Player-run guilds emphasizing the gold-farming profession have become popular in some games. At least one guild, in World of Warcraft, has chosen to name themselves “Gold Farmers”, specifically to mock such operations. Another mock guild was set up on several European servers called “we farm gold u buy” [sic], a clear dig at the usually poor typing and grammar that Chinese gold farmers often have.

Much derision was poured on websites that advertise and sell in-game items and property when many of them closed briefly and could not carry out transactions over the Chinese New Year. Players took this to be incontestable truth as to the identity of those involved in the farming and selling of virtual items.

In most games, gold farming is specifically prohibited by the game’s EULA or terms of service and is grounds for termination of the account. However, in general enforcement is sporadic, due to the effort required to investigate farming activities and the large negative impact that the termination of a compliant user account has compared to the minor positive impact of the termination of a gold farmer[citation needed]. In addition, most MMORPGs require ordinary players to spend large portions of their time on repetitive actions (farming), making it difficult to distinguish between those who farming for their own use and those who farm for real-life profit[citation needed].

It is possible to attack the gold-farming problem by data mining transaction logs for suspicious activity. This forces gold farmers to obfuscate their activities by moving gold through many different accounts on its way to the paying client. However, it is always possible to trace the movement of objects in an MMORPG, so all clients can be identified whenever a gold farmer is found. Currently not every MMORPGs appears to be banning clients just for buying items from gold farmers in exchange for real-world items or money. However some MMOs such as RuneScape [3] and Guild Wars actively ban accounts[4]. Similary Final Fantasy has also begun banning large numbers of accounts for Real Money Trading (RMT)[5].

In response to on-going customer complaints[6] World of Warcraft has recently banned in-game advertisements for gold farming, as well as applying a patch to minimising in-game spam. Blizzard has now also taking legal action actively pursuing cases in court to those who do[7], and has benn banning large numbers of accounts for for farming virtual items for exchange with real world money[8][9]. On May 30th, 2007 players of the game launched a class-action suit against IGE [10] for breaking WoW’s EULA and damaging the game for ‘honest players’[11]. These actions are reflected in Blizzard’s Terms of Service, ‘Ownership/Selling of the Account or Virtual Items’ which clearly disallow sale of transfer of Virtual Items in the “real world”[12].

According to recent posts on its forums Blizzard now views gold-farming as a bannable offence and will be seeing to remove all such accounts that sell WoW content for real money from the game.

The sale of virtual items and assets has found its way into auction sites such as eBay. Although it was a common sight to see gold farmers list their virtual items on these sites, the sale of these virtual items does not actually take place there. More commonly, these sites are used to facilitate the sale on their own website.[citation needed]

In order to prevent legal entanglements and EULA violations, eBay has recently delisted all virtual property auctions. Items and property related to Linden Lab’s Second Life are exempt from this policy. eBay spokesman Hani Durzy explained the logic behind the apparent double standard: “If someone participates in Second Life and wants to sell something they own, we are not at this point proactively pulling those listings off the site…We think there is an open question about whether Second Life should be regarded as a game.”

According to estimates, around 100,000 people in China are employed as gold farmers, as of December 2005.[1] This represents about 0.4% of all online gamers in China.[citation needed] Chinese gold farmers typically work twelve hour shifts, and sometimes up to eighteen hour shifts. Wages depend heavily on location and the size of the gold-farming company. One gold-farming operation in Chongqing in central China with 23 gold farmers was reported to pay its employees the equivalent of about 120 U.S. dollars per month, while workers at a larger gold farm in Fuzhou earn the equivalent of about 250 U.S. dollars per month. The rising prevalence of gold farming has led to the creation of gold-farm brokerages.

There are gold farmers or gold farms in other countries as well, such as the Philippines, Indonesia, and Mexico. However, they do not approach the scope and scale of the Chinese farm industry. China’s abundant labor, availability of high-speed Internet connections, and cheap computers have made it a powerhouse in collecting virtual assets for online games, fueling the market among the 30 million or so online gamers worldwide.

Jin Ge, a 30-year-old Shanghai native has made a documentary on “gold farms” in China as part of his doctoral research at the University of California, San Diego.[2] He is one of the many researchers who have invested their time in investigating how farm owners manage their production and distribution of virtual commodities across the border between the virtual and the real as well as the border between nations. His main aim in his research was also to delve into the background and lives of these workers: “I also tried to find out what this job, combining work and play, means to Chinese gold farmers and how it feels like to live at this peculiar intersection of the virtual and the real.”

Ge Jin’s research is documented in his periodical online news articles, which can be found at Consumer Studies Research Network.

See also: Video games in the People’s Republic of China
South Korea is also notable for its level of gold farming. So much so that South Korea is currently considering legislation to regulate the exchange of virtual currency.

Farmer is a general term for an MMORPG player who attempts to acquire (“farm”) items of value within a game, usually by exploiting repetitive elements of the game’s mechanics. This is usually accomplished by carrying out in-game actions (such as killing an important creature) repeatedly to maximize gains, sometimes by using a program such as a bot or automatic clicker. More broadly, the term could refer to a player of any type of game who repeats mundane actions over and over in order to collect in-game items. An organization which organizes farmers is known as a shop.