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GOLD FARMER A gold farmer is a generic term for a player who acquires "gold" (or other in-game currency) or items in a MMORPG 's Virtual Economy for the sole purpose of sale to other players via an out-of-game venue, such as EBay or IGE (also called Real-money Trading ). This term is sometimes considered ambiguous, as "farming" is the term used for the activity of gathering in-game currency regardless of its intended use. Real life characteristics In the beginning of online gaming, most gold farmers worked independently, but as the market for their services has increased, a greater number of gold farmers are becoming affiliated with a gold farming organization of some sort. The largest gold farming organizations operate like real life industrial producers, with low-ranking employees performing the actual production work, supervised by managers, and delivering their products to centralized repositories where they are then sold either directly to the customer or to a gold reseller like IGE. Some organizations impose quotas on their employees or tie wages to production. Due to operating outside the terms of service of most games (see below), gold farmers tend to be secretive about their real life (and online) identities. Virtual characteristics Gold farmers are most notably characterized by performing the same tasks repeatedly for long periods of time. Especially on English Language servers, gold farmers operating from another country are often observed to speak poor or broken English. For this reason gold farmers are sometimes referred to as "Chinese farmers". As well, many organizations will maintain fewer accounts than they have employees to reduce overhead, so gold farming characters can sometimes be observed to be logged in and active for longer consecutive periods of time than a single person could manage (sometimes 24 hours a day) as the character is operated by different people in 8 or 12-hour shifts. Public opinion Gold farming is a very controversial subject in the MMORPG community. Supporters argue that the practice brings jobs and money to those who might otherwise not have them, that it levels the playing field for those who have less time to play or who joined the game later than others, or that it follows the spirit of Capitalism . Those who oppose the practice usually do so because they feel it violates the spirit of the game as an enclosed virtual world or that it is unfair to those who are unable or unwilling to purchase gold, not only because they are at a disadvantage in relation to players who do buy gold, but also because greater availability of gold causes a rapid increase in prices, or Mudflation . Players are also vocally against gold farming, but the continuing health of the in-game currency market indicates there is a large segment of the players who are willing to purchase gold. Discrimination The prevalence of gold farming has also led to claims of discrimination against players with poor English on English speaking servers. Rules and enforcement In most games, gold farming is specifically prohibited by the game's EULA or Terms Of Service and is grounds for termination of the account. However, enforcement is generally sporadic, due to the manpower required to perform investigations of that kind and the large negative impact that the termination of a compliant user account has compared to the minor positive impact of the termination of a gold farmer. As well, most MMORPGs require players to spend large portions of their time on repetitive actions or "farming", making it difficult to distinguish between characters that are farming for their own use and those that are farming for real-life sale. EXTERNAL LINKS
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