The Funeral of WoW Gold

Andy Crowther used to have time to play a lot of computer games. Not any more. At 33, he is now a supermarket manager in
North London and has a girlfriend.
Despite the intrusion of real life, Mr Crowther still enjoys slaughtering hordes of monsters and capturing treasure in online games such as World of Warcraft and Star Wars Galaxies. But, like increasing numbers of gamers, he no longer has endless hours to earn the “virtual wow gold” needed to buy weapons and upgrades which make the game more fun. Luckily for him, 400,000 geeks, mostly in East Asia, are available for hire at the click of a button.
Packed into rooms and sleeping two to a mat, Chinese or Vietnamese “gold farmers” spend up to 14 hours a day in front of their computer screens, immersed in complex three-dimensional virtual worlds known as massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs).
They are “employed” by the four million people who buy wow gold online, including hundreds of thousands in Britain. By defeating enemies and completing mundane quests over and over again, the gold farmers’ characters amass virtual gold that can then be sold online - for real money - to Westerners with better things to do.
The practice is not new. But the scale of it has mushroomed into a business worth £400 million a year, according to research from Manchester University released this week.
With an estimated 20 million paying users, MMOGs form one of the fastest growing areas of the internet. Millions of devotees take part in activities such as Everquest, Second Life and Age of Conan around the clock. They team up to fight monsters and each other, acquire treasure or simply hang out in nightclubs and coffee bars.
But to succeed in the game, a player needs money for equipment. Around £10 will buy enough for a decent sword in World of Warcraft. But a fully fledged, Level 80 character in Age of Conan, one of the newest MMOGs, can cost up to £300 on eBay.
Buying wow gold online is not illegal but it breaches the game companies’ terms and conditions. Players who are caught risk having their accounts cancelled and their characters eliminated.
Mr Crowther, known in the gaming community as McBain, spent £25 on gold from a Chinese website last month that he then used to buy a virtual horse. “If I hadn’t have bought the gold I would have had to play for months to earn enough for a mount,” he said. “World of Warcraft takes too long if you play it by yourself. I’m not a student any more. I don’t have time to spend eight or nine hours a day online. If I can afford to take a shortcut then why not?”
Lee Baker, 33, an IT manager from Watford, also refused to spend months building up his World of Warcraft account. “Most multiplayer games force you to complete the same action over and over again,” he said. “You might be sent on a quest which takes 20 minutes to get to. That’s 20 minutes of your life holding down one button, running around. A lot of us can’t be bothered to do that.
“Buying wow gold means you can get whatever equipment you want. It leaves you free to enjoy the game.” Mr Baker, known in the gaming world as Lestat, said that his friends who disagreed with gold farming usually did not have jobs. “This one guy is really passionately against it,” he said. “But he plays games from 8am until 3am. I can’t and wouldn’t want to do that.”
Mr Baker recently paid £39.99 to a Chinese-based gold-farming site for 5,000 gold pieces that he then spent on his World of Warcraft character. “With that I could buy whatever I wanted. If I had done it properly, I would have had to complete twenty-five quests a day for ten days. Why spend that much time playing the game when you can spend a bit of cash and get past that?”
The temptation to buy wow gold grows as gamers progress on their virtual quests - more complex characters require more money to maintain. “You have to feed your horse, look after your armour, things like that,” Mr Baker said.
Professor Richard Heeks, who wrote the Manchester University report, said that gold farming had started off as a cottage industry but is now an economic sector “comparable in size to the Indian software industry”. He said: “In one Chinese town so many people were employed as gold farmers that they renamed it Heaven of Legend after the online game Legend of Mir,” he said.
He dismissed criticism that Chinese gold farmers were living in sweatshop conditions. “Fine, it’s not a five-star hotel. But they’re paid £77 a month, which is higher than the average wage, and they’re given a place to sleep and fed. By Western standards it’s not much but wow gold farming is benefiting a lot of people.”
Steven David, chief of the game security firm Secure Play, said that gold farming had burgeoned in size. “When you get people with more money than time and people with more time than money the two will find a way to meet,” he said.
Gold farmers caught practising their trade online have often suffered abuse from irate Western players who consider the practice to be cheating. One told Professor Hicks: “They treat me bad …They keep calling me farmer, China dog and such. They non-stop racist me.”
But for others, the virtual world offers an escape from their impoverished lives. Ge Jin, a PhD student at the University of California who filmed scenes from a Chinese wow gold farm in 2006, said: “Their virtual lives give them access to power, status and wealth which they can hardly imagine in real life.”
Not all gold farming is located in East Asia. One anonymous farmer, based in America, wrote on his blog that his first tax return for 2001 showed $150,623.78 after expenses. Seven years later “the business was approaching $800,00 [£440,000] a year in income with hardly any costs associated with it.”
