The BBC covers online gaming; "Online games may be set in fantastical or far future worlds but they share one feature with the real world - the relative scarcity of money. Life can be tough for the novice characters that players create in games such as World of Warcraft, Runescape and Tabula Rasa because they are unskilled and poor. While skills will improve as monsters are slaughtered and quests are completed, the scarcity of cash can be a brake on progress for many gamers.
Many fix the problem by turning to a gold seller and buying a chunk of in-game cash, using real world money, to fund their advancement. This is despite the fact that the terms and conditions of many games ban the buying and selling of in-game gear for real money. Being found out can mean a player is banned and their account is closed.
As games rack up more and more players the numbers turning to the money sellers and those who only play to amass, or farm, gold that they can then sell have rocketed. There are many websites that offer to sell players in-game gold for any and every online title. For games such as Runescape which have millions of players the numbers involved are staggering. Runescape brought in changes to stop rogue gold traders
Geoff Iddison, chief executive of Runescape maker Jagex, said that during 2007 the company took more than 525 billion farmed gold pieces out of its game world. In real money that virtual gold is worth more than £1.3m ($2.6m). "A lot of this is coming from China," he said. "We had tens of thousands of accounts in China that were just bots working the game to make gold and then sell it." Mr Iddison said that the gold farmers spoiled the experience for many players by camping out near monsters with the most valuable loot, filling chat channels with spam messages advertising gold, inflating prices and sometimes taking real world cash without handing over the game gear. In a bid to stem the trade, Jagex changed the Runescape mechanics to make unbalanced trades much harder to do. Mr Iddison said typically game cash was handed over during a transaction for relatively worthless items. By making it hard for all but dedicated players to conduct such unbalanced trades, Jagex hopes to stifle the farmers. Early reports suggest the changes are having an impact, said Mr Iddison with complaints about farmers well down on usual numbers. Thanks for the tip silpol. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7226818.stm).
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with pleasure :)
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