Goldfarming

[SphereOfFeetMan]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7575902.stm

Poor earning virtual gaming gold

Nearly half a million people are employed in developing countries earning virtual goods in online games to sell to players, a study has found.

Research by Manchester University shows that the practice, known as gold-farming, is growing rapidly.

Researchers say the industry, which is largely based in China, currently employs about 400,000 young people who earn £80 per month on average.

Games companies have attempted to crack down on the practice.

Players in the popular online game World of Warcraft acquire virtual gold by fighting monsters and completing quests.

Alternatively, some simply buy it from a fast-growing workforce employed to play this and other games.

Manchester University says the young people, described in the study as "playbourers", sell gold or other virtual goods, despite the practice being against the rules of many online games.

However, the report's authors say an industry which connects cash-rich time-poor players with those willing to work long hours for little reward is likely to go on growing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_co ... population

170 Brunei 390,000 0.006% UN estimate
171 Bahamas 331,000 0.005% UN estimate
172 Iceland 316,252 April 1, 2008 0.005% Hagstofa Íslands
173 Maldives 306,000 0.005% UN estimate
174 Barbados 294,000 0.004% UN estimate
175 Belize 288,000 0.004% UN estimate
— French Polynesia[15] 259,596 August 20, 2007 0.004% August 2007 census

This disgusts me on so many levels that I feel stupefied.

[Crissa]

I don't understand your point.

That virtual worlds should not exist, because they are larger than some countries?

What?

You could pay Americans to do the same, but they would not be able to make their rent on such a paycheck. Western nations tend to get picky about people getting their income in grey market situations, too, and want to get a bite of it. (The bottom 1% of gross incomes were audited by the IRS more often than the top 1% in the US from 2001-2005)

Does it upset you that the overall population of Azeroth is over eleven million people? A quarter of a million people populate Eve Online, based in Iceland - though I doubt many of their players are there! It was reported that 65 million people had played Kart Rider, making it possibly the largest ever multiple player game in the world?

And even so, goldfarmers go home and play video games. Well, not literally home, since the wouldn't own a computer or have broadband access there, but the local internet cafe would.

The power of currency trading at work.

-Crissa

[SphereOfFeetMan]

It disgusts me for the following reasons (There are probably more reasons, but this is all I got off the top of my head):

1) Millions of people (MMO players) are allowing themselves to be manipulated by the destructive business practices of MMO game companies.
2) Millions of peoples lives are being cheapened or damaged by these business practices.
3) These business practices also lead to secondary goldfarming markets which costs the MMO player real money in exchange for nothing but a further investment in a destructive game.

4) This real money, which paid for worthless numbers in an online game, was made by people devoting their professional lives to it.
5) These third world people have no better opportunity for economic subsistence than performing this goldfarming "job".
6) This job can be performed by 10 year olds, and in some parts of the world generate more money than traditional jobs for adults. As a result it is possible that this is having a profoundly negative impact on children (and future generations, and the future of their communities) who are dropping out of schools and job training in order to do this job.

7) 400,000 people is a larger number than many widely known and respected countries.
8 ) If these 400,000 people had better educational and economic opportunities, they would in effect have a good sized country’s worth of people contributing to the betterment of mankind.
9) Instead these 400k people are making money doing what might be the most useless and pointless job that has ever existed. Certainly this is true given the scale of people doing it.

10) This secondary goldfarming market generates half a billion dollars of revenue each year. And it is growing. Think of the better things this could be spent on (anything).
11) These 400k peoples lives are dependant upon ‘goldfarming’ in transitory online games, which is against EULA’s, and possibly against the law in some places. If ever for some reason this paying market base stopped, 400k people’s lives would be economically imperiled. Perhaps a new mega-MMO emerges which was designed so that there would be no need for a secondary market. Now, this isn’t much of a problem on the small scale, but if tens or hundreds of thousands of impoverished people lost their jobs over a short period of time, there could be disastrous consequences.

