Gold From The Chinese Farm

This post wont exactly relate to gaming addiction, but instead what fuels the addiction and who is used to keep shoveling the coal into the MMORPG fire. MMORPG's are a huge industry today, if you have read my first post you know that Vivendi games makes roughly 150 million dollars a month from the game WoW alone. People that play these games are obsessed, some so driven to become the best that they use their own money to purchase gold online through private companies. These companies make there gold by what is called farming. These companies are often China based where there is a tons of cheap labor and these people are paid to sit at a computer for extremely long shifts and play MMORPG's with there only goal being to make gold. This gold is then stock piled and sold to people online via gold buying sites.

Wikipedia has a large compulation of the realities of gold farming. Some of the facts on there are sad and shocking.

While I have never done it I know people who have purchased gold online through sites like http://www.wowgold3000.com/ for large sums of money. As enthralled in the game as I was I could never justify putting out that kind of money for a leg up on my online competition, it just never seemed right. I had also heard of the conditions that the people worked in who farmed that gold. When I played WoW back in the day you could often find players who were unresponsive, played with no morals and spoke only Chinese. I in fact learned a little Chinese just to be able to somewhat communicate with them. These people were gold farms. They would say in one zone all day rapidly killing monsters in hopes of rare drops which could be sold so they could get their pay checks. All in all it was a rather sad ordeal, but as long as there are people out there willing to buy the gold for these high prices there will be people selling it.