timesink. I played Star Wars Galaxies for a while when it came out, and wound up quitting because it was just so boring and pointless. Participating in the Galactic Civil War actually made the game worse. To get into the Rebels or Imperials, you had to run a bunch of stupid "blow up building" and "deliver package" missions. Once you were in, the only "benefit" you got was running around getting jumped by people on the opposite side with their ten billion pets. There was no "war" to speak of. At least I've heard they finally put spaceships in the game. Spaceships in Star Wars?! Whodathunkit?

Hi, my name is Lapsed, and I'm a World of Warcrack addict.

As part of his Christmas present this year, one of my IRL friends is getting gold. Not farmed, I've just been buying/selling on AH for profit.

Dave Chapelle has admitted he's a huge WoW addict. I think that's the real reason for him losing interest in the show.

So anyone here on Arthas or Dark Iron?