Chinese Communist MMORPG

[Adrian II]

Spino started a thread about this that was locked because of its unfortunate title. The subject has interesting angles, so let us try again.

Story

The real news of course is this:

Online gaming has exploded in China in recent years, with an estimated 14.3 million people playing regularly and spending some $240 million on their hobby last year. Annual revenues are expected to hit $1.5 billion by 2008 for a habit that domestic media warn is taking a toll on children's studies.

Already thousands of Chinese 'gold farmers' are active on EQ, WoW and other online gaming servers, collecting ores and credits, building valuable avatars and making in-game fortunes that may be converted into RL fortunes via Ebay and other auction boards. These gold farmers work in sweat shops where they play avatars 14 hours a day, seven days a week, for the equivalent of $150 a month. Meanwhile game companies are outsourcing more and more of their software development and account management to Asian countries. As a consequence, gaming environments will have an Asian 'look and feel' about them in the near future. More elephants and demons, less individual diversity in avatars.

[Crazed Rabbit]

I guess we were all wondering how a company could make the MMORPG begining any less boring than killing small rats. Now we know: its sewing and mending socks. I don't like mending socks in real life, why would I want to do it such that no real socks of mine get mended?

I wonder how many Chinese still revere Mao, and how many will play this.

These gold farmers work in sweat shops where they play avatars 14 hours a day, seven days a week, for the equivalent of $150 a month.

As in an actual, come to work and play WoW for $150 a month, sweat shops? Dang. I guess that puts perspective in the whole MMORPG grind as work thing.

Crazed Rabbit

[Soulforged]

Doing good deeds, volunteering on building sites and obtaining Chairman Mao's autograph are some of the objectives of "Learn from Lei Feng," a new online game starring the Chinese Communist Party's legendary hero.

If this is only about the game, I've only one thing to say, it's the worst game ever.

If this is about propaganda, then I think it's the best way to propagate the message ever. Not only you get to advertise your ideas throughout more than a billion people, also you give it the size of an epic transforming the characters in their equal idealized image as a legendary leader. Please tell me that there's a best way to wash minds...

[Adrian II]

As in an actual, come to work and play WoW for $150 a month, sweat shops? Dang.

Be amazed

[Lazul]

blhe... WoW sucks... dont buy it!

[Zalmoxis]

Be amazed

That was interesting, but when you think about it these people are paid alot in their own currency.

[Adrian II]

That was interesting, but when you think about it these people are paid alot in their own currency.

Ge Jin, theD student from the University of California San Diego who made that video, had this to say about the general atmosphere in the workshops:

When I entered a gold farm for the first time (tietou's gaming workshop in the preview), I was shocked by the positive spirit there, the farmers are passionate about what they do, and there is indeed a comraderie between them ... I do see suffering and exploitation too, but in that place suffering is mixed with play and exploitation is embodied in a gang-like brotherhood and hierarchy. When I talked with the farmers, they rarely complained about their working condition, they only complained about their life in the game world.

Although they have to work/play for 12 hours a day, they take pride in what they achieve and they seem eager to escape into a virtual reality richer, brighter, and more exciting than their impoverished real world lives.

[Crazed Rabbit]

AdrainII, you sir, are a regular fount of information!

I have't watched the video, but I can't say I'm surprised that the 'workers' aren't real sad. After all, making a living playing computer games half the day is't that bad of a job in China.

It will be interesting to see the affect of increased outsourcing of games, and whether the content production becomes huma factory based or more procedural.

Crazed Rabbit

[Adrian II]

It will be interesting to see the affect of increased outsourcing of games, and whether the content production becomes huma factory based or more procedural.

