Chinese Communist MMORPG

[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]

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?