Gold farming is proving so lucrative that criminal gangs are increasingly cashing in on it. Hundreds of fake sites purporting to sell wow gold for the major online games have sprung up, taking money from players and not handing over the gold.
But for thousands of British gamers who refuse to dedicate their lives to their computers, the chance to play as a Level 80 Warlock has proved too much to resist.
VIRTUAL GAMES - REAL STAKES
— The real dollars spent playing the game EverQuest would make it the 77th richest nation
— A 22-year-old Australian paid nearly £14,000 for a virtual island in the game Project Entropia
— World of Warcraft is the largest massively multiplayer online game, with more than tenmillion subscribers
— A baby reportedly suffocated in South Korea while her parents played World of Warcraft in a local café
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The ESL had announced that the second Global Challenge event would not take place in New York City after the Digital Life Trade Fair was canceled, which left the organisation in a quest to find an adequate replacement on U.S. soil.It has now been confirmed that the second Global Challenge, which will feature Counter-Strike: 1.6 and World of Warcraft (Currency: wow gold), is due to take place at the E for All Expo in Los Angeles from October 3rd-5th.Sixteen Counter-Strike and World of Warcraft teams will clash for a total prize purse of $80,000 USD, as well as two continental spots in the season’s Global Finals.The ESL event is scheduled to take place at the exact same time as Major League Gaming’s third PC Circuit event, which will be held Dallas, Texas, and will feature World of Warcraft as well.For detailed info on how to participate in the Global Challenge event, visit the ESL page

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Thankfully, I had a less eventful Sunday. After brunch with friends, I played some more of my level 70, continuing to explore new areas in Northrend and killing tougher and tougher enemies, inevitably dying a few times as I soloed. I found a neat chain of quests where I was to investigate the mysterious circumstances of the death of some woman’s brother, which included finding an old bottle of wine in a shipwreck and… fighting a shark. After I’d done several quests on this chain, I went back to my Death Knight.
With my Death Knight working again, I went and stole a horse. I was rewarded with a faster, cooler-looking one — an Acherus Deathcharger. I also collected items, wow gold and — you guessed it — killed even more enemies. One particularly memorable quest tasked me with killing 100 scarlet defenders. Not 10, not 20… 100. Even someone on the general chat was flipping out about it. But I knew there had to be some sort of catch. The quest told me to sneak into a mine cart near an outhouse. The cart was then dragged through an area with dozens of enemies. I ended up a on ship with a cannon conveniently ready to use and aimed at their direction. From there, I was able to shoot fire or lightning at dozens of enemies at a time, and, with a partner, I finished the quest easily in a few minutes. I wish it lasted longer.
As I progressed through the quests, I leveled from 55 to 57 and received talent points (Death Knights have blood, frost and unholy trees), wow gold, new skills (like “Raise Dead,” the ability to summon a ghoulish minion from a corpse) and better gear. With four hours logged today, I decided to stop playing and go outside (I’d like “massive” to not also refer to how much weight I gain sitting in front of my computer).
VERDICT: As expected, “Wrath of the Lich King” is more of the same — but better. Just when you thought Blizzard couldn’t do anything else after “The Burning Crusade,” they’ve added a new hero class with its own storyline and its unique set of skills, which combines elements of the other classes. The expansion looks like it will satisfy those “World of Warcraft” players who want new scenery to explore and new enemies to kill, as well as new raids, battlegrounds and dungeons. Every aspect of the game has additions to please any kind of “WoW” player, including the Achievements and significant user interface improvements.
With “Lich King,” Blizzard continues to raise the bar for what players can expect from MMORPGS. In other words, yes, I will be spending many a weekend playing “Lich King” when it comes out later this year.
Besides, I only have 514 Achievements to go.

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My Saturday was, unfortunately, jam-packed with shopping for a present for my cousin’s baby shower. That evening I had to attend said baby shower. After dinner, I came home and logged on to the beta. This time, I decided to play my level 70 night elf druid copied from my existing account. My character began where I last left her, in the “Burning Crusade” city of
Shattrath.
First, I spent at least a half-hour looking at my Achievements. Honestly, I don’t even care that much about Achievements on Xbox Live. However, in a game like “world of warcraft” where I usually feel terrible for playing more than a few hours with nothing to show for it, well… Achievements are now the thing I have to show for it (though I admit they are still meaningless to anyone I know who doesn’t play “WoW”). I had 42 out of 556 Achievements, totaling 420 Achievement Points. Though I haven’t PVPed or raided much with this character, I still had quite a few including some “Feat of Strength” ones (recognition for in-game tasks that are obsolete, worth 0 points). It also showed me some useful (and depressing?) stats — like how I’ve completed over 1000 quests and gain wow gold. It also said I fell 164 feet once without dying (really?).