Because some of these farmers are actually darn good players, one idea that is being kicked around at the moment is that they could become personal 'game managers' for regular players. It would work like this. Players pay $2 to hire an experienced gold farmer from China or India who manages their gaming environment for, say, 12 hours. During that time the GM embodies non-player creatures like monsters, wizards and talking trees; he acts as a director of their quests and adventures; and he makes sure that player X or Y in the end gets the girl, the jewels, the superior level or the magic sword, even though he plays like shit. However, a major problem with this would be the outsource contracts that would probably cause an uproar similar to the one about the Nike sweatshops. Another would be the language. The English language skills of Western players, even the Anglo-Saxon ones, are bad enough. If they team up for 12 hours with Qiong Gang who doesn't even possess a dictionary, you get monsters that speak like Chinese assembly instructions - 'Fasten screw on inkling lightly, important minding fingers'.

On the other hand, it would be brilliant if talking trees went 'Door of opportunity swing both ways, brother Wizard'.

[Keba]

Because some of these farmers are actually darn good players, one idea that is being kicked around at the moment is that they could become personal 'game managers' for regular players. It would work like this. Players pay $2 to hire an experienced gold farmer from China or India who manages their gaming environment for, say, 12 hours. During that time the GM embodies non-player creatures like monsters, wizards and talking trees; he acts as a director of their quests and adventures; and he makes sure that player X or Y in the end gets the girl, the jewels, the superior level or the magic sword, even though he plays like shit.

Isn't that D&D (or any other of a plethora of similar pen and paper games)? Or are you meaning in computer games?

If it is computer games, Neverwinter Nights already allowes for the ability to create modules, in essence, creating situations like the above.

[Major Robert Dump]

I met a farmer once

When I played SWG, they had looping macros enabled which allowed you basically take a bunch of AFK players with you to do stuff, follow you, share rewards etc as long as the macro functioned and the connection wans't lost.

I came a cross some guy who was killing stuff with 7 toons following him in a tight line, a sure sign of macro. He saw me and asked me "You help me kill nightsister Quenn but no in group I share reward K?" (the group was full of AFKers, if he let me in he would have to kick one of his other accounts)

I responded "People like you ruin the gam"

To which he responded "Chinese"

To which I responded "And?"

To which he responded "I very hate you"

To which I responded "Bite me" and rode off.

He then sent me a tell saying "I bite the dead you"

At the time I had no idea how prevalent such things actually were.

[Adrian II]

Isn't that D&D (or any other of a plethora of similar pen and paper games)? Or are you meaning in computer games?

Do the guys in the video look like pen pals to you? As it says in the title and opening post, this is about EQ, WoW and other MMORPG's.

If it is computer games, Neverwinter Nights already allowes for the ability to create modules, in essence, creating situations like the above.

I believe NN's so-called 'Aurora Toolset' allows you to create (a large part of) your personal gaming environment in the shape of territorial or campaign modules. The difference with having a game manager is twofold: in a managed game there are genuine surprise elements and those surprises are genuinily animated as well. Of course the difference is threefold when the manager happens to be Chinese. Not only will the fierce level-147 dragon on top of the rock actually turn out helpful and benign, but after you save the incarcerated princess she wil turn into a demon that goes 'Qilin pissed off, kwai-loh have ten seconds to kiss ass goodbye'.

[Keba]

Hm, I would have to say I like the idea. It would solve a lot of the problems with MMORPGs. I've played some, but grew tired quickly, it is so repetitive, there is no story behind things. Go to village/town/spaceport/whatever get quest/mission/task, kill critters, get item, solve quest/mission/task, get new quest/mission/task, and so ad aeternum. Having a human running a campaign with a story would be more entertaining.

[Adrian II]

When I played SWG, they had looping macros enabled which allowed you basically take a bunch of AFK players with you to do stuff, follow you, share rewards etc as long as the macro functioned and the connection wans't lost.

I met some farmers too.

My kids (8 and 10) play Runescape. Being a responsible Dad I decided to make myself a Runescape avatar last summer in order to see what the game was all about. Turned out it wasn't that hard. Inside one week I was a full rune warrior (level 70) with 1 million in game currency in the bank. Never looked at it again until some weeks ago. I was bored anyway. Runescape is simple and repetitive and like most MMORPG appears to be geared toward kids, because kids like repetitiveness and predictability which give them a level of control over their environment that they do not have in real life. Who'd have thunk most MMORPG players are over 25 years of age, eh? What does that tell us?

