there's some guy at my college who used to do this, and he drives to school every day in a yellow Lambo.

oh yeah, and he parks in the fucking Visitor Parking every day (up until recently when my school threatened to tow his car if he did it again). the guy's a dick.

I think that job would bore me to death ...

The farmers are jsut working hard for low pay. The asshole farm owners/slave drivers drive Lambos. Yellow Lambos. That should be the two strikes that God needs to smite them, shouldn´t it? I mean YELLOW..?

Rather than gold farm for a company, these guys should deal stuff on their own and become millionaires like Wang Yue Si or Anshe Chung!

suddenly my job does not seem so bad

You have remember how easy it it to get lost in games like WoW. It's very easy to get addicted to.

i remember my roommate talking about this a long time ago...he's a lineage dude...

i thnk they're are all losers wasting their time....buying skills and abilities in video games? isn't that cheating?

it's not like they care, but i still think, for the people addicted to these games.. that online role playing games are a waste of their life....

i guess physically interacting with people just doesnt appeal to pussies

(sorry, that was mean)

i just want my roommate back...............fucking bastards

PC gamer did a piece on a gold farmer / power leveling company that actually saved one town by opening up as one of the only source of income after the fish processing plant there shut down. They actually offer the top wage in the area about .75c more than the fishing plant ever paid. Free room and board for the people who work there and free meals.

Fuck those stupid goldfarmers, they wreck up the economy of my imaginary game!!!! They are teh lame!

if peple are stupid enough to trade REAL money for FAKE money i say let them. Esspesllly if it helps out people in these 5th world countries.

Actually they do wreck the economies of the games they farm in.

They inflate the economy. Gold sellers in general (in almost any game) are problematic.

Once enough people buy milliions of gold off the farmers it can get to a point where you aren't competitive if you play the normal way.

Of course, one of the largest causes of this are games which (like WoW) are entirely too item-based.

Interestingly enough, Eve Online seems to not have much of this type of activity going on.

Then again, there is a basically functional economy in the game. Nearly everything can be created by the player (if he has the components, a blueprint and a manufacturing facility that he owns or has rented. And on the other end most items can be reprocessed back into base metals.

The one annoying thing in the game is the constant emails from ISK traders on trial accounts. If the trial program weren't necessary to get an Icelandic came into American hands (they don't seem to sell Eve at stores), I'd want them to dump the trial program.

meh. Where are the virtual gold diggers ?

Well, I'm not an expert economist; not even a very good one, but I'll take a stab at this one. Gold farmers make their gold in two basic ways (I'll look at this from the perspective of WoW): 1) they gain trivial amounts of gold from killing humanoid targets and selling "untraded" objects (grays, things which are soulbound to them) and 2) they sell items on the auction house (AH). Now the gold they acquire without trading on the AH contributes to an increase in the available gold supply, which if distributed could lead to inflation in the auctions (as people have more gold to spend on AH objects without a corresponding increase in the availability of AH objects). This shouldn't create a massive amount of inflation, though because a) the amount of gold gained this way is relatively small and b) some percentage of gold transactions are with ingame vendors which remove gold from the economy). So the first part of their goldfarming may lead to inflation, but it may not be that much.

The second method of their goldfarming shouldn't lead to inflation at all. They have gained gold by selling items on the auction house, this comes from non-farmer players. The gold from that transaction is then sold (for dollars) to another non-farmer player. You should notice that the gold isn't coming from the farmer, it's coming from the player who purchased the item; the "gold supply" hasn't really been increased by the farmer, in this case--in fact it has been slightly reduced because auctions cost some small amount of gold. Even more interestingly because of the number of farmers trying hard to sell these items, there is downward pressure on the prices of said items. I suggest that the upward pressure caused by the people who have purchased the gold is probably roughly equitable to, if not less than the downward pressure on the prices. I say this mainly because some of the most expensive items in the game are purchased from vendors, meaning that some proportion of the gold "farmed" is being taken out of the economy.

This actually plays out on servers pretty well; having rolled a character on a brand new server and watching it mature, I feel as though I've seen the evidence to support my theory (namely that prices of hard to find items go down as the server matures).

If there are any actual economists reading this, I'm very curious to see whether I performed a good analysis on this. Obviously the subject interests me. Let me just add that I have no idea how the economies of other games are affected by goldfarming, but even if it caused inflation in wow (which I continue to believe it doesn't) the best items in the game are a) purchased for gold from vendors once you've accumulated honor/reputation or b) gathered on raids. Inflation is clearly helping players with case A, since those prices aren't rising and it should have a roughly neutral effect on case B.

Edit: Okay, I've written quite the novel on this; but it's very rare that I'm actually able to use my economic skills because I'm so bad at understanding them within the context of the global economy. WoW is like a learning example

that made them look like not jerks

Makes sense to me.

On another note, I've bought gold online before under circumstances that I wouldn't be able to compete with other players if I hadn't. I wasn't upset that I had to resort to that. It was a pretty good feeling as I watched my character evolve into something different from the equipment I could purchase.

Some say it destroys a sense of accomplishment for the player and that may be true. It sucks that I didn't get every single roll that I've wanted and it would be awesome if everything I needed dropped the first time... but that will never happen. Buying the gold, to me, saved me a lot of time I really didn't want to have to go through with (such as raiding a particular instance 40+ times for a single drop off one boss).

So, in a way, I'm saying I support the idea, though the way some people carry out that idea could use work.

BTW, I still haven't got that drop I wanted.