That is why I am disgusted.

[CatharzGodfoot]

MMOs that try to 'crack down on' gold farming are either idealistic and stupid, sadistic, or stupid.

It's possible that some MMO devs/owners/whatever feel that they have a beautiful game which gold farming is ruining. That's dumb, because their games obviously have atrocious grinds that the players just want to avoid.

It's also possible that they're sadistic enough that the whole purpose of the MMO is convincing people to pay to waste their time at a frustrating, meaningless job.

Or maybe they're just so fucking stupid that they don't realize that they could kill the entire gold farming industry and make a tidy profit by selling their own gold for less than a farmer can afford to.

[Crissa]

Those are interesting points, but...

1) These are games. Buying gold 'ruins' the game by breaking down the ability of non-gold-buying players to play the game.

2) Grinds. This has some value, but what is a grind to one is a pastime to another. The basic answer is that the reward for learning how to play the game is being able to do and see each step in the game.

3) Identity. You didn't mention this; but when the identity of a character's player changes, so to does that character's reputation. If the role of Joe is now played by half-torque the idiot boy, he's not going to have the same interaction with the social fabric of the MMO. Levelling services and goldfarming are essentially the same thing.

4) Cheating. Gold-farmers regularly attempt to break the game to sell their gold or create their gold. This lowers the experience for all the customers of the game.

5) Gold. You can't just take it out of the game. Players will create another medium of transfer.

6) Selling... Some players want to have a game experience in which they are at the same level as someone with more money. Given the fact, "The median income in America is still around $48,000, and that's been flat for about the last 10 years," said Frank. "Meanwhile, the top 1 percent of Americans control 33 percent of the wealth. That top 1 percent owns $17 trillion in wealth, which for perspective, is greater than the GDPs of Japan, Germany, the U.K. and France combined." in just the US, one would think the experience of equal playing ground might be what they're searching for. Also, levelling services and gold-selling services and pyramid schemes show up even if the game itself sells items and gold. It's a myth that any game has shut down all gold sellers by selling their currency themselves.

---

Take WoW for example. If you have a level 70 character, there are over 300g worth of quests you can do each day. (An hour of play will net you ~200g) If you don't have a level 70 character, there is nothing you need to buy with gold. And yet, there still are gold sellers and buyers and levelling services.

Yes, the game has days and days of content. I'm certainly against the idea of raising the level cap, yet they're planning on doing it. To do something radically different (like raising the level cap is somehow required to keep players) is seen as some killing the golden goose. Give the players what they ask for, they say, not some experiment.

Anyhow, the numbers your quoted means that a gold farming outfit only needs to make a few sales a month per farmer it employs. That has nothing to do with the game but totally about the power of the currency market. These guys are getting paid gross what I pay each month to get broadband and television into my home. It costs the equivalent of two farmers to rent a game server that runs 24-7. For the amount we spend on rent each month we could hire eight farmers.

That's your real problem. Which apparently is that people in developing countries should be subsistence farming instead of having access to the cast-offs of a high-tech society.

-Crissa

[Manxome]

I find it fundamentally disturbing that people voluntarily buy games and pay other people to play for them...and not because they derive any direct enjoyment from other people playing.

I find this disturbing both because it means that developers are making games containing long, mandatory segments that their customers do not actually want to experience, and because it means that those customers not only buy the game anyway, but invest even more money into these games than they spend on games that do not suffer from this problem.

The fact that half a million people are "employed" producing an effect that could be provided by the game developers at for practically zero effort is certainly also weird. And, to add further irony, the negative incidental effects the gold farmers have on the world in the process of farming is similarly avoidable. And the economy the developers are trying to protect is invariably inherently unstable and generally messed up in the first place.

So, while it's possible these games would be better if one could magically eliminate gold farming, I agree that this is an ineffective strategy that ignores the underlying problems.

But what really scares me is the thought that the same games that have these problems are also tremendous commercial successes, which isn't very flattering to the typical consumer.


