Criminals in China play MMORPGs all night long.

[Eulogy]

The devil, of course, is in the details.

As a prisoner at the Jixi labour camp, Liu Dali would slog through tough days breaking rocks and digging trenches in the open cast coalmines of north-east China. By night, he would slay demons, battle goblins and cast spells.

Liu says he was one of scores of prisoners forced to play online games to build up credits that prison guards would then trade for real money. The 54-year-old, a former prison guard who was jailed for three years in 2004 for "illegally petitioning" the central government about corruption in his hometown, reckons the operation was even more lucrative than the physical labour that prisoners were also forced to do.

"Prison bosses made more money forcing inmates to play games than they do forcing people to do manual labour," Liu told the Guardian. "There were 300 prisoners forced to play games. We worked 12-hour shifts in the camp. I heard them say they could earn 5,000-6,000rmb [£470-570] a day. We didn't see any of the money. The computers were never turned off."

Memories from his detention at Jixi re-education-through-labour camp in Heilongjiang province from 2004 still haunt Liu. As well as backbreaking mining toil, he carved chopsticks and toothpicks out of planks of wood until his hands were raw and assembled car seat covers that the prison exported to South Korea and Japan. He was also made to memorise communist literature to pay off his debt to society.

But it was the forced online gaming that was the most surreal part of his imprisonment. The hard slog may have been virtual, but the punishment for falling behind was real.

"If I couldn't complete my work quota, they would punish me physically. They would make me stand with my hands raised in the air and after I returned to my dormitory they would beat me with plastic pipes. We kept playing until we could barely see things," he said.

It is known as "gold farming", the practice of building up credits and online value through the monotonous repetition of basic tasks in online games such as World of Warcraft. The trade in virtual assets is very real, and outside the control of the games' makers. Millions of gamers around the world are prepared to pay real money for such online credits, which they can use to progress in the online games.

The trading of virtual currencies in multiplayer games has become so rampant in China that it is increasingly difficult to regulate. In April, the Sichuan provincial government in central China launched a court case against a gamer who stole credits online worth about 3000rmb.

The lack of regulations has meant that even prisoners can be exploited in this virtual world for profit.

According to figures from the China Internet Centre, nearly £1.2bn of make- believe currencies were traded in China in 2008 and the number of gamers who play to earn and trade credits are on the rise.

It is estimated that 80% of all gold farmers are in China and with the largest internet population in the world there are thought to be 100,000 full-time gold farmers in the country.

In 2009 the central government issued a directive defining how fictional currencies could be traded, making it illegal for businesses without licences to trade. But Liu, who was released from prison before 2009 believes that the practice of prisoners being forced to earn online currency in multiplayer games is still widespread.

"Many prisons across the north-east of China also forced inmates to play games. It must still be happening," he said.

"China is the factory of virtual goods," said Jin Ge, a researcher from the University of California San Diego who has been documenting the gold farming phenomenon in China. "You would see some exploitation where employers would make workers play 12 hours a day. They would have no rest through the year. These are not just problems for this industry but they are general social problems. The pay is better than what they would get for working in a factory. It's very different," said Jin.

"The buyers of virtual goods have mixed feelings … it saves them time buying online credits from China," said Jin.

The emergence of gold farming as a business in China – whether in prisons or sweatshops could raise new questions over the exporting of goods real or virtual from the country.

"Prison labour is still very widespread – it's just that goods travel a much more complex route to come to the US these days. And it is not illegal to export prison goods to Europe, said Nicole Kempton from the Laogai foundation, a Washington-based group which opposes the forced labour camp system in China.

So now, if you pay real money for not real goods, you help sadistic greedy bosses earn even more money and torture non-violent offenders. Just another reason you should not buy from China.

[someone_else]

OMFG. They are living bots .
A "bot" is a program that controls your charachter doing a dumb task all night while you are away to make money. Which would be cheating in theory and usually causes a ban when discovered.
But they are living people so they won't be banned.

[Stark]

You think people who farm ingame items for sale aren't banned?

[mr friendly guy]

If its profitable to gold farm, they can't be that good at detecting humans doing it. The next question is how good are they at detecting bots, because then some whiz man computer programmer could create a program to do it, set up multiple accounts and sell to someone on the other side.

That being said, if 300 prisoners make less than $1000 AUD (when you convert the Chinese currency to Australian), that means each player makes what $3 a day. Can't be very profitable for an individual to do it, but I can see how it would be if you have free labour.

God damn it, if we are going to let our prisoners enjoy being in prison instead of a punishment because we are trying to rehabilitate them, then we should encourage them to gold farm as well. Just joking.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

Jesus. People joke all the time about gold selling being a staple of the Chinese economy. This is just surreal.

If its profitable to gold farm, they can't be that good at detecting humans doing it. The next question is how good are they at detecting bots, because then some whiz man computer programmer could create a program to do it, set up multiple accounts and sell to someone on the other side.

