MMORPG Veteran

Joystiq and a few other blogs have mentioned a documentary about the life of the chinese farmer.
There is one thing that I disagree with:

“The trouble is, outsourcing tends to result in the online replication of the real-world divide between rich and poor. Is it fair that rich people are allowed to skip the low-level gruntwork while poor gamers must suffer through it? Whatever happened to the egalitarian ideal that makes places like World of Warcraft so appealing? Whatever the case, don’t blame the customers, and don’t blame the Chinese. Blame Blizzard. And Canada.”

Someone who is poor in real life can obtain riches in online gaming. Those who are rich offline can skip a few steps, but most games have unwritten signals that you cheated your way to glory. You don’t appear out of nowhere with a max level character with the best gear without *someone* knowing how you obtained it.

The problem with these online crack addictions is the design of the game. As long as a game is based on *skill* you don’t have to worry about the guy who buys the best items with real-life money.

The chinese and other foreigners usually take the blame for the “farming”, but those who have been around long enough know that many of the big time “farmers” are in the United States. Stop being so naive… Many Americans would never pass up the opportunity to jump into a multi-million dollar industry. Why pay someone when you can buy a bot program to do it for you?

Here is a perfect example:
Young American BusinessMan/Woman #1 decides to start an online farming empire. He/She buys 10 computers, a fast internet connection, and networks them all together. If he is smart, he will use a proxy to connect to the game servers if/when some of the accounts get banned.

Next, he will buy the accounts for whatever game. Most likely he will get them all for an extremely cheap price since so many companies offer “refer a friend” discounts. He will make sure to use game cards instead of signing up with a credit card…

Now that he has his game accounts registered, he will do a 2 minute google search to find the best bot for his chosen game. He will be smart enough to choose one that isn’t detectable or write one for himself.

Next, he will monitor the bots and watch the money flow. If he gets lazy and goes “afk”, he will eventually get banned. Who cares? At this point, he has already made more than enough money to cover all losses and buy more accounts.

If the farmers were really smart(World of Warcraft), they would create clans that raid constantly. Once this clan is fully equipped, they can sell their epic drops in Molten Core etc. for thousands of ingame gold..

Tags: World of Warcraft, MMORPG, Lineage 2, Video Games

This entry was posted on Friday, March 17th, 2006 at 7:46 am and is filed under MMORPG. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.