MMO Sweatshops

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Rich Tate

Supreme [H]ardness
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Jun 9, 2005
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Although this article isn’t cutting edge news, this subject did come up in our discussion of World of Warcraft yesterday. Some people may not be aware of the ever growing issue of MMO currency sweatshops. I’m sure no one could ever realistically verify any numbers on how many people, or how much they make, but this is the same activity that many companies have come under fire for over the years.

But this Shanghai sweatshop is not churning out T-shirts, trainers or children’s toys. Its workers are known in the computer games world as “gold farmers”. They are playing online games and winning virtual gold, which the owners of the gold farms then sell on to cash-rich, time-poor Westerners for real money.
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Paul Younger, co-editor of worldofwar.net, said: “It’s getting ridiculous. They have started mugging other characters and stripping them of valuables. It’s meant to be a game, but when there’s money involved people will do anything.”

Help! That man stole my purse!

Seriously though that isnt even possible in WoW. Being a Co-editor of a WoW fansite, he should know that.
 
pain.angel said:
Paul Younger, co-editor of worldofwar.net, said: “It’s getting ridiculous. They have started mugging other characters and stripping them of valuables. It’s meant to be a game, but when there’s money involved people will do anything.”

Help! That man stole my purse!

Seriously though that isnt even possible in WoW. Being a Co-editor of a WoW fansite, he should know that.
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I think he is referring to the massive account hacking issues, and the subsequent vendoring of all items for gold to offload to other accounts. I believe he was just trying to correlate it with an example that anybody could understand.
 
Rich Tate said:
I think he is referring to the massive account hacking issues, and the subsequent vendoring of all items for gold to offload to other accounts.
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I suppose so. I've only ever talked to one person who said he had his account hacked in wow and it turned out he tried to sell it or trade it, something, and just got ripped off. So he wasnt really hacked, he gave his password away.
 
Only way to really stop this is to make the North American and European servers completely OFF LIMITS TO ASIA.Developers might also require that North American based credit card accounts be used when subscribing to the N.A. based game servers and same for the Europeans.

This has really gotten far out of hand and is effecting people's ability to enjoy playing mmo's .Time to dry up the gold farmers well on them once and for all.
 
No, that'd be hard to do as well. If that became the case, that'd cut it initially, but then you'd run into other problems.
1) Prepaid cards wouldn't be allowed?
2) They'd get their hands on american based credit cards somehow.
3) American's abroad would be upset and consequently complain.
4) Same would happen if you tried to limit it by IP's. You'd catch some people who use shell's for whatever reason and you'd catch others who maybe travel a lot and would be ticked if they couldn't login.

Seems like in WoW, Blizzard is doing what they can. There's always going to be an exploit, always. The trick is to minimize it and or turn it into something that isn't unexpected and deal with it accordingly.
 
Setiri said:
No, that'd be hard to do as well. If that became the case, that'd cut it initially, but then you'd run into other problems.
1) Prepaid cards wouldn't be allowed?
2) They'd get their hands on american based credit cards somehow.
3) American's abroad would be upset and consequently complain.
4) Same would happen if you tried to limit it by IP's. You'd catch some people who use shell's for whatever reason and you'd catch others who maybe travel a lot and would be ticked if they couldn't login.

Seems like in WoW, Blizzard is doing what they can. There's always going to be an exploit, always. The trick is to minimize it and or turn it into something that isn't unexpected and deal with it accordingly.
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Yes, some of that is true, but trying to solve the problem by making it extremely difficult to next to impossible for them to do is well worth pissing a few folks overseas off.The folks overseas would also be able to do other things to verify who they were, by supplying their NA/European address that could be checked and substantiated.Requiring emails addresses that aren't free is also another thing they could do.

There are plenty of ways to combat the gold farmers, but the mmo companies have to WANT to do this.If they aren't serious about it, then there's little that can be done except to not use the services.If the government ever decides they are going to tax these services then you'll see most of them fold up(at least the asian sweatshops).

Whatever happens, it's only a matter of time before someone comes up with a system that makes these buisnesses obsolete or outright unprofitable to run.I'm in an mmo beta now where harvesting anything besides that needed for crafting is useless and farming won't/can't really get any profit out of the game.It works well so far but only time will tell if it stays that way.
 
Kurgen said:
Only way to really stop this is to make the North American and European servers completely OFF LIMITS TO ASIA.Developers might also require that North American based credit card accounts be used when subscribing to the N.A. based game servers and same for the Europeans.

This has really gotten far out of hand and is effecting people's ability to enjoy playing mmo's .Time to dry up the gold farmers well on them once and for all.
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Yes, let's make a few bad people ruin it for the legitimate gamers.

Most ignorant comment I've seen in a long time.
 
There has also been a trojan making the rounds that installs a keylogger for the express purpose of capturing your WoW login info in order to hijack your account and steal your gold. The scammers embed it somehow so that if you play a "must watch" cool WoW video it will install the keylogger. This "must watch" video then gets touted and makes the rounds of being posted at various WoW forums. The scammers let the innocent victims do all the work of spreading it around.

Pretty scary stuff.
 
