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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New research by the
University of Manchester in England has shown that almost 500,000 people in developing nations earn their living wage by making virtual goods in online games to sell to other players. Roughly 80-percent of the industry is based in China, which employs about 400,000 people who earn an average of about $142 per month.”I initially became aware of wow gold farming through my own games-playing, but assumed it was just a cottage industry,” Professor Richard Heeks, who helped author the report, told the BBC. “In a way that is still true. It’s just that instead of a few dozen cottages, there turn out to be tens of thousands.”In many massively multiplayer online games (such as World of Warcraft, pictured above), players often go to suppliers to get money to outfit their character with better weapons, armor, and other gear. Compared to the time required to actually earn that money, going through gold farmers is often a good deal.While he estimates that the global market in gold farming could be worth about $500 million, he also says this number is inexact — thanks to the pseudo-legality of the practice — and that it could easily be twice as big. Already, he said, gold farming was comparable in size to India’s entire outsourcing industry.”It is also a glimpse into the digital underworld,” Heeks said. “Or at least the edges of a digital underworld populated by scammers and hackers and pornographers and which has spread to the ‘Third World’ far more than we typically realize.”
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I had never even heard of Warhammer until just over a year ago. I had never seen the army pieces you could paint up or even played any Warhammer PC games. So when a fellow World of Warcraft guild member said it was going to be the best MMO ever because it was being developed by Mythic Entertainment, the people that made Dark Age of Camelot, I shrugged it off. I was too busy playing Ultima Online and never got into Dark Age of Camelot. He kept babbling on and on about “Realm vs. Realm” and capturing keeps with siege weapons. World of Warcraft was my game of choice and addiction at that time; I couldn’t imagine playing any other MMORPG. Time traveling forward to the present, my love of wow gold is done. It was a great game, but it wore me down to a nub. All my time in the game was spent chatting in the trade channel, waiting for the arena queues to pop and raid groups to fill up. So, I didn’t hesitate one second when I received that golden ticket in my email that told me to come join the WAR.You can bet that I played through Warhammer Online comparing it to World of Warcraft. I played WoW for years, and my recent burn with Age of Conan had me approaching Warhammer Online even more cautiously. The first thing I noticed while playing Warhammer Online was that the graphics do have a cartoony feel to them, similar to World of Warcraft. While the style of the graphics have similarities, the detailing in Warhammer far outweigh those of it’s predecessor. Whether it’s the massive buildings and cities, the vast environments or the armor and weapon graphics, the detail is everywhere in WAR. I kept having to tell myself this was beta and not the finished product.Mythic has split the game into two main factions, Order and Destruction. Order consists of the Dwarves, High Elves, and Empire, while Destruction is made up of Greenskins, Dark Elves, and Chaos. This type of setup is identical to world of warcraft

as well. The differences are in how these zones are played out. Dwarves and Greenskins, for example, share the same zone and are constantly at war with each other throughout the game. It’s not uncommon to see other factions aiding you in your battles, as no one is limited to only one zone and can take advantage of the flight masters at the war camps.

The character selection in WAR is unmatched. You have ten unique classes per faction to pick from; that’s twenty for those who aren’t counting. Let me repeat this, ten unique classes available for each faction. The closest thing World of Warcraft has to this is the forced lore classes, the Tauren and Nightelf Druids. Just the idea of never running into my same class on the other faction had me tickled. The customization of characters is limited by the Warhammer IP and so you won’t find any characters with pink or blue hair. My most recent character I tested on was the Dwarf Engineer. He’s a stubby guy with a twisted love of guns and explosives. I gave him a long, braided beard with black hair, a couple earrings and nose rings and named him Engie (catchy, huh?). I loaded into the game and found myself in a massive, stone and metal area. Massive doesn’t really do it justice. If big is a
White Castle burger, this was definitely the Hardee’s monster burger. It looked like I was in some type of juiced up siege weapon factory, with large explosions and machinery running. After taking in the sights and sounds, I wandered over to the initial quest giver and started my leveling.
Questing in World of Warcraft for wow gold is boring and really does not tell a story until much later in the game. All of this is gone in Warhammer: the quests smash the lore into your brain and before you know it, you’re starting to resemble your character out of game. Maybe not that drastic, but you definitely get a better feel of the story through even the first WAR quests. My little Dwarf that could, Engie, picked up his first quest and was directed to run down and kill some squigs. Those pesky two-legged creatures are always causing problems. On the way down, I also picked up a quest to blow up a mine shaft and trap the greenskins inside. I killed my four squigs easily with a few ranged shots and smacking them with my wrench and proceeded into the mine to blow up the shaft. I found the trigger to drop the shaft on some goblins and I had completed my first two quests ever as a Dwarf.
If the questing alone has you excited to jump into WAR and smash some skulls, public questing should have your squirming in your chair. Public questing is currently unique to only Warhammer Online, but it is definitely something that every developer will be including in their future MMOs. PQ’s are just simply areas on the map that have objectives. The first objective is usually something easy, like gathering supplies or killing easy NPCs. After the first objective, the group aspect begins and you are asked to kill a set number of harder NPCs and finally down a boss NPC in the last phase. After the boss is downed, a window pops up showing everyone’s contribution in the public quest. Loot is distributed by random rolling and the top contributers gain a scaling bonus to their rolls. While it’s more likely that a higher contributor will win the roll, it is still possible that the last place contributer gets first place in the loot. Public quests vary in their difficulty and the loot from each public quest changes based on that difficulty.