@Crissa:

Yes, I'm sure lots of people want a playing field that is level with respect to real-world wealth. Lots of people (though not necessarily the same people) also want a playing field that is level with respect to the amount of real-world free time you're willing to pour into the game.

Real-world time and money are exchangable in the real world (to a certain extent--you can pay someone to do something of your choice for a given amount of time). If you make a game where grinding gives you an advantage, you've made a game where money will buy an advantage, directly or indirectly.

If some people enjoy the grind, that's great. You can make it an optional in-game activity that produces no measurable benefit towards other game activities; then, people who want to do it can do it, and people who don't want to can ignore it without penalty.

The problem is that lots of people apparently want an unfair advantage over others in the game, and will happily pay either time or money to get it, while simultaneously complaining about others who get a similar unfair advantage through other means. You can satisfy any one of these people by explicitly giving them an unfair advantage, but you cannot satisfy this class of people, and trying to do so will frustrate other players.

[Crissa]

Do you get the point that it doesn't take a majority, or even a sizable minority, of lazy game-players to support half a million gold farmers?

I quoted one game as have sixty-five million players from two countries. Another has over eleven million subscribers. One game has enough players to dwarf every single farmer in the entire world. Let alone the fact that there are literally dozens of dozens of games with more than a million players and salable currency.

And the article you quoted doesn't make the difference between farming gold in games where its legal vs where it's not allowed. One person has even made a personal net worth of a million dollars US via games where trading currency is allowed.

And it only takes one person in the US, which is currently lower in its value of the dollar, to easily support a dozen farmers with their actions.

So obviously it's not game design that's the problem here. 9-9

-Crissa

The average american in the bottom 90% makes more money in a day's work than one of these gold farmers makes in a month's wages.

[RandomCasualty2]

It's also possible that they're sadistic enough that the whole purpose of the MMO is convincing people to pay to waste their time at a frustrating, meaningless job.

Or maybe they're just so fucking stupid that they don't realize that they could kill the entire gold farming industry and make a tidy profit by selling their own gold for less than a farmer can afford to.

I'm really surprised MMORPGs have survived as long as they have. I mean people paying to do that stupid grinding bullshit? It's seriously like McDonalds asking you to pay them to work there. Only with gold farmers, you've got rich people paying other people to actually do the work.

Now, this shows that some people just have money to burn. As for the gold farmers, if people are dumb enough to pay real money for virtual gold, then I'm happy that they've found a job. Most jobs in life are nothing more than catering to the frivolous needs of people, so gold mining isn't much different there.

[Manxome]

So obviously it's not game design that's the problem here.

That's not at all obvious to me.

I don't have confidence in your numbers. Even if I did, it sounds like you're suggesting that every person who buys gold is going to buy a lot of it--not just once, but on an ongoing basis--just because they can afford to buy a lot, without considering how much they plausibly want. It also sounds like you're ignoring all expenses for a gold farming operation other than basic labor.

But even if it was all perfectly accurate and it turns out that only, say, 1 in 10,000 players actually buy gold. That's just the most extreme minority of people who have a problem with the game's design; not everyone who hates the grind and wishes it wasn't in the game is going to buy gold. Some people consider it unfair or unsporting, some people won't think it's worth the money, some people are more concerned about the large-scale inequalities the grind creates rather than their own personal power level, and some people just won't play the game in the first place. And that extreme minority of dissatisfied players still represents--according to your numbers--tens of thousands of people.

And even among the people who enjoy the grind and would complain or quit if it were removed--certainly not all of them consider it important that they can get unlimited in-game advantage by spending more time grinding. Most would probably be happy if it were totally optional, or if there were a more practical cap to the advantage that can be derived from it, or if the advantage was only useful for more grinding and not for other parts of the game.