Lethal said:
There has also been a trojan making the rounds that installs a keylogger for the express purpose of capturing your WoW login info in order to hijack your account and steal your gold. The scammers embed it somehow so that if you play a "must watch" cool WoW video it will install the keylogger. This "must watch" video then gets touted and makes the rounds of being posted at various WoW forums. The scammers let the innocent victims do all the work of spreading it around.

Pretty scary stuff.
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Which is exactly how folks get their accounts stolen and gear sold.

This whole thing is a very recipricol affair, and it isn't until you start to read up a bit to realize a great deal of MMO problems come from one source.

Excellent point Lethal.
 
The main problem isn't the farmers. Sure they're the ones you see and hear about, but the real guy pulling the strings is sitting safely in his lazyboy checking his stocks. Kill one farming operation and you only kill that one. Kill the drug lord and you just killed whole chunk of them.

I remember seeing that video they're talking about in the artical on youtube.
 
MMO's, MMO's, and more MMO's. It seems that every last company is trying some sort of subscription based MMO. I swear, this MMO bubble is going to pop.
 
As long as people are buying, There will be farmers selling. Its a two way streak, if more people just had better morals and played the games as intended, then the sweatshops wouldn't exist as they would have no one to sell to. No market No sale No Cash. :rolleyes:
 
Rich Tate said:
Which is exactly how folks get their accounts stolen and gear sold.

This whole thing is a very recipricol affair, and it isn't until you start to read up a bit to realize a great deal of MMO problems come from one source.

Excellent point Lethal.
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Yep... another thing is, many online game players aren't very security-conscious, so they'll click just about anything to see said "must-have cool WOW video" without having any protections on their computer, nor even caring what site it's on (COOLFREEPICSSITENEATFUNHAPPYAWESOMESTUFFVIDEOS with an RU extension? NEAT, I WANT TO SEE IT!). This makes it even easier for the scammers to steal people's account info, unfortunately :(.
 
GoldenTiger said:
Yep... another thing is, many online game players aren't very security-conscious, so they'll click just about anything to see said "must-have cool WOW video" without having any protections on their computer, nor even caring what site it's on (COOLFREEPICSSITENEATFUNHAPPYAWESOMESTUFFVIDEOS with an RU extension? NEAT, I WANT TO SEE IT!). This makes it even easier for the scammers to steal people's account info, unfortunately :(.
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Majority of the WoW players are under 15 (funny enough, wow players make fun of that daily) so of course if they see such a thing they will click on it...and a good portion of the mature players who are adults with jobs that didn't grow up using a computer and only use it to play wow will be sucked into it as well.

In terms of gold farming well...stop the buyers and we kick the sellers out.
 
hl3395 said:
The main problem isn't the farmers. Sure they're the ones you see and hear about, but the real guy pulling the strings is sitting safely in his lazyboy checking his stocks. Kill one farming operation and you only kill that one. Kill the drug lord and you just killed whole chunk of them.

I remember seeing that video they're talking about in the artical on youtube.
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That won't change a damn thing. As long as there's a demand for gold (IOW, people with more money than time), there will be gold farmers.

What you suggest will fail for the same reason that killing Escobar in Columbia hasn't stopped the flow of drugs from South and Central america: there's always someone else that's willing to take his place.

Personally, I don't care as much about farming (stealing accounts is another story) as I do about characters that are sold. And I only care about htem, because all too often the buyers don't know WTH they're doing.
 
Lethal said:
There has also been a trojan making the rounds that installs a keylogger for the express purpose of capturing your WoW login info in order to hijack your account and steal your gold. The scammers embed it somehow so that if you play a "must watch" cool WoW video it will install the keylogger. This "must watch" video then gets touted and makes the rounds of being posted at various WoW forums. The scammers let the innocent victims do all the work of spreading it around.

Pretty scary stuff.
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They are even cleverer than that, on at least two occasions the account stealerists have bought advertising space on popular wow community sites and attached keylogging trojans to the ads, which exploited activeX vulnerabilities in IE to down load and install themselves.
 
people need to learn not to click on big flashing things. vista ought to make such progs a good deal harder to implement. but yeah, most accounts get taken because people pay to use leveling services.
 
MartinX said:
They are even cleverer than that, on at least two occasions the account stealerists have bought advertising space on popular wow community sites and attached keylogging trojans to the ads, which exploited activeX vulnerabilities in IE to down load and install themselves.
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Am I the only person who doesn't automatically download stuff with IE or Firefox? I don't play WOW, but if an ad requires activex, I'm not going to download it. If an ad requires flash, I'm not going to see it, because dont like flash. Ok, it is installed on IE, but I only use IE for an alternate email account and for sites that I really REALLY want to view and they require IE and/or Flash.

Me hates flash. Me thinks Flash videos generally look like runny turds. Me thinks Flash ads are both resource hogs and annoying. Me hates flash.

The management wishes to apologize for this offtopic rant against flash. The writer has been fired.
 
MichaelJB said:
As long as people are buying, There will be farmers selling. Its a two way streak, if more people just had better morals and played the games as intended, then the sweatshops wouldn't exist as they would have no one to sell to. No market No sale No Cash. :rolleyes:
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Agreed. Like George Carlin said, "I don't blame the idiots for selling, I blame the idiots for buying!"
 
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