Anyway, enough Achievements.
I made my way to the old-world city of Stormwind, which now has a harbor where I can take a boat to the new expansion continent of Northrend. I hopped on the right ship, which took me to Valiance Keep. At the port, I re-speced my druid. After thinking way too long about where to spend my points, I just loaded my Balance tree (spell-casting) with all of my talent points.
Typical for the beginning of any new area in the game, at Valiance Keep I was overwhelmed with quests that required me to find and talk to certain NPCs, investigate different locations, kill a certain number of various enemies, etc. I pretty much soloed the whole time, stopping occasionally to replenish my health and mana points. With so many people doing the same quests, there were times when I had to camp out for a certain NPC I needed to kill. One time, after waiting a few minutes until my turn, a hunter cut in front of me and ninja’ed the boss with his pet (the nerve). Thankfully, I soon made friends with a 71 druid nearby who I grouped with. After helping out in a few quests and killing various enemies, he said he had to leave to go get some ice cream. Yeah, that’s right — I was ditched for ice cream. Sad. But it was a good idea, so I too, took an ice cream break.
After a 15-minute ice cream break, I ventured into a new area called Riplash Strand, which has all kinds of beach and underwater humanoids and creatures to kill. One quest had me kill a beast named Leviroth, located under an iceberg. He was a ginormous level 72 elite (translation: really hard, a lot of hit points). But I was equipped with a special quest item that made him much easier than I anticipated. For that, I got 30,000 XP points, and for once, I was out of quests. Seemed like a good time to stop and get some sleep.
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MMOGs take a lot of time.
There’s no way we can play them all, so what are we to do? In this periodic feature called “Massive Weekend,” I decided to give an MMOG three days’ time — in between life’s commitments — to convince me that it’s worth playing later on.
I recently had a chance to try the beta of the new “World of Warcraft” (Currency: wow gold) expansion “Wrath of the Lich King.” Sure, I’ve already played the original game and the first expansion, “The Burning Crusade.” But does “Lich King” add enough to retain my interest?
Read on to see how my “WoW”-filled weekend went…
FRIDAY, DAY ONE (2 hours, 3 minutes logged)After watching way too much of the Olympics, it was finally time to kick off my massive weekend. I had the choice of starting the new-to-”Lich King” hero class the Death Knight or playing one of my ported-over characters. I went with the Death Knight, which I’ve heard described multiple times as “badass.” The beta let me begin with a level 55 character of any race, the minimum level at which Death Knights can be created with players’ existing characters. I chose a male Orc and named him “Ooganar,” using the name randomization button (much better than the plain “Anna” or the unpronouncable “Ghtshana” as it had suggested).
After I created my character, I was treated to a short scene that explained the Death Knight class. Suddenly, my character appeared in the Horde-only Death Knight city Acherus, located in the old-world area of the
Eastern Plaguelands. And surprisingly, standing only a few feet away from me was the big boss himself, the Lich King. You know, just hanging out on the balcony, ready to give new recruits like Ooganar their marching orders. (Doesn’t he have an assistant who could do this? Also, he’s a lot smaller in-person than I thought he would be.) With a bright yellow exclamation mark above his head (quest!), he told me, “You will become my force of retribution. Where you tread, doom will follow. Go now, and claim your destiny death knight.” Okay, sure. Then I set off on a chain of quests to become a proper Death Knight.
First, I had to talk to a trainer and create a proper Death Knight weapon; I got a runeblade to create a runeforged sword. The Death Knights use runes and Runic Power — instead of mana, energy or rage that other character classes have — giving them special attacks and abilities. Next, I had to kill another Death Knight initiate (an NPC) or be killed. I had all these skills loaded into my hot bar, but I didn’t know what to do with them just yet. I just pushed them all (”Death Grip” sounds good; “Icy Touch,” why not?), and defeated the initiate in one try.
Then I had a quest where I was to use the Eye of Acherus. Essentially I became a giant floating eyeball that was to spy on an enemy town at key landmarks. It was a little confusing at first, but after several tries, my eyeball survived the attacks from the village guards.
Finally, I was ready for war. From there, I teleported to a campground called Death’s Breach. I found a slew of quests, which included dueling other Death Knights, killing enemies and collecting items. Another early quest, called “Grand Theft Palomino,” asked me to steal a horse from a local farm. On my way to doing so, I was attacked by three enemies at once (they seemed to spawn everywhere), and died. A Val’kyr Battle-maiden flew in from the sky to resurrect me. Cool. But then I died again (respawned next to some more enemies).
Then, tragedy struck. I couldn’t log back on. The game kept crashing when I tried to log onto my dead Death Knight. It was pretty late anyway, and I decided to end my Friday night early.
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