{"id":288,"date":"2008-05-12T09:36:59","date_gmt":"2008-05-12T01:36:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chekyang.com\/musings\/?p=288"},"modified":"2008-05-12T09:36:59","modified_gmt":"2008-05-12T01:36:59","slug":"gold-farmers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/2008\/05\/12\/gold-farmers\/","title":{"rendered":"Gold farmers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here’s an interesting bit of news for MMOG researchers, watchers, and players. Source is here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Chengdu’s Shuangliu county has arrested two virtual item and currency traders, surnamed Li and Zhang, focused on tapping out The9’s (Nasdaq: NCTY) licensed MMORPG World of Warcraft (WoW), reports Chengdu Evening News. Police arrested the pair after Li reported Zhang for unfair revenue distribution. Going into business last August, the gold miners accumulated more than 20 employees with 20 computers to generate RMB 1.6 million in seven months of dealing.<\/p>\n

\"\"How is this news of any importance or relevance? Well, MMOG players either really hate and downright resent gold farming, or they’re neutral – the latter especially so if they’ve bought virtual currency before. Either way, gold farming has resulted in large discussion threads in MMOG forums and headaches for gamemasters who have to respond to petitions from irate players complaining about how some player is running a script around a zone harvesting resources.<\/p>\n

I remember for certain the news threads 4-5 years ago on the EverQuest 2 forums; there were huge complaints against these botters with suspicion typically heaped towards the Chinese from players. Several players sent petitions, others tried all sorts of ways to disrupt the automated scripts in which the botters were using to harvest resources in the zone.<\/p>\n

What’s especially interesting is that the Chinese police has taken action against the above WOW gold farmers. It’s not specifically mentioned in the original source if they’d taken action on instigation from Blizzard Entertainment, but it’s unusual nonetheless. The net of police-actionable activities on one’s virtual behavior in MMOGs is clearly growing larger.<\/p>\n

(Picture from http:\/\/www.freakygaming.com\/)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here’s an interesting bit of news for MMOG researchers, watchers, and players. Source is here. Chengdu’s Shuangliu county has arrested two virtual item and currency traders, surnamed Li and Zhang, focused on tapping out The9’s (Nasdaq: NCTY) licensed MMORPG World<\/p>\n

Read More Gold farmers<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[180],"class_list":["post-288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-gaming","wpcat-10-id"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=288"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}