Anyway, last month my kids told me there were robots at work in Runescape. They had names like Yyy748 and Qqq398 and all they did was mine. I did some research and consulted a first generation Dutch hacker whom I happen to know since the 1980's and who is now a global computer security guru. Dutchie discarded the notion that these were autominers, i.e. macros that mine ores 24/7 which are then conferred to the developer's account by mule and sold by him for game currency, which he then uses to buy rare items that can be sold on eBay for real $$.

However, autominers don't work in RSII the way they worked back in RSI. Jagex have introduced too many random events for the autominers to work for more than 20 or 30 minutes. So either these Yyy-avatars were a new generation of autominers, representing an amazing advance in software development, or they were real people.

I revived my my old avatar, added Yyy748 to my 'friends list' and snooped on him for about an hour. He reacted intelligently to random events and even took two or three minute breaks. Then I started talking in friendly fashion to him by PM. Lo and behold, the third message of 'hello China' got a response from Yyy748 saying 'Hello America'. He couldn't say much, but he told me he had mined 50.000 runes in one week. I asked if his friends were all Chinese, but he declined to answer. It is still possible that part of these Yyy-farmers are bots, though. You never know. It would be a very clever move if the developer used some human farmers along with a host of intelligent bots... But it is highly unlikely. It would take a professional team of software developers weeks and months to make it work. If you look at the huge problems encountered by professional MMORPG trackers like PLayOn, you can imagine the problems in developing intelligent macros.

Anyway, Major, could you tell me if these farmers on SWG are paid by the AFK in game currency or in real $$? I haven't discovered a meeting board for real currency MMORPG service deals yet. Goods exchange, yes. But not service exchange -- like the shared adventures and rewards you mentioned. Do you know a URL?

[Adrian II]

I've played some, but grew tired quickly, it is so repetitive, there is no story behind things.

You are right that the game dynamics and environment are boring, but in the end the nature of your game depends on you. It turns out that on-line gaming is a highly social activity, much more so than other video games. Many people play them in couples (man-woman) or peer groups. So they log in to 'meet' people whom they also know in real life, and they go on a quest or raid together with their IRL friends. These are the die-hards of on-line gaming: they make up their own story as they go along and meanwhile they deal with IRL issues. There are stories of people who dissuaded a troubled friend from committing suicide by chatting to them in the game. On the other hand, people who are isolated IRL will be alone as players too, so they tend to get bored real quick. Or they become a nuisance to fellow players, inviting teh ban from the in-game mods.

[KukriKhan]

I wonder if this business model (hiring a ringer ('game manager', in AdrianII's parlance) to play/work for you for cheap) translates across game-genres to FPS's that have player ladders/ranks? What would a 'wealthy' american 16-year old be willing to pay a chinese ringer to see his username in the top-50 rankings of Halo or Call Of Duty? Two bucks; five; 10?

[Major Robert Dump]

I'm not sure if i understand your question completely, but i'll give ti a shot:

Anyway, Major, could you tell me if these farmers on SWG are paid by the AFK in game currency or in real $$? I haven't discovered a meeting board for real currency MMORPG service deals yet. Goods exchange, yes. But not service exchange -- like the shared adventures and rewards you mentioned. Do you know a URL?

The answer is likely both. On Ebay during the first 18 months SWG was going, you could buy credits on ebay or you could pay an ebay account to level your character for you while you were away.

There were also actual players who advertised in unofficial SWG forums that they would level AFK people if you payed them in-game crtedits or items, although I don't know if their intent was to turn around and sell those for real money or just to be able to get rich in game and own rare stuff.

