Farming for gold has been a staple in the early days of the Warcraft franchise – in-game at least. Remember those peasants mining for gold in order to sustain the massive armies behind the war of the Humans and the Orcs? Well, those were the days. Now, gold farming has come to mean a different thing altogether.
Gold farming is a practice inside one of the more popular online games for kids and adults alike, World of Warcraft, wherein gamers are decidedly looking to secure all the valuable items they can have (farming) and to exchange them for in-game currencies (gold). This is done deliberately and often times involve doing mundane and repetitive actions in order to amass high volumes of loot.
Collecting gold is not as random as it appears. In huge massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) such as World of Warcraft, these gold farmers are organized well. Groups of farmers are sometimes referred to as sweatshops, work shops or gold farms. Basically, the premise for these gold farmers is “we do all the hard work, just pay us afterwards.”
Because of the millions of unique users in the virtual world of the World of Warcraft, these gold farmers are looking at a very lucrative industry. Judging by the high rates of monthly subscription fees for World of Warcraft, most people inside WoW have money to spare and that is the target market of gold farmers.
Once a gold farmer accumulates enough currencies, valuable items and even game experience, they then try to look for buyers. This industry is described as gold trading or gold selling. This is also closely related to activities such as power-leveling and selling game characters with high levels of experience already. Gold farmers sell their services in order to expedite the gaming experience inside the World of Warcraft.
The history of gold farming took on three development phases – and this is an interesting case study on the parallelism of the virtual World of Warcraft and real-life economy. As with earlier civilizations in our planet, the industry of gold farming started with bartering or the trading of items straight-up. In the 1980s, virtual world users would only trade items for each other. In 1997 it eventually transformed into an economy trading items with the online currency. Two important milestones which also happened during this commercialization phase were the arrival of Ultima Online as a true-blue MMORPG and the emergence of eBay for online transactions.
When the practice of gold farming was deemed profitable, offshoring became a viable option for entrepreneurs in the United States and South Korea. China was a particular destination because of its low cost manpower. The companies who had the foresight for gold farming earned profits during this phase. However, this was short-lived as the entire MMORPG community caught up. Game designers and developers made it harder for gold farmers to do their repetitive farming. Moreover, certain accounts were banned. The entry of many prospective gold farmers also diluted the field. As of late 2008, statistics showed that 400,000 people worldwide were working as gold farmers.
By itself, gold farming does not directly hurt Blizzard’s earnings because it actually encourages more activity inside this virtual world. Hence, more subscription fees. Gold farming is more of an agreement between two players: one wants to toil in order to earn money while the other one does not mind shelling out money as long as items, gold and experience are earned without a sweat. But there are ethical considerations to follow here, especially the deception involved in building a high-level character.
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