Gold sellers get detected and banned pretty swiftly. The problem is that they then just create new accounts, using the handy-dandy credit card numbers their customers so helpfully give them.

[HeadCreeps]

To get an idea of how those kinds of operations work, an article from 2005 off 1up:

Last month we showed you some of the scammers and crooks that lurk in MMO games. Now, let's go into the field for a firsthand account of another part of the online underworld.

"Sack" is the only name I'm given for the person I'm supposed to contact. He lives in the Fujian province of China, but his place of business is online?he plays Lineage II. He's paid about 56 cents an hour to work in a videogame "sweatshop."

If the term sounds familiar, it's because of Lee Caldwell. The notorious MMORPG scripter got busted four years ago for admitting that his company, BlackSnow, hired workers in Tijuana to earn gold by "farming" in Ultima Online. Caldwell sold that in-game tender online for a handsome real-world profit while only paying his employees pennies on the dollar. Since 1998, the second-party market for MMORPG loot has steadily grown. Last year alone, this newfound industry grossed roughly $500 million, according to Bob Kiblinger of UOTreasures. CGW decided it was high time to go underground and find some of the key players who are going after a piece of the action.

Sack is the low man in these operations. "I work from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. on the U.S. Lineage II server," he says. He works long, boring hours for low pay and gets no holidays. Carefully constructed macros do most of the work; Sack is just there to fend off the occasional player itching for a fight or game master who's hunting for these automated farming programs. "Everyone knows where the good places are, and GMs know that your account has been online for a whole month," he says. "[A GM will] message me asking, .Hello, what level are you, please?' I know he isn't asking my level; he just wants to know if [there's actually a person at the computer]."

How does it work? The macros for World of WarCraft, for example, control a high-level hunter and cleric. The hunter kills while the cleric automatically heals. Once they are fully loaded with gold and items, the "farmer" who's monitoring their progress manually controls them out of the dungeon to go sell their goods. These automated agents are then returned to the dungeons to do their thing again. Sack's typical 12-hour sessions can earn his employers as much as $60,000 per month while he walks away with a measly $150.

Macros and exploiters
The real money is made by the people with the resources and the right programs. Rich Thurman earned $100,000 by farming 9 billion gold in Ultima Online. A longtime user of the macro easyUO, Thurman says he had "up to 30 PCs running at once, automatically collecting gold for me."

That is the first step. It isn't too difficult from there to make the leap into creating your own sweatshop. All you need is the ability to write game macros or the money to purchase them. That's right, if you know where to look, they are on the open market. A macro that uses a teleportation exploit in WOW is currently going for $3,000. Then just hire cheap labor to monitor the bots.

Weeks go by as I chase ghosts and rumors of Chinese workers clicking 12 hours a day. Word has it that 300 farmers are working at computers lined up in airport hangars somewhere in Asia. After all, Lineage II banned certain Chinese IPs for a reason. Finally, I get in contact with a man in his 30s who goes by the name Smooth Criminal. He's a partner in one of the largest sellers of MMORPG gold, and he isn't apologetic. His rap sheet: banned from Ultima Online, Asheron's Call, Shadowbane, Star Wars Galaxies, and Ultima Online again. He says once someone even traded him a wedding ring worth $2,000 for WOW gold.

Smooth Criminal's game cartel made $1.5 million from Star Wars Galaxies alone last year, and individually, he's made as much as $700,000 in a single year. "[SWG] built my new house, which I paid for in cash," he says. "So when you ring my doorbell, it plays the Star Wars music." Smooth Criminal is in charge of writing programs, finding exploits, and locating in-game "dupes" (bugs for duplicating gold or items). "I have a real job, but when there's a dupe, I call in sick," he says. It costs him more money to actually go to his "real job." "When I dupe," Smooth Criminal adds, "I farm billions on every game server and spread out my activities." He then uses three accounts to launder the gold: a duper account, a filter account, and a delivery account?each created using different IPs, credit cards, and computers. This way, it's hard to trace the source, and the gold comes back clean.

Basically, if you're imagining one guy actively playing a single character trying to farm up in-game currency, you have the wrong idea. Also, games which are sourced from another country, like Lineage II in the article I quoted, are known to have extremely poor cheat policing systems. You're more likely to be banned for complaining about the bot than you are to see the bot banned, no matter how obvious it is that the character is a bot.

Games like Perfect World from a Chinese company have adopted systems which make this more difficult to be profitable as far as I'm aware. Since there are people willing to buy virtual items with real currency, they've made it a part of their business model. Rather than buying virtual currency from farmers, you just buy it straight from the game company to get whatever you want. There are skills in that game which will cost you hundreds of $USD and which are a requirement to be competitive in Perfect World.

