Do you play World of Warcraft, Everquest, Final Fantasy or any other MMORPG? Have you ever purchased any gil that you suspect was produced in a gold farm? Does gold farming raise any ethical concerns for you? We want to hear your story! Leave a comment here or send us a link to your own blog post, and we will make sure to feature it here.
i can haz gil?
photo by stacina
Ive never purchased gold, but i have had a long history of selling it. As a player of World of Warcraft for close to 4 years, i have had many opportunities to hone my skills as a “market force” in the game. You see, that’s what a lot of people don’t seem to comprehend. Gold farmers come in all shapes and sizes, ethnicity’s and locations. Not just in China. Im a perfect example of this. My friends are perfect examples of this. And to many, the process of gold farming seems like a boring, arduous task, its repetitious nature in itself functioning as a vacuum for any fun the game may have. Andi never manipulated anyone to achieve my goals either. I simply understood the functions of a free market economy. No exploitation. No cheating. Just simple common sense.
So what if you’re a gold farmer? Well If you can control one aspect of the free market economy in WoW, then you can develop a reputation, a name for yourself, and in the process stacks and stacks of gold that you can then turn into real world money.
I started humble enough.Before any of the expansions, i held the market on a resource known as encrypted texts. These items could only be farmed from one particular zone, that in itself was an endgame zone. so it limited the amount of people who could actually get to them.
I at one point had close to 10,000 of these items on my character. I understood their value, and sought to make it my prerogative to be the person to go to when a character wanted this item. And there was significant demand for this item. Stacks of these text could be turned in for a reputation reward, which many people are the time were doing to achieve new profession patterns. The demand was there. There was just the question of how to supply it.
If you know how much someone will pay for an item, you can corner the market on that item. And if you corner the market on that item, you can control the distribution, the price, and the amount. so that’s what i did. I began buying up all the text i could find on the auction, while continuing to farm them. Soon enough, the market for these texts became fever pitched. People began to grab them for whatever price they could get them on the Auction hall because they were so sparse.
I slowly began to reintroduce them back into the market. A little at first. Never putting more then 2 stacks (2×20) on the AH at the same time. They were never on for longer then an hour. So i began to raise the price. A little at first. minor increments of 50 silver to 1 gold on a stack. People didn’t seem to notice. The demand was just as hot, as the market was just as thirsty for the items. I became bold, increasing the price by upwards of 5 gold a stack. People still didn’t care. So I decided what the hell, lets really go nuts. I inflated my product by more then 20 gold a stack, ballooning the price to more then 200% its original price. I held the market, so there was no danger of losing out among lower bidders. I was making enough gold that anytime someone did try to undercut my prices, i simply bought him out of everything he had. I OWNED this market.
Similarly to this story there was the guild leader of one of the top three horde guilds on the server. His name was Gauss and he earned himself the reputation of being the enchanting baron of the server i played upon. As guild leader, he had access to large sums of the guilds money, and also the natural resources that the guild had acquired over the course of its existence. Realizing this, he sucked the auction hall dry of an incredibly in high demand item, (generally selling for 20 gold for a stack of 20) then took that item, and began to sell it at the inflated price of 3 gold per piece. And he held the market. He held it for a period of months. Some people say he made close to 50,000 gold from his endeavors which at that time was a fantastic sum of money.
And I made a lot of gold too. And sold a lot of it. Restrictions were much more lax at that time, so there were many free market websites that allowed you as a seller to set your own price for gold. I Was selling close to 300 dollars of gold a month, which would be conveniently deposited into my paypal account at the end of each month. It was fun! And on top of that i made enough to keep my character happy and my friends wealthy for a long time.
I still to this day sell gold, but on a much smaller scale. As i said, the restrictions that are now in place didn’t exist back then so i now sell to a much smaller, more local clientele. But there’s still a thrill involved when you are able to turn something completely virtual into real world currency.
So there you have it. Juts a couple stories from my vast experiences as a world of Warcraft player, and gold farmer.
If you dug what i had to say, I would love to elaborate more on my in game experiences. I have almost 4 years knowledge of the game. So let me know!