How lucrative is game-farming?

[CaptainChewbacca]

I'm only passively familiar with WoW and other online games, but say a person spent 8-10 hours a day working at trying to get and make items that people would pay hard cash for, how much money could he make in a week? I'm not talking about a n00b or a bored kid, but how much could a REALLY good WoW player make if he knew everything about the game?

[Enforcer Talen]

Depends on his level. Higher level peeps get more loot.

[bilateralrope]

For most MMOs trading ingame items for cash is a bannable offenses (I don't know if this is the case for WoW, but it probably is) and if the GMs are competent they will be checking activity logs for large currency transfers because those are almost certain to be people breaking that rule.

As for the amount you would be earning if you could pull it off without getting banned, just find out the current exchange rate and the areas where you can farm gold the quickest. But in both Guild Wars and Eve Online the majority of the currency earned for such sales is farmed by bots, which are also against the rules. So don't expect to earn much, especially if you don't know the tricks they gold sellers currently try to use to avoid being caught.

One bullshit excuse the gold sellers try to pull on the buyers is that they are selling the time used to farm, not the gold they farmed, therefore no rules are being broken. But as the gold sellers would have a lot of accounts that have been banned (but the money they earned from an account before its banning is more than enough to replace it), the fact that I'm not aware of any of them trying to sue to get those accounts back suggests that they don't believe it themselves.

[Keevan_Colton]

I know that in EVE online it's considered fine to trade Game Time Cards ($10 or so a pop) for ingame money. Any direct sale of items for RL cash is prohibited though.

[Archaic`]

As an indicator of how lucrative this can potentially be, here's one interesting statistic I happened along recently.

The value of a WoW account with a level 70 character that's viable for use in farming, is equal or greater in value to an individual's credit card details, on the black market.

[Mobius]

And what about people trading real sex for virtual gold?

[Jaevric]

Funny story on WoW.

Recently, I rerolled from Horde to Alliance, and sent a lot of cash to a friend of mine with 2 accounts so we could transfer it to my new Alliance character.

His Horde account was banned for gold buying as a result, and his attempts to get a better investigation done--like, I don't know, actually checking to see what account sent him the gold and what account he's been sending gold back to--were ignored. Nor was any effort made to contact me so I could explain what happened. So he lost a Horde account with a level 70 priest, a level 60+ druid and a few other characters.

We've both subsequently cancelled our subscriptions. While cracking down on gold-buying is both understandable and even a positive effort, the haphazard way Blizzard is going about it is simply infuriating.

[Ar-Adunakhor]

There was actually an article on this in CGW a while back, and one of the top "bot farmers" would take time off of his six figure job to write new bots whenever a patch came out, simply because it paid so much more to do so. He now, supposedly, has an extremely nice and extremely large house that was paid for by his SWG credit trading alone.

Of course, that's a step above Joe Blow sitting at a monitor for 10 hours, as he probably had multiple accounts running bots all the time. Still....

[Crown]

Frankly it's one of the most frustrating things (for example WoW) that MMORPG's by design encourage gold farming/buying ... that or having no life.

It's pretty sickening really.

[brianeyci]

Look up Chinese farming. I'm almost 100% sure I heard the same story about the house online, but it was a house in China.

Even if somebody knew everything about the game, even if it wasn't against TOS, even if the guy spent fifteen hours a day, he'd have the same problem as tech support workers. His job could be outsourced at any time and probably would. But at least level two and three tech support will always be in the home country if the company knows what's good for them and you can actually make a career of it. If he's good enough to write code for bots to farm gold in an MMORPG, because bots is the only way you're going to keep up, he's good enough with a bit of effort to become a real computer programmer isn't he. So it looks like a lose lose.

[Sea Skimmer]

For most MMOs trading ingame items for cash is a bannable offenses (I don't know if this is the case for WoW, but it probably is) and if the GMs are competent they will be checking activity logs for large currency transfers because those are almost certain to be people breaking that rule.

It’s very illegal in WoW and they ban tens of thousands of accounts every single month for doing it. Most of the time is people in say China or Thailand, selling to people in Europe or America, which makes it very lucrative for the person in Asia.

[Lord Pounder]

I remember back in the day in Lineage 2 there where stories of banks of computers set up in warehouses in asia, each warehouse with 30-40 bots running and one person supervising. Back on that game 10 million Adena cost £150. Having played the L2 for 6 months i can believe it. It was a game set up for asains to exploit dumb westeners