[Darmalus]

I'm always amazed how profitable these gold farming operations are. As far as MMOs go, I only play WoW, which nearly has piles of free gold lying around for you to take. Who is buying all this gold?

[Eulogy]

I'm always amazed how profitable these gold farming operations are. As far as MMOs go, I only play WoW, which nearly has piles of free gold lying around for you to take. Who is buying all this gold?

Extremely lazy assholes with much more money than sense. It is because of they that gold-selling exists in the first place.

[Gandalf]

I'm always amazed how profitable these gold farming operations are. As far as MMOs go, I only play WoW, which nearly has piles of free gold lying around for you to take. Who is buying all this gold?

Extremely lazy assholes with much more money than sense. It is because of they that gold-selling exists in the first place.

A friend of mine once justified it like this: For X hours wages, he was able to buy >X worth of gold. As such, this meant more play time and less money grinding time.

[Skgoa]

At some point you have to ask yourself: is it fun to grind for weeks just so that you can even get into more advanced encounters? I say no. My time/sleep/fun is worth more than what just buying the gold costs. Then again, thats the reason why I don't play MMOs anymore in the first place.

[mr friendly guy]

One way to deal with this for governments anyway, is to simply tax income derived from selling virtual goods, prevent virtual cash being used for real goods (so they can't avoid tax) and legislate that these virtual workshops must also come under the laws for minimum wage.

[mr friendly guy]

Does any one have any objection to gold farming in general? Not including those cases where prisoners are forced against their will to farm gold. As far as I am concern, its just supply and demand, and unlike say, ilicit substances its hard to argue someone is harmed by gold farming.

[Stofsk]

I never understood the controversy to be honest. It's like muling items on Diablo 2. Blizzard made it annoying and difficult to do because they want their players to play their games in a certain way, and most players won't have a bar of it. Blizzard just makes stupid gameplay decisions that force grinding. Frankly I think it says more about the games blizzard makes than the kind of players who farm gold for real money.

You could argue that the prisoners are being harmed by it, on the other hand if I was in prison I would rather be forced to play WoW than... um... anything else I could do in prison to be honest.

[White Haven]

People who don't buy gold or the local currency. If gold-farming is widespread enough to cause inflation in the game's economy, non-buyers end up suffering a great deal due to wildly-spiking market prices for player-sold goods. That can become doubly problematic if the developers attempt to react to the inflated economy by increasing the gold-sinks present in the game to reflect the newly-found prosperity of their playerbase. At that point, not only are non-gold-buyers effectively locked out from participation in much of the player-run economy, but they're subject to gold-sinks tuned to a much wealthier playerbase.

Now these aren't insurmountable problems to the non-gold-buyer playerbase, but depending on the width of the new rich/poor gap that widespread gold-buying has created on that particular game, they can be serious issues.

[HeadCreeps]

Does any one have any objection to gold farming in general? Not including those cases where prisoners are forced against their will to farm gold. As far as I am concern, its just supply and demand, and unlike say, ilicit substances its hard to argue someone is harmed by gold farming.

Yes. Depending on the game, it is possible that the botting or whatever form of farming becomes so pervasive that a regular player cannot play normally. In both of the MMORGs I played in the 2002-2007 range, it became oppressively difficult to play because all of the worthwhile hunting grounds were occupied by bots who were farming gold to sell online. I recall this not being so much the case in WoW or in Final Fantasy XI because the botting was (as I heard it, I never played either) less visible. This is not always the case.

Here is an example.

Cheating of any kind is a non-issue in either a single player game or a multiplayer game where all parties involved consent to the cheating. If there are players who refuse to participate in the cheating, their experience is typically damaged by the careless disregard. MMORPGs are typically competitive - especially in PVP-centric games, you need the best gear or the best experience levels to compete and stay on top. MMORPGs which feature PVP are predominantly centered less on player skill than on the quality of a player's equipment and levels, so simply buying the equipment without having earned it "legitimately" tilts the scales in favor or the RMT-users and people who afk bot for experience.

It's absolutely nothing surprising and should be expected in a competitive game, but it's not harmless in general.

[mr friendly guy]

@Headcreeps do you find it cheating say, if player x raised a character to level 60 or some ridiculous high level and then decided to sell it because he has lost interest in the MMO and now moves onto other interest. If you don't, what happens if that person created such a character for the sole purpose of selling it and does this for a living?

Now I guess gold farming can impact on the enjoyment of regular players, although some players no doubt enjoy help from the gold farmers and don't want to go through the menial tasks. Just search gold farmers on youtube and you get some people thanking them in the comments section.

[Mr. Coffee]

Chinese Gold Farmers run eSweatshops, News at 11. Also, tune in for Sports with Rock Turgidson!

[HeadCreeps]

mr friendly guy, that's a slightly different subject than gold farming, with its own set of factors involved.

