How a Gold Farm Works

[jionger]

Here is a very interesting article titled "How a Gold Farm Works" and it's gonna be very long. Here is a most informative post in the thread:

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I guess I should mention, as I failed to in my last post, that I have been in the process of dismantling my "business" since Christmas. You may wonder why I do not just fold it up completely and immediately, but that lies in needing to make sure that those I am responsible for, are taken care of. I expect to be completely done within the month.

This is going to be long, but I'd like to explain what my business essentially was, and my views on things in general and why what is currently going on is quite serious for EQ. Not just for the plat sellers like I was, or just those who rely on bazaar gears and trading to equip their character, but also those at the raiding level. While it certainly impacts raiders the least, it does eventually.

I started selling about 7 years ago. I started on my home server, amongst a few other sellers. At the time EQ was EQ, no expansions, fairly new, and you could sell 1,000 platinum for $500. I got into selling because of a GM at the time who I spoke to on occasion who was selling platinum and other items from places like mistmoore, guk, and solusek b. This was at a time a GM was an unpaid volunteer player, and the kinks hadn't been worked out as far as the EULA which forbid the buying and selling of intellectual property.
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Link from: http://www.trade4game.com/html/news/23.htm
Another Link: http://www.trade4game.com/gw.htm

[rpgreseller]

This article seems titled incorrectly because is doesn't really talk about how gold farms work very much, and it doesn't go into detail concerning dupes.

Ge Gin is doing a documentary on gold farms, specificly Chinese. He covers both sides of the coin, and you can view the first half of the doc (which has already aired on MTV) at his website chinesegoldfarms.com

As far as dupes go, the author didn't know that plat in EQ was actually made out of thin air, and for a much longer time period that he was aware of. I don't mean macros when I say thin air, I mean hacks. 1 million gold as fast as you can log in? Done.

The 'conglomerate' was pretty loose and it wasn't the resellers, but the suppliers that were fixing the prices. The suppliers with the ability to produce millions on demand had unlimited gold, and they sold it at a specific price that was competitive with legit farmers, but just slightly lower. This makes sense. If you can make a corvette for a penny, you're going to sell it for as much as possible, not for two pennies and then be happy you doubled your profit.

If you dickered around, you might be able to get them to offer you slightly lower prices, but their situation was that if you didn't buy, someone else would. Not a lot of power to negotiate with someone that can essentially print money. If you want in the market, you buy. The people with the powerful exploits became market leaders for multiple reasons. For one, it's really nice to only have to deal with one supplier instead of dozens in order to run your business.

Modern goldfarms have to use everything that they can in order to compete in this market. EQ is still wide open and I know people that could give me a million plat on every server by the end of the day if I asked for it. It doesn't have to be like that, but the company refuses to fix a few lines of code when a problem is found. Contrary to his statement, the economy had little to do with players leaving the game. Too many expansions were being released and new games were coming out. ie. world of warcraft. EQ simply hit it's life span.

Games like WOW are much more difficult to exploit as massivelly as EQ. Due to this, manual playing still pays. It pays for Millions of workers in China and the Philipines. Occasionally, american gamers work the economy too, but to remain competitive and make a real business of it, they have to run bots. It's kind of sad to hear the author lost his business due to pristine ethics. Running a hack isn't too different from paying someone to kill stuff for you and sell the goods to make plat. Plat is plat and if you exploited the work of another, or the work of a program, or even a few lines of bad code... you still exploited. He's an exploiter himself and calls the kettle black.