The Funeral of WoW Gold

Our friends at Manchester University have published another study looking at developing nations where the poor earn money by wow gold farming or powerlevelling in MMOs. The estimate is half a million people do the work for pay, a supermajority of them in
China. Of the online toilers, 400,000 are involved in gold farming, the rest powerlevelling and other services.
The study’s author admits that precise estimates are not possible because of the underground nature of the activity. But it’s at least a $US 500 million global industry as of now, with organised crime snaking its tendrils into the business.
The growth is entirely predictable and not really a new phenomenon, when you think about it. “When you get people with more money than time and time than money the two will find a way to meet”, said Stephen Davis, of game security firm Secure Play. Quoted for truth.

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IT SOUNDED like a brilliant idea. Google, the internet giant, would bring 3-D virtual worlds to the masses by making them accessible through a web browser. Millions of people log into virtual worlds such as world of warcraft (its currency is wow gold )and Second Life every day, but they require special software and their complexity can be daunting to newcomers. So Google’s launch of Lively, in July, seemed to have great potential. But in the weeks since it opened its virtual doors, Lively has remained surprisingly lifeless, hosting a dwindling number of users and prompting a string of negative reviews.
Lively is a simple environment, amounting to little more than a series of 3-D chat rooms. To enter, you must first download and install a plug-in for your web-browser. You can then choose from a list of rooms, the most popular of which are (inevitably) themed around sex and dating. And although some popular rooms—“Love Sweet Love” and “Sexy Babes Club”—have had thousands of visitors, the number quickly drops into the double digits further down the list. Hardly anyone is using Lively.

Why has it been such a flop? “There’s nothing to do in Lively if you’re not talking to someone,” says Greg Lastowka, an expert on virtual worlds at Rutgers School of Law in
New Jersey. Second Life, he says, offers “commerce and creativity”, and Club Penguin (a popular virtual world for children, owned by Disney) has lots of built-in games.
Not all users are disappointed. Kathleen Schrock, an early adopter of Lively, signed up after using Second Life for nearly two years. Unlike many people, she appreciates its simplicity. “It’s so easy to use,” she says, making it much more approachable for anyone put off by what she calls “the hurdle of Second Life”—the time it takes to get started.
Google denies that it is beaten yet. Mark Young, a member of the Lively team, admits that it has a lot of problems: crashes, log-in difficulties and hard-to-read text. When asked what he hopes to tweak, he says: “Everything. Much of the user interface is not as complete or polished as planned in designs.” He promises a round of updates soon. But Lively also highlights a deeper problem: for all its might, Google’s efforts to diversify beyond its sole money-making business, web search, have yet to set the world—real or virtual—on fire.
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Many virtual worlds hope creating an orderly environment will entice more users — and prevent the need for real-world legal intervention.
Some worlds have devised their own versions of jail, where boredom is the punishment. In Second Life, the largest virtual world, where about 60,000 residents are logged on at any given time, misbehaving avatars used to find themselves stuck in the Corn Field, an eerie place with nothing but endless rows of corn, a decaying tractor and a black-and-white television. The Corn Field still exists but is no longer used as a penalty box.
Another site, called VZones, created the Void, a dull-colored last- chance holding cell where delinquents are sent before getting a final warning or being removed from the world entirely.
“Very rarely does it get to this point,” said Justine Reichman, CEO of VZones.
But sometimes curiosity about these penalties can cause spikes in petty crime. In Cellufun, some characters started breaking rules just to see how their avatar looked behind bars, Goikhman said.
Many virtual universes leave the law in the hands of their users, allowing each world to develop its own moral code.
But a lot of bad behavior is tolerated by residents, said Gartner analyst Stephen Prentice. And often, banished users can simply create new avatars.
“The sanctions that can be taken are pretty minor,” he said. “The problem is that the relationship in identity between an avatar and the real person behind it is quite tenuous.”
Still, groups of peacekeepers have emerged in some worlds to enforce a sort of common law. In World of Warcraft (its currency is wow gold ), a popular online fantasy game, a character who is acting out runs the risk of being attacked by a group of self-appointed sheriffs. While the avatar doesn’t face official penalties, the interference from other players can deter future crimes.
But virtual laws do not always match those in the real world, and users who think they’ve been unjustly punished have sought help in human courtrooms.
In 2006, Linden Lab, the creator of Second Life, canceled Marc Bragg’s account for violating the world’s policies on real-estate deals. Bragg sued
Linden, saying he legally owned the content he created in Second Life, including land and businesses. The suit was eventually settled, and Bragg’s avatar was restored.
Authorities also have intervened in crimes committed in online worlds. In the Netherlands, for example, a teenager was arrested for stealing more than $5,000 worth of virtual furniture in a world called Habbo.
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