Ho John Lee’s Weblog

This evening, I received a spam e-mail offering to sell virtual gold for World of Warcraft.

We are a company which offer WOW gold both US and EU sever, cheap and quickly. Only 49.5 pounds(75EROUS) for 1000 gold EU sever and 75 dallors for 1000 gold US sever. You can visite our website

and pay with paypal.

We also accept Western Union and other payment method.

If you have any question,Please directly relates with us.
Email: deleted
Website: deleted

This is a first for me, I wonder if gold farming is scaling up in low cost-but-wired labor markets. The Wikipedia entry on gold farming notes

Gold farmers are most notably characterized by performing the same tasks repeatedly for long periods of time. Especially on English language servers, gold farmers operating from another country are often observed to speak poor or broken English

At today’s exchange rate, $1 US = EU 0.83527 or UK 0.57300, which means that the US price is a much better deal than the Euro or UK pound denominated price, at roughly 15% less. I gather that World of Warcraft players can’t migrate between servers, so perhaps there’s some other economic aspect at work here.

I’ve avoided diving into World of Warcraft and other MMORPGs in fear of the time sink, so I don’t have a good sense of how big the problem is for players and game developers, or how long it takes to accumulate gold in normal game play.

Since “gold” functions as currency in the game economy, injecting farmed gold into the system should gradually cause inflation (if prices are not controlled by game policy) similar to when government monetary policy creates excess currency. The traditional real world hedge against inflation is physical gold, which is one of the reasons you see dollar denominated gold prices generally going up lately. I’m not sure what an inflation hedge would look like in World of Warcraft. Maybe a stockpile of valuable artifacts?

Nick Yee has an extensive article on gold farming, with many links and comments at The Daedalus Project.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 7th, 2006 at 8:50 pm and is filed under Business, Front Page. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.