I don't know how else to put this, but shouldn't it be a little obvious that there will be people who buy gold and then thank gold farmers for their service? Is there some point in bringing that up? My focus was on the fact that it negatively impacts those who play "legitimately" in games where RMT is against the rules but is not adequately enforced.

[mr friendly guy]

I am not arguing that those who play legitimately may be adversely affected depending on the game. It will certainly affect their level of "fun". I am just pointing out that some players will also argue for the gold farmers because it increases their enjoyment. Each player presumably is paying equal amounts of subscription playing this game (either zero if its a free one, and some amount if its subscription based), so it sort of comes down to, why is one person's enjoyment worth more than the other guy's?

Personally since I don't play MMORPGs I don't have much of a stake in this, but I find it fascinating that people can create an industry servicing virtual goods and I can't help but admire the entrepreneurship of doing so. I will also note some of these Chinese gold farmers weren't likely to get a good job anyway (according to them) so at least this job gives them some money to live on as opposed to requiring government support.

[Broomstick]

I have mixed feelings about this, honestly.

On a certain level I regard gold-farming as cheating in many games, for reasons White Haven and HeadCreeps already covered. On the other hand, if the game is designed for players to use real money to purchase in-game items then that's the design of the game and not cheating.

It would be nice if I could sell off a few of my very high level WoW toons for real cash, as I need money these days, but I can deal with it not being allowed by the rules. I understand the incentive, the entrepreneurship, but I can't help feeling that (outside of games structure from the start for this) it's cheating, which is wrong.

[HeadCreeps]

I am not arguing that those who play legitimately may be adversely affected depending on the game. It will certainly affect their level of "fun". I am just pointing out that some players will also argue for the gold farmers because it increases their enjoyment. Each player presumably is paying equal amounts of subscription playing this game (either zero if its a free one, and some amount if its subscription based), so it sort of comes down to, why is one person's enjoyment worth more than the other guy's?

RMT = selling virtual items for real money; "Real Money Trade"

MMORPGs either have a "cash shop" where you purchase virtual currency directly from the company that owns the rights to the game, or they do not and there is probably an active, against-the-rules RMT scene happening. The former is perfectly valid (it's another subject, overly tangential to this topic) and no one in this thread has made an argument against that*. What I objected to is the latter, where people are openly giving themselves an advantage in spite of the fact that doing so is against the rules. Why is one person's enjoyment "worth more" than the other guy's? Because one is violating the rules to play the game, and the other is not. Because there is an active sweat shop industry going on behind the scenes. Other than more personal reasons, there are probably no other arguments to give against RMT than what has been mentioned already.

*-If it seemed like I did, I should probably point out that it's not even possible for a hunting ground to be overrun with bots farming currency to sell to players when the currency is generated by the official game company. In this case, someone who wants to purchase in-game currency will buy it from the company, and then sell items they purchase with this virtual currency on the market to players. There is absolutely no need for a third party to farm gold.

Having said what I said, there are factors that can defeat my argument in some ways. South Korea's supreme court has evidently ruled that RMT is perfectly legal. While I don't like it, in South Korea, RMT is valid and acceptable. I expect to see more "cash-shop" based MMORPGs being released from Korea to account for this. Companies from China and Japan have already been using cash shop systems, but I'm not so sure about Amercian or European ones.

[Eulogy]

I never understood the controversy to be honest. It's like muling items on Diablo 2. Blizzard made it annoying and difficult to do because they want their players to play their games in a certain way, and most players won't have a bar of it. Blizzard just makes stupid gameplay decisions that force grinding. Frankly I think it says more about the games blizzard makes than the kind of players who farm gold for real money.

You could argue that the prisoners are being harmed by it, on the other hand if I was in prison I would rather be forced to play WoW than... um... anything else I could do in prison to be honest.

False Analogy, You do not have to pay real money in order to use mules in Diablo 2.

Besides, if ypu read the article yuou would see that the prisoners do hard labour anyway, and get tortured if they don't meet their quota. Don't go to China.

[Tanasinn]

Not to mention being imprisoned for such "crimes" as reporting corruption to begin with.

Such a modern, forward-looking country.

[White Haven]

Character sales don't bother me from an economic perspective, as someone who bought a character and not gold would not be an anomaly in the market any more than a player who didn't buy a character or gold. The only real disadvantage to character sales and character renaming services/exploitable GM renames is the damage to the playerbase's ability to self-regulate. How can you ostracize someone for bad behavior if you can't tell who he is a week later? Back when I played Warcraft, 'Why not ninja that high-end raid loot in a pickup group, I'll just get a name change afterwards' was a depressingly common refrain. When your reputation comes attached to a reset button, the threat of building a bad one becomes ineffectual.

That, of course, is less of a structural problem to the game as a whole than massive inflationary pressure, but it's a real one nonetheless.

[Luke Skywalker]

And Blizzard does nothing about this?