Thank you very much!

Explain like I’m five?

Yeah, no. Phones on students are vital, particularly the United States, where a shooter might just mosey on in any time and open fire. Phones play a huge role in active shooter situations, which unfortunately show no sign of slowing down.

oh my god

Thank you so much.

The Devilsaur Mafia

No sooner had WoW developed an economy than pernicious capitalists began to exploit it. Sites opened up, offering gold, rare items, and accounts with powerful characters in exchange for real money. Where these sites acquired it, no one knew for sure, though there were rumours. Most assumed they just bought it from players at a low price and then sold it at a mark-up, and that definitely happened. But the owners of these sites sought to maximise profits, and minimise costs. The solution was to set up sweat shops in China. Dozens, if not hundreds of them.

Multiple interviews have been done with Chinese gold farmers. They all described it as mentally exhausting, with working days of at least 12 hours, often spent killing a single enemy over and over. The value of farmed gold is different across the world. A day’s worth of gold could sell in China for $4 dollars, but could fetch triple that amount when sold to Americans.

It’s by exploiting the differences and selling to cash-rich, time-poor gamers that Chinese gold farms prosper. Former Wall Street banker Alan Chiu founded an online trading platform for virtual currency, a virtual stock exchange, if you will. And he sees videogame work as another opportunity for outsourcing.

“It’s a very labor-intensive job. I don’t see it any different from low-cost Chinese workers working in Guandong, producing Nike shoes, and for Nike to be sold eventually - sold at retail stores for maybe 600 percent margin.”

Yet it is different because gold farming is a gray area. Gaming companies like Blizzard, which owns World of Warcraft, see gold farming as cheating, and regularly ban the accounts of suspected gold farmers. Robin admits he’s been closed down four or five times, losing thousands of dollars each time. However, there’s always a market for gold farmers. Surveys show 20 percent of gamers admit to buying gold.

According to the New York Times, while some gold farmers enjoyed playing games all day, they nonetheless had strict quotas and were constantly supervised. They estimated that there were between 100,000 and 500,000 young people working in China as full-time gamers, earning less than a quarter an hour. It’s true that this practice did not originate with WoW. But WoW is perhaps the first time it became a major issue due to the sheer size of the playerbase, and the overwhelming demand for black market gold.

For its part, Blizzard has tried to crack down on black markets, but arguably their most successful attempt was by creating the WoW token, effectively creating a legal avenue to sell gold via Blizzard. That has its own controversy, which we’ll get to later.

Gold farming was known to evoke a strong reaction. It was seen as violating the spirit of the game, and players looked down on those who used these sites. There was a sense that if you had suffered to reach where you are, then everyone else should have to as well. Others defended it as yet another part of the free market, which catered to players who wanted to sacrifice money to ‘get ahead’.

In an interview with Jared Psigoda, a market leader in virtual trade, he states that originally, these black markets were regionally exclusive. Europeans worked in the European black market, Chinese players in the Chinese, and Americans in the American, which resulted in dramatically different prices. It was in the early 2000s that the use of Chinese labour was used across the board, undercutting western currency exchanges, in order to make further profit.

Perhaps the most infamous group of gold farmers were the Devilsaur Mafia. They realised killing devilsaurs in Un’Goro Crater had the potential to return the highest profits out of any creature in the game. While devilsaurs didn’t drop much, they could be skinned to get Devilsaur Leather, a material from which a number of powerful pieces of hunter armour could be made, such as the Devilsaur Leggings and Devilsaur Gauntlets. Outside of raiding content, this was the best gear you could get in Vanilla wow. All in all, a single devilsaur could net its killer 20 gold – a kingly sum at the time.

But where most enemies constantly reappeared, devilsaurs did not. They regenerated sparingly, and could appear anywhere in the zone. Players would spend their whole day in the zone, waiting for one to spawn. And so, a group of sellers decided to coordinate their efforts. They completely took over the crater (LINKS TO REDDIT), using their organisation to out-compete other farmers, and this indirectly gave them total control over the Devilsaur economy.

On PvP servers, these cartels had teams on both factions working as security – if a Horde player tried to step on the Mafia’s turf, the Alliance security team would be alerted and sent to hunt them down, kill them, and keep killing them every time they resurrected at a graveyard. Technically speaking, cross-faction communication was against the Terms of Service, but it was almost impossible for Blizzard to prove players were communicating using third party apps (LINKS TO REDDIT). The only way to get close to a devilsaur on any PvP server was to submit to the whims of the mafia, which meant selling at regulated prices and handing over a cut of the spoils. All-out turf wars were known to occur when multiple cartels came up against each other.

This was not remotely the only instance of farmers banding together to control resources and manipulate the economy – that happened every single day. But it may be the most well-known. And when Classic Wow came about, players eagerly worked to recreate the Devilsaur Mafia.

It’s an interesting case study, but the Mafia disappeared as WoW’s economy grew and changed. The gold farmers did not. For years, WoW’s economy would be driven by a black market that depended on sweat shop labour from China (and later other countries like Mexico, the Philippines and India). It never stopped, but the practice of online black markets for virtual currencies expanded far beyond WoW, to encompass many of the biggest games in the world. Blizzard still hasn’t been able to get rid of it. No company has.

(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)

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What game is that?

NTA, just a miscommunication of some kind.

Hilarious. YTA.