Gold Farming

Gold Farmers

You most likely have heard about MMORPGS that you can play on the computer by now. MMORPG stands for Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, you usually create a character, choose its style, race, hair and compete or play with others in a virtual world trying to collect rare items, become the best and mostly role-play your character. There hardly ever is any role-playing anymore in MMORPGS, its a lot like real life and has become so addicting and popular that people started earning real cash, yes real cash, from selling virtual items, characters and more in the game.

What?
MMORPG farming is how these people make real cash off MMORPGS. Farming is a term used to say when someone is collecting loads of items, in-game currency or levelling the account like crazy and online most of the day, so if you think about it, its a lot like a real farm.

Who?
Anyone can become or establish a MMORPG farm and earn money from it. The most experienced business people and people who want to get in it seriously establish business plans and go to third-world countries and set up sweat shops. They are legit businesses and ran by legit business people, but behind those people are others working in their sweat shops in third-world countries, maybe paid $0.50 an hour or are told to reach a quota and if they don’t they might get fired.

When
Anytime of the day, well actually most of the day I would estimate roughly 15-24 hours a day and that’s not surprising. Most farmers work at night as mostly everyone who is legit is in bed and resting.

Where
Well most farmers are in third-word countries being paid low wages and must meet a quota. Most of these countries include, China, Indonesia, Africa and Nigeria. Now of course they play on their computers, but what games do they play? Well there is many popular ones out now which are, World of War craft, Guild wars and even a few non-popular games.

How are they doing this? Simple, there are so many people working for them and they are making so much that its almost impossible for game developers to stop them. Most experienced farmers set up businesses and sweat shops, sell on Ebay and even establish their own site. Ebay is a common place to find items, money and more for sale for any MMORPG basically in-existence. They have tried many times to shut the auctions down but there are so many of them now that it is almost impossible. Is this bad for the game? The answer is yes. Most experienced farmers who own companies are good at finding exploits in the game to get what they want fairly and even often make software to exploit the game for their staffs use only. It also ruins the game play, for example if we were to spend hours a day working hard and finally getting our character to a high level in a game and some person comes along and kills you with his mighty higher level character that he bought off Ebay which took the company a few days to level and get all his items.

Will this ever stop? In the future yes, in present time no. There are just simply too many ways and too many people exploiting the games to stop it. The only way to fight back is for game developers to add-in features that will help or stop farming.