And not everyone that would enjoy the game more if the grind were gone is actually going to be sufficiently thoughtful and insightful regarding their hobby to realize that fact. There are a lot of things that would affect my enjoyment of, say, a movie or a painting, that I do not begin to understand, because it's just not important to me to study and understand those things.

[Crissa]

You may not like my numbers, but they're the top in the business.

And yes, market research indicates those who buy gold (or other things in games) buy them both repeatedly and often.

In that games where this is legal, less than 5% of players participate in buying stuff. And of those players, they repeatedly buy items and currency. This has led some people to note that by going free-to-play one can gain tenfold the number of users, and by selling items, that small number of paying folks can more than make up for the subscriptions lost.

This has been known in the free-to-play chat market for years, but has been demonstrated over and over in the most recent years with things as diverse as plush sales to card sales to redeem for virtual items instead of time in the game.

I know you have to 'trust me' on the numbers, but it is my actual job and stuff.

-Crissa

Why would anyone be 'surprised' at MMOs? They're a game that interacts with players, is an ever changing social mass, and have grown exponentially for the last three decades - going from ten user MUD to millions of millions of user MMOs. There are sixty thousand people logged into Second life right now, and in North America and Europe another ninety thousand are playing World of Warcraft. At this very moment.

[Manxome]

I know you have to 'trust me' on the numbers, but it is my actual job and stuff.

I was unaware of that. That's interesting, then.

However, I imagine buying patterns may be somewhat different in games that forbid real-world sales than in games specifically designed to tempt more and more money out of customers (since the latter are intended to elicit the pattern you report and the former are not), and I imagine it's harder to get statistics for the sales that break the EULA. I also doubt your job includes analyzing the finances of the actual gold farming operations, making your estimate of the number of farmers that can be supported by one player somewhat less authoritative, though perhaps I'm wrong.

And I don't see that this would change the last 3/4 of my previous post.

[Crissa]

What I meant by farmers supported by players was that the disposable income of e even an average working class american was more than 30x that of a gold farmer.

Their monthly wages are similar to buying, say, a night at the movies with your SO five times - with the discount package, single drink and large popcorn.

-Crissa

[ckafrica]

I find this neither surprising nor offensive.

It doesn't even have to be about people being to lazy or that the middle of the game isn't any fun. One of my friends who was playing WOW had a friend level up his character for him because he didn't play enough. To get to level 70 in any reasonable amount of time he needed someone to help him. It's not that getting there wasn't fun, it was that the other guys were playing at 70 and wanted to focus on those characters. Now if his friend wasn't willing would it have been bad to have paid someone to do it? I don't see why.

OK, farm workers aren't getting much, but if that bothers you, than you'd better stop consuming just about anything that isn't almost completely produced in a developed country because the girls making your Nikes in Vietnam are lucky to get $100 bucks a month and their salaries haven't been going up to match the 25% inflation we've been having over here.

I don't see how the money spent on MMOs is any worse than, say sports, where billions are spent on people watching other people playing a game and feeling vindicated or dissappointed at the peoples success or loss. Or Movies, TV, Music, Art, drugs, sex, rpgs, novels...

Yes if we took all the money spent on frivolous entertainment around the world, and all the people working in these industries than we could dedicate it towards other things that might be deemed more important. it might allow us to accomplish monumental tasks. But that could be argued about pretty much anything.

I guess I don't see why someone choosing to spend the money they earn on this affects anyone. Sure it's not the way I would spend my money but what basis is this truly heinous?

[Ice9]

I guess it's a bit relative, because the same complaints that buying gold is unbalanced have been said about grinding, see Sirlin's articles about MMOs, for instance.

Sure, buying gold can allow a newbie to defeat a long-time player - and having played a long time can allow a no-skills player to defeat a more skilled one. Is either of those fair? It depends on your perspective, and what you want out of an MMO. And while many MMOs are firmly against bought gold, some not only allow it, but sell it themselves.

[SphereOfFeetMan]

5) Gold. You can't just take it out of the game. Players will create another medium of transfer.

