*Please not that views and expressions in this editorial does not neccessarily reflect those of WoW Stratics and the Stratics Network; it is a personal opinion.

A problem which has yet been lying in the dark is about to surface. Until now it's been severely limited and not had any impact on gameplay and overall game economy in the past MMORPG's, but during the Lineage 2 open beta this has come to be more than just a minor nuisance. It's getting to be a big problem which must be controlled before it starts running rampant in other MMORPG's like WoW. What am I talking about?

A phenomenon that has generally been known as “Adena Farming”.

That name originates from Lineage 2 were the currency is known as Adena, since I'm addressing the problem in general, I will for the rest of this article refer to it as Money Farming or just MF.

Now, I'm not talking about when you and your friends head out into Elwynn Forest to kill low-level creeps for money to buy that new sword you've always wanted, that's part of the gameplay and is naturally not a problem. What I am talking about is organized cooperate money farming. More specifically "factories" localized in countries with good and cheap internet connections, yet low living costs, wages and rampant child labor problems: In other words Asia . People, often children, are hired to sit day in and day out farming virtual money or maintaining bots which farms for them. The money is then sold for real life currency on places like EBay. The consequence of this is a quickly spread inflation which in turn can make potential healthy economies crumble.

Before moving on we have to ask ourselves; why has this problem occurred in the first place?

As early as 1998 we could all read about the first E-bay sales taking place in Ultima Online, complete accounts with houses, developed characters and tons of items went for hundreds of dollars. A new phenomenon had occurred, a real economy had been created, the in game currency and economy was no longer isolated, but one which had a real (albeit loose) exchange rates to existing currencies. A few years ago I read a PhD paper in economy written on the subject of virtual assets and how it's no longer isolated to the game worlds. The article concluded that someone who decided to "work" in Everquest would be able to make up to 10 USD (United States Dollars) an hour doing so, and that the GNP per capita of the citizens of Norrath was about the same as that of Russia . This has occurred even though Sony - in contrary to OSI -strictly prohibited the sale of in game assets for real life money.

Bearing this in mind I think the question isn't as much as why MF is getting to be a problem now, but why it hasn't been so earlier. While 10 USD an hour might not be impressive by western standards, it's a very high salary for most people in countries like China and India . So why is this a problem? Is it really a problem that poor people in these countries have a new way to make a living?

The main problem here lies with availability and knowledge. Those people who could have made a decent living off this seldom have access to computers and very seldom know what kind of money is really in this. Some clever business men in countries like China and India has realized this and the potential of money farming and has thus started these MF factories. They employ poor people, often children, train them in how to use bots or how to farm cash manually, pay them little to nothing and sell the money farmed on E-bay for real life cash.

The consequence is divided into two parts. First of all this is another way to exploit children, which brings suffering far worse than that of the players. Child labor is a terrible thing, and although some might ask if this has negative effects on the children, as they are after all “being paid to play a computer game”. However this has little to do with having fun playing a computer game. Imagine sitting for hours and hours killing the same monsters over and over again without having any specific goal often 12-14 hours every day, day after day in a small poor ventilated building.
The second problem is more of a selfish one, albeit more directly a problem for us gamers, the continual flow of in game cash sold on EBay will quickly drive the in game moneys value down, breaking the economy. The value of in game cash and items in real world currency will quickly drop due to increased availability, making it cheap and easy for everyone to buy in game assets. Why waste twenty hours hunting low level creeps for cash, when you can buy enough money to do so for 10 USD?

A third consequence isn't as obvious as the other two, but following Lineage 2 during beta I've seen it's gotten to be a quite serious one. Although the perpetrators usually denies it, racism is getting more and more usual and to some extent almost accepted by western gamers.
Since these sweatshop money farms are localized in Asia , Asian players in general are often viewed with suspicion. Especially since botters almost always use a so called “country tag” in their names, which is two letters describing which country they come from, names like “CNpoang05” are quite usual.

Traditionally MMORPGs has had minimal problems with racism and discrimination, even though most of us would like to think that's because we gamers are an accepting breed, which I think the vast majority of us are too, it would be naïve to think there's not bad apples amongst us. So the primary reason there's been so little problems with the mixed nationalities is the anonymousness of the games, you have no idea who plays the character running past you, without specifically asking, and even then you have no guarantee that the reply will be truthful.

When corporate money farmers use country tags, players will, knowingly or not, attain a bad impression of Asian gamers in general. And since the guy who just resurrected you and gave you your stuff back doesn't declare himself to be Chinese, you will end up with quite a lot of bad impressions but not a whole lot of good ones.

The ominous result of this is that, if nothing gets done about the issue, players won't want to reveal themselves as Asians, because if they do, they will be viewed with suspecting eyes by their fellow players.

Can anything really be done about this? The most traditional and most frequently used action it forbidding the sales of in-game items and currency, threatening with bans and blocking of IP's and CC's for those who do so. Experience with particularly Everquest shows that this has little or no effect, web-auction sites like e-bay refuse to forbid such trade, and even if they did, there's countless other auction-sites which would be happy to take over the traffic.

Other more drastic measures are those of NCSoft, the producers of Lineage and Lineage 2, they have decided to ban Asian-based IP's from the North-American and European version of the games. This is a measure I strongly oppose, as I feel it has more negative consequences than positive ones. One of the main points with MMORPG's is the bond that it creates across the world; it doesn't matter if you're from New York or Beijing . MMORPG's unite people with the similar love for role playing games and computer games, and if you part the world in two, Asia and US/EU, and block them from interacting with one another, you loose something essential.

But then again, what are you supposed to do? Let this problem run rampant? I'm positive NCSoft didn't take such extreme action without seriously considering the consequences.

I don't have all the answers, but I trust Blizzard will do whatever is necessary to minimize the problem.

Written by: Lord Anders

» Advertisement «