Completing objectives and public quest phases earn your character influence points. Influence is earned in three tiers and opening each tier allows your character to select loot. I found myself farming these public quests with groups of people for the loot and influence. Grouping is similar in ways to WoW, but differs in a few major areas that I noticed. First, group sizes are six and not five like World of Warcraft. Open grouping was the first major difference someone will notice. When your character is not grouped, there is always an icon located below your character’s healthbar. Clicking the open group icon will open up a list of all open groups in your area and anyone can click the button to join. This is great for those that don’t like to spend time finding a group or trying to start one, letting the group form itself. Private groups can be set in the group options, as well. The other major thing about grouping that I noticed was there is not a penalty for questing in a warband. Warbands are larger groups of groups of players. Many public quests start out with a few people and grow into a nearly full warband by the time it’s completed. The loot system in World of Warcraft can bring a grown man to tears. Hours and hours spent in raids and groups, farming the same thing over and over, only to get beat on the roll by someone who doesn’t even need the item. Don’t forget that quest that took you three weeks to complete and only to find out that the item rewards are for a class that isn’t yours. Warhammer Online does all it can to squash these annoyances. Your quest loot is catered to your character; Chaos Marauder quest loot is for a Chaos Marauder. This also holds true for all loot from public questing. Don’t worry, though, there is still plenty of rare loot that drops off players and monsters that can be traded and sold to other classes.
The player vs. player (PvP) in Warhammer Online is something that reminds me of the old wow gold days. You know, way back when the struggle wasn’t over arena gear and arena titles. Back when the players would line up, all different levels, and compete in a virtual tug of war in Hillsbrad. There was nothing to earn and no real reason to be there. Along came the battlegrounds and arenas, and PvP in World of Warcraft became all about the honor, gear, and arena ranks. What Warhammer does great is bring everything together in one massive RvR package. Every quest you complete, every scenario you win, and every keep you smash through and capture all play a role in your character’s, your guild’s, and your realm’s progression through the game. I must add that there is nothing as chaotic and fun as trying to storm a keep with a large group of players inside defending.

The Tome of Knowledge feature in Warhammer Online has recently sent Blizzard into a fury to implement something similar into their game. The tome allows you to track everything that your character has done. Kill twenty five boars and you get a popup with an experience and wow gold reward. There are literally thousands of possible tome unlocks and trying to complete some of the more challenging could keep someone busy for months. Multiple unlocks include titles, and these range from the silly to the really silly. Mythic does a great job of adding their own sense of humor and keeping it Warhammer related. Even though the Tome of Knowledge is not Mythic’s own idea, the way they implemented it into the game is definitely unique. It’s a giant leap ahead of Blizzard’s upcoming achievement system. The tome is not simply about unlocks and rewards; it tells your characters story, where you have been and what you have done.There are many other features in Warhammer Online that can’t be compared to world of warcraft , simply because they are unique to WAR:
Class trainers are able to train up any class in the game
A character can queue up for a scenario from anywhere with the scenario button.
Players have a small circular guide around their characters showing group members.
Flagging yourself for RvR in a lower tiered zone will make your character become a chicken with one health point.
Players automatically receive new storage bags as they level up and quest items are automatically stored in a separate bag.
Players can fully edit their User Interface (UI) and customize it to their preference.
The differences definitely exceed the similarities and I have not ran into anything yet in Warhammer that makes me wish it was more like World of Warcraft.Mythic Entertainment did the impossible with Warhammer Online: it made me go from a skeptic to a rabid fan in a matter of hours. It is what I have been waiting for in a MMORPG for a long time. It takes all of the best parts of other MMOs, adds a crazy Warhammer twist, improves it in a unique Mythic way, and rolls it up into a big ball of MMO goodness. The only question you should be asking yourself is how you are going to pass the time from now until September 18th. WAR is coming!
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Cynthia and Brad Murdock replaced their dining room table with an L-shape desk so they can be side-by-side playing World of Warcraft on their computers.
Cynthia Murdock caught the world of warcraft

