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 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.
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.
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.