[turbinemonkey]

There's tons of people making more within the Microsoft/Oracle/SAP/Apple/etc ecosystems than employees of those companies, too. This is different insofar as the market was not intentionally created, but it's hard to blame him for "exploiting" the circumstances.

[nihilocrat]

I use "exploiting" in a more technical sense here. An exploit is using a bug in the game for personal gain, in an always-on multiplayer game with an economy affecting all players, the permanent effects of an exploit can be much worse. That's not what's happening here, because no bugs are necessarily being exploited (though maybe at one point they were; a buggy drop rate resulting in excessively high yields for farmers, for example) but the farmers tend to get lumped in with the exploiters in the developer's mind because the exploit/fraud departments of customer service work pretty closely together.

Gold farming has generally been considered a fraud of sorts, because it can seriously damage the in-game economy or the player perception of the economy, and many gold farmers perform actual fraud (creating accounts with fake or stolen CC numbers).

[samstave]

The fact that we even have these problems is both amazing and wonderful.

The fact that there are cartels within computer games hiring low cost foreign workers to manipulate a virtual experience for real monetary gain, and there are investigative units trying to track them down is fucking awesome.

I was an original beta player for UO and we had a fantastic run exploiting bugs and high speed Internet connections from the Intel game lab we ran, with multiple accounts to dominate and reach wealth and fame.

It was my golden years of gaming actually. Now I may play an hour or two of skyrim a week if I am lucky.

Back then I was making nearly nearly 70k to play UO from a sick lab 12+hours a day.

[alanfalcon]

"The fact that we even have these problems is both amazing and wonderful. The fact that there are cartels within computer games hiring low cost foreign workers to manipulate a virtual experience for real monetary gain, and there are investigative units trying to track them down is fucking awesome."

From one point of view, sure. It really is a bummer to the player experience since the reality of it is that a company can and will protect itself better than it's users in aggregate will protect themselves, so you just end up with the current WoW situation of a huge stream of hacked accounts draining resources of the game company and destroying the play experience of the players. I'm not sure where any of this is wonderful, really. It isn't like the myth of the gold farmer where they hire out warehouses of employees to play the game building up "new gold" in the player economy, it's just key loggers and trojans and ten million potential victims.