bug from her husband — and at first it was just a matter of survival.
Brad, Cynthia’s husband, had played the popular video game for years before he introduced his wife to it in 2007 when an expansion of the game (World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade) came out.
“When we first started dating, I didn’t play, and he played a lot,” recalled Cynthia. “I started playing because I got sick of just lying around watching TV and trying to crochet.”
Besides, said Brad, “We’re sitting side by side while we’re playing so we can talk to each other. We’re talking about what we’re doing and how our day was while we’re playing.” (Here’s how serious they are about the game. They’ve removed their dining room table and replaced it with an L-shape desk capable of supporting two computers.)
Frank Pearce, a founding member and the senior vice president of product development for Blizzard Entertainment — the game’s developer and production company — believes he knows why couples such as the Murdocks might prefer staying in all weekend playing Warcraft to going out.
“There’s a huge social element to the game. We’ve had this huge massive community grow out of the experience,” Pearce said. “The community is really a big factor that draws people into the game and keeps them in the game as well.”

For the uninitiated, World of Warcraft is what’s known in the trade as a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, or MMORPG. People from all over the world participate simultaneously in these games in which participants are integral characters in a virtual world. The game has 10 million subscribers worldwide.

Unlike most video games targeted at younger men, Warcraft has succeeded in bringing women to the game with a diversity of features.
“It’s a social experience; it’s not just an entertainment experience,” Pearce said.
In fact, many women play because of the social aspect. “It’s real-time interaction with other people, and you’re not just sitting there fighting against some boss (enemy) that doesn’t have a brain behind it,” said Cynthia. “I really, really like playing with other people.”
The latest expansion of the game, World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King, is rumored to be coming within the next year, although Blizzard would not give a specific release date.
“We typically try to avoid launch windows until we’re pretty sure we can achieve them,” Pearce said.
The Murdocks say that World of Warcraft has brought them closer together and saved them a ton of money，only money for wow gold in the process.
Of course, some wives of gamers aren’t buying.
Michael Akers, a waiter at a restaurant in
Kennesaw, Ga., prefers to wait for his wife to fall asleep before logging into the World of Warcraft. A self-described recluse, Akers seldom ventures out of the house, other than to go to work, but still wants to be connected to the outside world. Playing the game allows him to do that.
“My friends all know that I don’t like talking on the phone or going to parties. I’m a bit of a hermit,” Akers said.
Akers has yet to persuade his wife, Andrea, to purchase an L-shaped desk for their dining room and pull up a chair alongside him to play the game.
“I want to play all the time, but I have to at least spend some time with the wife,” Akers said by phone. “It’s funny, because her twin sister plays (Warcraft) with her husband all the time.”
When World of Warcraft debuted, according to Pearce, nobody on the design team had any idea how popular the title would become.
He knows that for some players, the game can be addictive. Warned Pearce: “I think it’s up to each player to decide what the point of the game is for them.”
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While the internet has brought a whole new wave of users to the internet gaming industry there are some things behind the scenes that the leaders would not want you to see. Even though the major gaming companies have nothing to do with them, there has been a massive growth in the use of so called ‘virtual sweatshops’ where people are paid a pittance to earn gaming points for so called ‘wow gold farmers’ around the world.So what is it and how does it all work?The online gaming industry has seen games such as World of Warcraft and Lineage move to the top of the popularity league with players earning so called ‘virtual gold’ by fighting and defeating an array of deadly monsters. In simple terms players are allowed to swap this ‘gold’ for services, skills and more recently money as ‘virtual gold’ is fast becoming the ‘currency’ of choice in the world of online gaming.It has been estimated that there are at least 400,000 people employed in ‘cyber sweatshops’ around the world earning as little as £
80 a month, but making literally millions of pounds for their employers. This is the dark side of online gaming but one which is been dragged more and more into the limelight.
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They’ve been mocked as mind-numbing, juvenile and even addictive, but it turns out video games can actually make you smarter, according to a blockbuster presentation yesterday at the American Psychological Association convention in Boston.
Researchers detailed a series of studies showing that today’s gamers could well be tomorrow’s surgeons. Their surprising conclusions included:
