As of April 2008, there were about 16 million active massively multiplayer online game subscriptions according to www.mmogchart.com. (Trivia: 10 million of those subscriptions were for World of Warcraft alone. With less than 1.5 million players, RuneScape was a distant second). With such a growing population of online gamers, it's no wonder farming gold has become huge thing. A recent article in a Singaporean newspaper featured this recent trend but did a poor job at it. Not only had they failed to define the term, they cast it in negative light.
Every online community has an economy that, like in the real world, has a currency - usually in-game gold. For obvious reasons, acquiring gold is necessary for in-game survival (the more the merrier) but it's not necessarily wrong. What's wrong is if the player acquires gold through unethical means like hacking into another account, duplicating items, etc. What's wrong
in addition to that, is selling the unethically acquired items for a profit.
This is where people get confused or misunderstand. I think it's perfectly okay to sell items acquired ethically for a profit. But because of these no-good doers, the term gold farming (now intrinsically associated with exploitation) was coined and among other repercussions, eBay now doesn't allow ANY virtual property auctions to be listed. Another case of greed in human nature destroying a perfectly great way to transact.
Cos really what's the harm in paying real money for some in-game gold to improve virtual game play, especially if one doesn't have the time to hunt for gold? Likewise, if a player has more time on his hands and acquires in-game gold fairly, why can't he be allowed to sell some of it to make a real profit? The time he's put in for the hard earned gold should be worth something shouldn't it? In shaping new law to govern online behaviour, let's not forget that there's more to internet crime than "farming gold". It comes in forms of bullying, harassment and discrimation just to name a few. Perhaps an equal emphasis should be placed on solving these problems as well.
As of April 2008, there were about 16 million active massively multiplayer online game subscriptions according to www.mmogchart.com. (Trivia: 10 million of those subscriptions were for World of Warcraft alone. With less than 1.5 million players, RuneScape was a distant second). With such a growing population of online gamers, it's no wonder farming gold has become huge thing. A recent article in a Singaporean newspaper featured this recent trend but did a poor job at it. Not only had they failed to define the term, they cast it in negative light.
Every online community has an economy that, like in the real world, has a currency - usually in-game gold. For obvious reasons, acquiring gold is necessary for in-game survival (the more the merrier) but it's not necessarily wrong. What's wrong is if the player acquires gold through unethical means like hacking into another account, duplicating items, etc. What's wrong in addition to that, is selling the unethically acquired items for a profit.
This is where people get confused or misunderstand. I think it's perfectly okay to sell items acquired ethically for a profit. But because of these no-good doers, the term gold farming (now intrinsically associated with exploitation) was coined and among other repercussions, eBay now doesn't allow ANY virtual property auctions to be listed. Another case of greed in human nature destroying a perfectly great way to transact.
Cos really what's the harm in paying real money for some in-game gold to improve virtual game play, especially if one doesn't have the time to hunt for gold? Likewise, if a player has more time on his hands and acquires in-game gold fairly, why can't he be allowed to sell some of it to make a real profit? The time he's put in for the hard earned gold should be worth something shouldn't it? In shaping new law to govern online behaviour, let's not forget that there's more to internet crime than "farming gold". It comes in forms of bullying, harassment and discrimation just to name a few. Perhaps an equal emphasis should be placed on solving these problems as well.
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