Worldwide Goldfarming article

[Fade]

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

[Konve]

The industry, about 80% based in China, employs about 400,000 people who earn £77 per month on average.

Can you make that much, or more, sweating?

[aridash]

Prof Heeks' ... work suggested that in 2008 it employs 400,000 people who earn an average of $145 (£77) per month creating a global market worth about $500m.
But, he said, the true size of the sector was hard to estimate - it could easily be twice as big.

i think the Prof has embelished his numbers to make it sound much bigger than it is. it is difficult to estimate, but i bet he's counting all the sales of gold/items that come from players leaving who arent "farmers". further, if it were worth this $500m, that would be about half as much the MMO market itself. why wouldnt the companies simply embrace it and control it (ie sell gold direct), rather than outlaw it?

[lanksia]

Originally Posted by Konve

Can you make that much, or more, sweating?

well...

in the best case scenario, say u gather 1k sweat/hour, 8 hours a day, 7 days a week (let's pretend 31 days a month) so that's 1k*8*31=248000 * 0.005 ped = 1240 ped a month

so pretending there wouldnt be any withdrawing fees that's 124 USD and 77£ is what..about 140-150 USD?

So no, dont think u can make that much sweating

[thoreau]

Originally Posted by aridash

i think the Prof has embelished his numbers to make it sound much bigger than it is. it is difficult to estimate, but i bet he's counting all the sales of gold/items that come from players leaving who arent "farmers". further, if it were worth this $500m, that would be about half as much the MMO market itself. why wouldnt the companies simply embrace it and control it (ie sell gold direct), rather than outlaw it?

I think the dirty little secret of gold farming is that its huge and MMO companies are just happy to get the subscription fees (and retail box purchases of the farmers.)

Every time an account is banned for selling gold that farmer must buy another game. This happens hundreds of times as the average age of a farmer account is 3 months (for those with Asian IP addresses.)

[Bones]

I would think EU would be the darling in this situation since sweating is legal to the game and Gold farmers are constantly purged from the games.



Bones