You can't take gold out of the game if gold is designed to be in the game. If there is no medium of transfer, the entire problem disappears. For whatever reasons, MMO developers have it ingrained in their minds that there must be mediums of transfer in their games. Hopefully in the future an MMO company will be brave enough to break the mold and not include grinding and mediums of transfer.

That's your real problem. Which apparently is that people in developing countries should be subsistence farming instead of having access to the cast-offs of a high-tech society.

I'll just quote myself:

It disgusts me for the following reasons... 5) These third world people have no better opportunity for economic subsistence than performing this goldfarming "job".

Learn to read Crissa.

So obviously it's not game design that's the problem here. 9-9

It fundamentally is a game design problem because it enables and induces people to behave in this way.

Manxome's points are also good.

---

Most jobs in life are nothing more than catering to the frivolous needs of people, so gold mining isn't much different there.

OK, farm workers aren't getting much, but if that bothers you, than you'd better stop consuming just about anything that isn't almost completely produced in a developed country because the girls making your Nikes in Vietnam are lucky to get $100 bucks a month and their salaries haven't been going up to match the 25% inflation we've been having over here.

I don't see how the money spent on MMOs is any worse than, say sports, where billions are spent on people watching other people playing a game and feeling vindicated or dissappointed at the peoples success or loss. Or Movies, TV, Music, Art, drugs, sex, rpgs, novels...

Yes if we took all the money spent on frivolous entertainment around the world, and all the people working in these industries than we could dedicate it towards other things that might be deemed more important. it might allow us to accomplish monumental tasks. But that could be argued about pretty much anything.

I guess I don't see why someone choosing to spend the money they earn on this affects anyone. Sure it's not the way I would spend my money but what basis is this truly heinous?

Goldfarmers are not contributing to the happiness of people, they are not producing anything or providing a service. They are merely spending their lives changing numbers in a computer game. Literally, these 400,000 peoples professional lives could be completed by one fucking guy making a programming change and giving everyone more numbers in their gold and xp in a computer game.

That is a fundamental difference between goldfarming and other frivolous pursuits like sports "Or Movies, TV, Music, Art, drugs, sex, rpgs, novels...". Goldfarming is a literal waste of money and producing power. Yes, the girls making Nikes in Vietnam are being taken advantage of. The point is that at least they are contributing to the world in a real and meaningful way by manufacturing shoes. There is no more efficient way to produce shoes.

The analogy is: If one guy could work less than one day and produce the same number of shoes that 400,000 people could produce in one year, but chose not to for no reason! But it is even worse than that because shoes are an important and needed object in peoples lives, and xp and gold in a game are not real things. It is even worse than subjectively valuable and immaterial things like ideas in books because of the ratio of wasted effort spent on production vs what effort is actually needed.

Finally, that one guy working one day who could replace 400,000 people working for a year, only exists because of arbitrary "rules" that only exist because of destructive business practices.

[Crissa]

You can't take gold out of the game if gold is designed to be in the game. If there is no medium of transfer, the entire problem disappears.

No. If anything is tradable, players will invent a currency. For instance, in Anarchy Online, there was no currency in the game at launch. Players eventually chose a lightweight gem to trade with, creating a gem-backed economy.

It disgusts me for the following reasons... 5) These third world people have no better opportunity for economic subsistence than performing this goldfarming "job".

Learn to read Crissa.

So sitting in an air-conditioned room all day smoking a cigarette while moving pixels is not 'better' for the man doing it than back-breaking field work? They do it not because there is 'no better' opportunities but because it is an opportunity. And it's an opportunity because the median pay in one technologically advanced country of a billion people is 1/30th that of another billion people in other technologically advanced countries.

It fundamentally is a game design problem because it enables and induces people to behave in this way.

Goldfarmers are not contributing to the happiness of people, they are not producing anything or providing a service. They are merely spending their lives changing numbers in a computer game. Literally, these 400,000 peoples professional lives could be completed by one fucking guy making a programming change and giving everyone more numbers in their gold and xp in a computer game.

