Dec 06
But Thurman is no ordinary player. In the weird and burgeoning virtual universe, he’s a former outlaw. While earnest gaming geeks spend hours slaying dragons to earn booty playing Sony’s EverQuest, Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft, and other multiplayer online games, Thurman spent years using his coding chops to cut to the chase: rigging his computers to play games automatically and rake in gold. It took three months and 50 000 lines of code to pull off the feat. And it was all perfectly legal, at least in the real world.
Amazing read…check it out. Thanks, Riley!
haha… Booty
I’ll save you all the three page read – he made $25k a month for his efforts.
But there are some interesting photos of his cluster of PC’s raking in the booty.
Remember when the porn industry was the only place money was made on the internet? Yeah, I’m that old. ^^
Great story and as long as we have MMOs we will always have folks exploiting them. This goes for ANY game weather online or offline. We have cheat codes for single player games, and there are ways to cheat in online games.
It is not going anywhere… might as well accept it. Not saying it is right, but I it is not going away… EVER.
Regardless of whether it’s legal or not, agreeing to Terms of Service, then blatantly violating them as hard as you can, as much as you can, makes you a dishonorable person as far as I’m concerned. Gold farmers are one of the most important reasons behind me quitting most MMOs I’ve played.
P.S.: This comments page has a WoW Gold ad on the top banner, currently. http://www.wowgold-usa.com
Scott Johnson supports gold farming, brawr!
What ads?
The ad at the top of this page. And I thought Scott had a filter for Google now giving him Gold farming/selling ads? I guess he might wanna check over that if it’s true.
Quitting a game due to gold farmers shouldn’t be the reason to quit. Quit because the game isn’t fun anymore. Quit because you’d rather spend time getting know you have a family. Quit because you need to work on a new job that will get you out of the rut you’re in right now.
Despite WoW having all the gold farmers in it and spammers running rampant, I don’t think that kills the fun in the game. It’s like hearing all the shootings that are happening at clubs or bars. Are you going to stop going to your favorite club/bar just because it might be tainted? I don’t think I would stop going.
EDIT – “Google now giving” to be read as “Google NOT giving him gold ads”
This is the main reason I left WOW over 4 months ago, was the lack of fun in the game. The boredom after 2 years of the game drove me away, at one point I thought I may come back. I have heard how the game is finally being tweaked MORE and MORE for casual players and less for hardcore folks. A little to late for this casual player.
If a shootout happened in a club/bar I liked… I would most certainly stop going there. Hell this happened in Daytona to a place a group of us went to all the time. My sister was there the night it happened. After that night… we ALL stopped going there.
So that logic is flawed… at least with some folks.
I don’t se how this is any different than the real world. Rich people get what they want all the time (buy it instead of earning it, or well earned and being able to buy it anyways). The element is always going to be there and kudos to anyone who can write code like that.
oh no
http://img80.imageshack.us/img80/3770/goldfarmadrr0.jpg
@Blades144…
Exactly… Cheating in anything from games, to banking, to investing. Some people will always use what ever means to get something. Could be their brains they use, could be a gun.
I think the “problem” is not the people that are willing to be a gold-farmer, but the ones that can’t resist the temptation of buying their way into a frellin’ game.
Because that is what makes gold-farming profitable experience.
OTOH … without gold-farming there’d be no one left to play a PvP-style MMO that’s been available for a few months.
At least I doubt that a true newbie can survive in an environment where 90% of their opponents outrank them by years of gaming-experience. If you can’t buy yourself past that part of the game then chances are that you are going to quit long before you get there.
It can get frustrating to the casual gamer sometimes, which is one reason they made the recent tweaks to WOW. For a casual gamer the 100 gold for a mount can be a real pain, and it’s tempting to just throw down 20 bucks for some gold.
I will say that the recent tweaks to xp in the game help a lot with the tediousness of leveling a toon. I have a number of toons ranging from mid twenties to 40′s and the changes have made it fun to play them again – no more grinding yetis for endless hours in Winterspring.
I don’t support gold farming, but I do think that there’s a certain imbalance in MMO’s between grinding and fun. I think 100 gold for a level 40 mount in WOW is too steep, it forces players to grind for gold and/or forgoe training just to get a mount. I think it should be half as much. Same with the level 60 mount, it ought to be half the price. Not because the amount of gold is unattainable, but it means that for most players you have to spend a certain amount of game time grinding, rather than having fun.