I can be certain, however, that the "I'll level you" situations they were "follow x, attack x's target" macros involved because it simply wouldn't be cost efficient to log onto one account at a time and grind grind grind. If you made a couple dummy accounts and used them all at once on different PCs (or on different user IDs on the same PC) you could grind for hours and recieve rewards and xp for all toons equally. I also think this is the case because the ebay grinders made a disclaimer that they weren't responsible for decayed items due to death, and they weren't responsible for lost xp in the case of a bounty hunter coming to kill your jedi. Considering the amount of time it would take to grind certain things it simply would not make since to sell your time unless you were selling it to multiple people at once, and doing this would greatly increase the chance of one of the party dying due to that toon being controlled by AI, or, in the case of a bounty hunter, not being able to simply force run away from danger because the person in control of the macro chain gang is on PC#3 and can't get over to PC #6 in time.

In the cases of credit farming, people who sold credits online did it one of two ways, both of which were actually due to bad design in the game:

First, if amissions payout was 20k then all party members got 20k instead of it splitting amongst them. This is where the macro gangs would come in, and one person leading a chain of 7 toons could make 8x an individual in a legitimate group of 8 players, because in the legit group 7 toons arent mules.

The second way was to go to a place where a static spawn was located, and to run an afk combat macro by yourself or in conjunction with other AFKers, and add a /loot command to the macro. With a right timer on the /loot it would guarantee a consistent spawn so you would never be overwhelmed AND it would keep other players from pinching your business because a respawn never occured until all the corpses were looted. So now you got people going to placesd where elite bosses spawn and drop high end items, or places where spawns are huge and statistically increase your chances of getting a a rare component, and they afk camp it. the bigger the group the better, that way no ones inventory fills up too fast. these items are then either sold in game for credits, then the credits sold for $$, or the person was just doing this to make themselves more uber by getting rich and having rare stuff.

I never saw anywhere actual in game items being sold individually on ebay, it was always either credits, grinding, or an entire account, but now it happens since things arent as rare as they used to be. A year ago you could have gotten enough ing ame credits for a jetpack to turn around and sell for $750 dollars, now I see jetpacks on ebay for $180 and they can be repaired in game now, whereas before if u got it blown in PVP it was gone fro good.

Also, take into consideration the varying economies from server to server in a game like SWG and by doing cross server trades of credits you could always launder your money to the server that would gain you the most real life profit.

I doubt anyone who sold credits online was someone who played for fun alone, or was someone who got rich from crafting. SWG had a very unique crafting system, so much that there was a significant portion of the gamers who played who ONLY crafted and ran shops because they thought it was fun. That being said, the time investment was too big to make a profit selling credits, even with crafting macros going, because crqfting macroes required you be at keynaord a lot more than camping/follow macros.

SWG killed looping macros, and SWG changed the manner in which rewards were payed out, and a lot of this
nonsense stopped with Ebay on a small scale and went onto a larger scale

There were plenty of players, however, who were not farmers who used these methods to grind, get loot and get rich in game. also, if you consider the amount of storage allowed in the game and the fact that you could own property and homes and storage ships, people who were doing this the entire time likely had a surplus of credits/loots they could continue to sell for a long time.

In the old days on ebay it was common to see "1 million credits for $15 dollars" or "5 million for $65 dollars". And I mean that stuff was on there a lot

Now it appears everything for sale credit-wise is larger increments, and its cheaper, but if u check the dates on these links a lot of this crap has been up for sale for a while, and I'd be willing to bet half those accounts for sale are mule accounts

http://video-games.search.ebay.com/s...1654QQsbrsrtZl

I didn't see any grinding services there when i just checked, but since they made the game level based and made it where you had to do quests to get xp, I doubt a grinding service would be worth the enteprenuers time unless he charged huge amounts. Remember, the game used to be based on 250 skills points to put in whatever skills you wanted, as long as you had the relevant xp to fill whichever of the 500 skill boxes you wanted, and combat xp was gained by killing stuff with the weapon you wanted xp in. I don't see a grinding service happening now, tell me if u do, but as I recall the ones I used to see had a brochure they would send you, they had some sort of money back guarantee and a website. Of course, all this was illegal under the Sony rules, so the people involved were kept confidential and in cases where one of the mule/grinder leader accounts was banned, they would just buy another and afk grind that one back up to par in like 2 days