No. Giving people more gold won't make them happy. If they weren't gaming the system, would they play the game at all? Probably not. And you don't even believe my numbers that those that pay - let alone those that cheat - are a tiny, tiny minority of the game.

These people are cheating, pure and simple, or lazy. They want to beat the system with cash. And they'll find a way.

Or are you so smart that you think no one has ever tried any other solution, and that Warcraft is the largest MMO there is? It's not. It's the largest subscription MMO. More people play Runescape (where you can just buy stuff) or dozens of other free-to-play (but you can pay for stuff or gold!) games.

Guess what? People sell Runescape gold, too.

-Crissa

[Username17]

The analogy is: If one guy could work less than one day and produce the same number of shoes that 400,000 people could produce in one year, but chose not to for no reason!

This is a bad analogy. It's more akin to clerical work. Imagine if there was a clerical task such as managing international visas or whatever that could be invalidated by restructuring the international agreements that allow transnational travel.

Which should be pretty easy to imagine, because that's how things currently work.

-Username17

[SphereOfFeetMan]

You can't take gold out of the game if gold is designed to be in the game. If there is no medium of transfer, the entire problem disappears.

No. If anything is tradable, players will invent a currency. For instance, in Anarchy Online, there was no currency in the game at launch. Players eventually chose a lightweight gem to trade with, creating a gem-backed economy.

Firstly, if the gems don't matter to advancement in the game, then very few people will care enough to pay for them. If gems do advance something in the game, then 'gems' is just a fill in for the word gold.

Regardless of that, you are still wrong on the point. If a game has nothing which is tradable, then there is no medium of transfer. End of argument. It should be obvious that games can be successful and have no mediums of transfer, there are many (dozens? hundreds?) of examples. I am sure you can think of one.

It disgusts me for the following reasons... 5) These third world people have no better opportunity for economic subsistence than performing this goldfarming "job".

Learn to read Crissa.

So sitting in an air-conditioned room all day smoking a cigarette while moving pixels is not 'better' for the man doing it than back-breaking field work?

Learn to read Crissa. Of course it is better. That is why I said “These third world people have no better opportunity for economic subsistence than performing this goldfarming "job". See, that means that the goldfarming job is better than other jobs they could have.

---

No. Giving people more gold won't make them happy. If they weren't gaming the system, would they play the game at all? Probably not.

It doesn't even have to be about people being to lazy or that the middle of the game isn't any fun. One of my friends who was playing WOW had a friend level up his character for him because he didn't play enough. To get to level 70 in any reasonable amount of time he needed someone to help him. It's not that getting there wasn't fun, it was that the other guys were playing at 70 and wanted to focus on those characters.

---

And you don't even believe my numbers that those that pay - let alone those that cheat - are a tiny, tiny minority of the game.

It doesn’t matter how many how many pay/cheat, or if they are a minority. 400,000 goldfarm. That is the number that matters.

They’ll only find a way if the game is designed so there is a way.

These people are cheating, pure and simple, or lazy. They want to beat the system with cash. And they'll find a way.

They will only find a way if a game is designed to enable them. They will only do this if the game induces them (gives them rewards) for doing so.

[SphereOfFeetMan]

The analogy is: If one guy could work less than one day and produce the same number of shoes that 400,000 people could produce in one year, but chose not to for no reason!

This is a bad analogy. It's more akin to clerical work. Imagine if there was a clerical task such as managing international visas or whatever that could be invalidated by restructuring the international agreements that allow transnational travel.

Which should be pretty easy to imagine, because that's how things currently work.

-Username17

Heh. Your interactions with Czech international buracracies helping you with your worldview on global problems of waste Frank?

Yes, my example was a 'bad analogy' in that it is absurd and unrealistic. In addition to making the point about waste, I was also highlighting what could be produced. Your analogy is the better one concerning real world waste. Although I am unaware if there is any example profession that has 400,000 jobs worth of pure waste. In the entire history of the world.

