Well, the NY Times did run an article on Chinese gold farmers, complete with a picture of Chinese guys on computers. And I'm not aware of WoW selling hourly subscriptions in Mexico. :)

Ah, here's the link to the article (12/9/05), registration required:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/09/technology/09gaming.html?ei=5088&en=48a72408592dffe6&ex=1291784400

That being said, I'm also Chinese (although born in the US) and resent the stereotype. I'm sure a lot of Chinese people play for fun, and not profit. But even the ones that play for profit, I don't mind so much. Everyone's got to make a living...
 

Tobold plays on European servers so unless he buys an american version of wow no Dark Iron server for him.

I played on dark iron for a few months and have a 60 druid on the Alliance side of the server. "Fancy Lads" we hates djork and panda attack!

Gold farming, heh heh, repair bills are insane wipe after wipe wearing all epic gear and learning the new encounters. So in that respect God bless gold farmers who bring more gold into the economy for those nasty repairs.

However I just don't like the exploitive nature of some of the gold farmers. They'll have 1 employee to monitor 12 different computers running bots that auto farm the gold for you. and when the boss makes 50,000 USD selling the gold his "employee" probalby sees $100 - $300 USD a month.

No fair!
 

Sorry but I really just have to comment. I have been reading your blog for more than a year now and I really think you are one of the most intelligent and perceptive individuals with a freely accessible online journal. But But But, please don't include the Philippines on your list of possible Gold Farming Third World Countries. Damn straight the country's poor, the local currency is practically 1/50th of its value 50 years ago, and the basis of political power here is laughably dependent on support from the United States and the local military, but there is no way that there are WoW gold farming setups here. None. Zip. Nada. I have a few friends that love playing WoW and are perfectly willing to sell their gold online but organized "gold-farming sweatshops" do not exist in any form here. Of course a few enterprising individuals play strictly for farming as much gold as they can and then selling them online, but you won't find anyone paying wages for people to actually do it.

The bandwidth is too expensive here, among the most expensive in Asia. And since we are sometimes treated as a North American territory, distribution-wise, goods and services like WoW's monthly costs don't have local, marked-down equivalents like the Chinese do and are, more often than not, significantly marked up by luxury and importation taxes. WoW prepaid cards cost 2,000 Philippine pesos, or $38.46, for two months of play time. If i'm not mistaken that is quite a bit more than what the average US/EU WoW player has to pay for the same amount of playing time.

WoW is still very popular here, but only among the middle-upper class who can either afford the prepaid cards or know someone that has a credit card they can use for paying online. More often than not, an entire group of friends has only one person's credit card paying for all their subscriptions. You can just imagine how popular Guild Wars or free subscription model MMOs are over here just because of the cheaper costs.

Sorry for the comment, but trying to avoid being racist to the Chinese kinda ended up being racist to people in the Philippines as well. On a side note, some Koreans in the Philippines pay people to play their Lineage characters for them so we're not completely innocent.
 

No offence meant. Hey, I included the US in the list of possible gold farming countries. :)

Having said that, I don't hold the argument that the $19.23 cost per month for WoW in the Phillipines would make gold farming there impossible. In China playing WoW costs $0.05 *per hour*. So if a gold farming operation runs an account 24 hours a day, 30 days a month, it costs them $36 per month.

And even at a pitiful wage of $1 per hour, the wage cost per month is 20 times higher than the cost of the WoW account. So in the end the limiting factor of a gold farm is with how little wage per month you can still find people to work for you.
 

Well I guess I was more surprised than anything. It's just that around the video-gaming web, most Asians are often seen as either wannabes or gold farmers. On the opposite band of the spectrum, not all Asians are good at Starcraft as well.

$19.23 dollars a month doesn't preclude gold-farming, but it sure makes the investment a bit more intimidating to make (especially if you make less than that for a whole day of work:( ). Smart players that don't bot may make much more gold in limited hours of playing time so having to pay only on a per-hour basis would be great for them. Ragnarok Online was (is?) the most popular MMORPG in the Philippines, with the option to pay for either per-hour prepaid cards or weekly/monthly subs. Boss MVP hunts (most analogous to small party raids) often yielded the biggest dividends so a lot of hardcore players used the per-hour payment method instead of making the larger investment for a monthly pay cycle.

Well If ever you want to try something aside from MMOs, I suggest getting a DS Lite and just playing some of the great games available for that instead. Hahaha sorry I couldn't resist
 

This article goes on an unfounded assumption that gold farming happens in China not because people there are Chinese, but because they are poor and must live with unpleasant labor laws. So you've extrapolated and concluded that farming operations must happen in other countries full of poor people afflicted by unpleasant labor laws.

I'm going with Occam's razor on this one and putting my money on the whole Chinese thing.

It's nice to see that PvP is delving now into condescending social commentary. Am I a racist for not immediately realizing he was poking fun at the notion that chinese restaurants might be staffed by chinese people?