Hardcore addicts that spend 8 plus hours a day 7 days a week in game will tell you it’s just part of the game, and casual players shouldn’t get the same rewards since they don’t put in the same time. That’s true for some things, but it shouldn’t be true for an in-game essential like a mount.
And of course spending that much time in-game isn’t really healthy.
I don’t feel Blizzard should impose a limit on gametime (even though it might save some marriages and introduce some people to the outside world) but they shouldn’t structure the game so that you almost feel like you have to spend 8 hours a day in-game just to level.
When I first got into WOW I remember an internet flame war going on between WOW enthusiasts and Final Fantasy enthusiasts. The FF guys kept claiming it was too easy to level in WOW, and I decided to try FF out when they had a free trial period over the xbox360. They were right even originally WOW let you fly through the levels as compared with FF. It was so hard to level in that game that I dropped it, which was too bad since the game world itself seemed kind of cool.
this guys is a punk. same time of person that stole the lands and killed of my people. anything for a buck kind of frigtards
WOW was my first MMO – played about a year – while I dont agree with gold-farming per se and never bought gold – it never distracted me or frustrated me as a gamer – in fact I probably sold stuff to people who had bought gold at rather inflated profit margins – at one point I was keeping a spreadsheet of everything i had – my buy price (if applicable) , post price and my sold price and how many times i had posted it – the gold buyers will pay way to much for stuff – so take advantage of them and their laundered goods. At one point I was selling feathers or something at like at a rediculous profit margin (1g50 for something that should have been 50c – 2s). One guy was complaining in chat about when the cost had gone up so crazy – i said that when people will but 1 feather for 1G50 then they will be sold for it. I made some good gold legally – all because some shmuck wants to spend real money for fake money and will spend it like its going out of style
I’ve quit many mmorpgs because of gold farming. A few of the games I played were so bad, you couldn’t hunt or even play the game unless you had a bot running. You would select a creatue and attack and the 50 other people near you would also be autotargetting and attacking with speed hacks.
Yeah, gold farming sucks the life out of a game. BUT it’s the ones buying the gold that are making it happen. Why the hell would you buy gold from a gold farmer when it’s just going to kill the game you were paying real $$$ for. I miss the days of Quake 2 when you would hop on and kick everyones butt and get called a bot without being a bot. Now it’s closer to an insult if you aren’t using a bot.
old news the article may be new but i remember an article with the same pictures and same gadge about 4yrs ago in PC gamer (UK).
also did anyone notice the writer said he used Pentium 4 chips in the comps before P4 came out
)
If this jerkwad worked for me, and I learned that he had been gold farming, I’d fire him (I can do that because employment here is “at will”). If he’ll steal from all the other players in the game – and that’s what gold farmers do – then he’ll steal from his employer.
Bottom line:
Legal is not the same as ethical.
Technically he is not stealing from anyone – he is exploiting a situation. The only way he could steal from a nother player would be if he hacked someone elses account – which does happen,but that is not what he is doing. yes it may be legal but it is not ethical to be doing things after you said you would not – ie disregarding the TOS of the game
@Cyclone1969: Yeah i noticed the P4 problem, but after verification. He says that he started plaing in 97 and some year later (let suppose 3) he started to farm gold. The P4 went out in 2000, so it fit, but he didn’t really bought the cheapest computer then.
of course he didn’t buy the cheapest… 1 gig of ram in 2000? come on…
but the article also says on page three “Gold farmers attack high-level mothers”, so it probably isn’t 100 % correct all the time
I personally have botted most MMO’s you can name. I don’t do it for any sort of financial gain but just to satisfy my own intellectual curiosity. I get quite a bit of academic pleasure from taking a game that is made out to be a fortress (e.g. WoW) and writing my own hacks and hooks into the game and to explore AI to the point of writing a program that can learn the rules of the game and make it’s own decisions about quests and items. I find it fascinating the decisions it makes about abilities and items and how they compare to what real people would choose (in some cases these decisions are the same, in others the end result is very different)
In the end, this guy was simply filling a need in the market. If people didn’t want to purchase virtual gold – then it wouldn’t be worth anything. But alas, too many lazy arse people out there don’t want to do the work when they can just fire up a browser with mommy and daddy’s credit card and buy the gold so they can go off an purchase the new suite of armor or a new sword.
Puhleeeze. The real losers are the kids that sit down thinking they’ll have a fighting chance if they just work hard at the game. There’s always going to be dickwads out there that cheated or bought there way to the top with little or no effort.