[tzor]

These people are cheating, pure and simple, or lazy. They want to beat the system with cash. And they'll find a way.

Good example of this. In the old Multi-Player Games Network game "Kindgom of Drakkar" (which is still online today as the programmer reclaimed the rights to the game after MPGN was sold and the parent company dropped all interest in the game) it was very difficult to "trade" your way to equipment; items tied when picked up and could not be transferred. Never the less, some people found a way, they literally bribed one of the high level employees of the company who had mod access to "cheat" in their favor. Needless to say this person was promptly fired for his actions. I don't know if he was ever sued.

[Crissa]

There are people in the US making less than those goldfarmers.

By definition, there is nothing better for them to do.

-Crissa

[Orion]

Regardless of that, you are still wrong on the point. If a game has nothing which is tradable, then there is no medium of transfer. End of argument. It should be obvious that games can be successful and have no mediums of transfer, there are many (dozens? hundreds?) of examples. I am sure you can think of one.

.

No. This is wrong. Even if resources cannot be traded between accounts, there will still be a business selling the accounts themselves.

[Crissa]

1) No gold? If there's any economy, it will be created, and then farmers will attempt to game it.

2) No trading between characters? They'll trade the characters themselves.

3) Sell the gold yourself? If there's a way to make the gold in the game, they'll try to make it cheaper. If not, they'll steal it. If people want to buy your gold, then someone else's gold will work, too. If not, see step 2.

4) Sell the items directly? Then why play your game, again? Anyhow, there will be resell market, see ! and 2.

It's a problem that can be fought, but cannot actually be solved if the game is worth playing. Even 'skill' games have cheaters.

Anyhow, as I tried to point out earlier - no one really knows how many gamers there are, but it's in the hundreds of millions. A half a million farmers is just a drop in the bucket. And you can't say 'there's nothing better for them to do' - people even in the riches countries are idle and would do that work if it were offered.

-Crissa

[SphereOfFeetMan]

1) No gold? If there's any economy, it will be created, and then farmers will attempt to game it.

A game with no economy. Done.

2) No trading between characters? They'll trade the characters themselves.

Characters don't own anything that takes grinding time to acquire. Done.

3) Sell the gold yourself? If there's a way to make the gold in the game, they'll try to make it cheaper. If not, they'll steal it. If people want to buy your gold, then someone else's gold will work, too. If not, see step 2.

There is no gold.

4) Sell the items directly? Then why play your game, again? Anyhow, there will be resell market, see ! and 2.

There is nothing to sell and nothing to buy it with.

It's a problem that can be fought, but cannot actually be solved if the game is worth playing.

Provably false.

Even 'skill' games have cheaters.

Sure. But they don't employ hundreds of thousands of goldfarmers.

Anyhow, as I tried to point out earlier - no one really knows how many gamers there are, but it's in the hundreds of millions. A half a million farmers is just a drop in the bucket. And you can't say 'there's nothing better for them to do' - people even in the riches countries are idle and would do that work if it were offered.

I am not addressing the goldfarmers economic opportunities here. In their contribution to society, anything else they do is better. It can only be called "work" in that they spend effort to gain money. See my prior post about how disgusting it is that one man could replace these 400,000 people who nudge digital numbers in a game.

[Calibron]

1) No gold? If there's any economy, it will be created, and then farmers will attempt to game it.

A game with no economy. Done.

This is stupid. Why would everyone specifically make games with no possibility of an economy at all, when a great many people like this aspect of the game?

You are effectively suggesting that an effective business strategy that is actually in demand from the consumers be universally scrapped, not because there is anything intrinsically wrong with it, but because some people somewhere might corrupt it down the line. Think about that for a minute, now think about the world we live in and the general failings of the human race. Getting some perspective now?

It is not a game design problem; it is a humanity problem.