The popular multiplayer online game “world of warcraft
” can improve scientific thinking.
Laparoscopic surgeons who play video games are 27 percent faster at advanced surgical procedures and made 37 percent fewer errors than non-gamers.
“There are some very compelling cases that video-game playing leads to advanced problem-solving in math, science, and spatial skills,” said
Fordham University psychologist Fran C. Blumberg. “I do think it has benefits.”
The study of surgeons was conducted by Iowa State University psychologist Dr. Douglas Gentile; Dr. Paul Lynch, associate professor of anestheology at the Mayo Clinic; and other researchers.
“I noticed that, invariably, the doctors who played video games were better at surgery,” Lynch said.
Gentile and Lynch argue that video games are producing a generation of more adept surgeons. And here’s the good news: The rest of the game-playing world is reaping benefits too.
With 92 percent of kids playing some sort of video game, Gentile says it’s become a “natural learning tool” for younger audiences.
But he warned that monitoring the content of what kids are playing was instrumental in gleaning gaming benefits.
Gleeful Hub gamers said they were not surprised by the results of the study.
“I can’t say I’m shocked. Games have definitely improved my concentration and reactions . . . especially for driving,” said 35-year-old Chris Boswell, a scientific researcher from Cambridge, who owns a PlayStation 2, a PSP and a Nintendo Wii.
Christopher Cavallacci, 21, an international relations student at Boston University, agreed, but warned “there is a severe downside.”
“It dulls the ability to finitely concentrate on anything that doesn’t have a million things going on at once, such as studying law books or history books.”
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Does “stop playing video games, you’re wasting your time” sound annoying? According to researchers gathered at the American Psychological Association convention in
Boston, this is completely untrue! On the contrary, it appears that today’s gamer is tomorrow’s top laparoscopic surgeon!
It may sound rather strange at first, but the researchers backed up their affirmation by using an eloquent example: World of Warcraft (Buy wow gold ). The world’s most popular multiplayer online game has already attracted millions of ardent gamers from all over the world and continues to expand.
What many thought to be a waste of time now proves to actually stimulate thinking, improving skills in systematic investigation and problem solving. Psychologist Douglas Gentile, co-author of the study, explained that surgeons who’ve played video games in the past were better predictors of surgical skills that years of training and surgeries performed didn’t provide.
“So the first question you might ask your surgeon is how many of these (surgeries) have you done and the second question is ‘Are you a gamer?,” Gentile said, as quoted by the Associated Press.
In addition to the chat rooms, where players interact and share knowledge to solve problems, the forums on world of warcraft are just as relevant, showing that gamers are capable of creating an environment in which informal scientific skills are being exchanged.
Although it appears that young people think more strategically than more mature people, and that they see the game from different perspectives, World of Warcraft enthusiasts seem to be more likely to develop scientific skills.
That of course doesn’t guarantee that by playing a video game you’ll become a brilliant surgeon or some sort of genius. Even World of Warcraft advices us to “take all things in moderation,” so enjoy playing and don’t forget you have a life outside the game.

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The BBC has suddenly caught on to the growing industry of wow gold-farming, where MMO players pay others, often located in a call-center type of operation in a developing nation, to level-up characters for them, earning virtual world currency along the way.
In
China, two World of Warcraft gold farmers were arrested this spring for “unfair revenue distribution.” In seven months, with a staff of 20, the two had made over 1.6 million RMB (equivalent to about $200,000 USD). In 2007, the New York Times profiled individuals in the gold farming industry, and estimated that gold farming was responsible for the majority of the goods traded in the $1.8 billion per year virtual goods market.
In the gaming world, working your way through the lower levels can be tedious and boring. Paying someone else to do it for you, accumulating currency and objects along the way, is against most games’ end-user license agreements, but the temptation is always going to be there. The underground industry, especially as described in the Times’ article, is a modern, voluntary version of feudalism, where workers make next to nothing for those who own the gold farms, and the entire system is held up by the money of the players in developed countries. Rather than continue attempting to ban the practice, it might make more sense for the gaming companies to regulate the industry, creating a more equitable arrangement for those doing the actual work.
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