--edit, I also forgot about faction points being sold online. You could get those from killing things against your faction, and they were used to buy faction pets like AT-STs and bases and turrets for PVP. Faction points sold for 1 point for 100 credits, and smugglers got a transfer bonus, so smuggler players in afk grind chains killing rebel bases could transfer the faction points without penalty to whoever was buying them. I also knew a lot fo people who just did afk spawn camping for faction points to sell, use etc, but this was for in gamew use only not to make real money

[Fragony]

I wonder if this business model (hiring a ringer ('game manager', in AdrianII's parlance) to play/work for you for cheap) translates across game-genres to FPS's that have player ladders/ranks? What would a 'wealthy' american 16-year old be willing to pay a chinese ringer to see his username in the top-50 rankings of Halo or Call Of Duty? Two bucks; five; 10?

I have been a very active rogue spear player (#2 on worldladders with pistols only you noobs) and cheaters pay a WHOLE lot more.

[Adrian II]

I'm not sure if i understand your question completely (..)

Yes, you did. Thanks for the wealth of information. I never played SWG, but I can understand most of it with the aid of their website guides.

It seems SWG ran into many similar issues that developers of other games had to deal with, such as respawn camping and level grinding. Macros can be scams too. Runescape mining macros were sold to noobs on eBay and Runescape boards for $$ for some time, and this went on well after they had become useless because new players were not allowed into RSI anymore and noobs had to join RSII, which was considered macro-proof. I know of an American noob who was so impatient he bought an outdated automining macro on eBay for $50 and was immediately banned when he tried to run it in RSII. He had just paid toward his half-year membership as well, so he pissed away more than a hundred bucks that day.

By the way, have you ever read The Great Scam by Nightfreeze? If not, you are gonna love this.*

*I could find only a cache of it.

[Major Robert Dump]

Ha, nice read. Yeah, I played Eve too and ended up quitting after getting podkilled in deep space without insurance when my corp went out to colonize the far edges. Some pirates basically camped our noob station and killed anyone who came or went, so we ended up being two dozen players stuck in space with no ships and no where to go. They did it for a week, but I just quit after that.

The guy in that story is kind of a dick, though, but online gaming sort of breeds it. Whenever theres money or an economy noobs are gonna get ripped off and people are gonna scam. I thought about giving all my credits and stuff to a noob, or even to a guild mate, but I pulled a little trick of my own and remaining players something to get a good laugh from.

Back to farming:

I can safely say I will likely never, ever play another mmorpg again because they are either dry, cookie cutter and boring, or if they have any depth whatsoever they get ruined by farmers and scammers who essentially effect the economy in a bad way. In SWG someone figured out a way to dupe veteran rewards that sold for tens of millions, and once most halfwya informed players figured out looping afk macros, everyone became rich, and the next thing you know every third player is sporting RIS armor, a jetpack or an AV-21, things that used to require lots of work and luck and skill, but with the market flooded with money no one is afraid of taking losses and no one cares about risk vs gain, and soon after pvp goes into the toilet too because every player who doesnt have top of the line gear gets ganked all the time, which means new players get discouraged and quit, which means the game makers stop making as much money which means nerf nerf nerf to make more user friendly.

[GoreBag]

I know a guy who used to play that online Final Fantasy game (X? XI? I don't remember) and he used to complain about the insane in-game inflation caused by the Chinese/Korean farmers. I didn't actually understand the gravity of the situation until he linked me to an article about how Squaresoft was cracking down on the farmers and banning them by tracing large transfers from one account to the other.

The whole thing reminds me of the online situation in the Sims where certain people began acting as Simwhores and making real money by having cybersex with Simcustomers. Mind-blowing.

If anything, though, that video just makes me think about how different things are in China.