"...Where you go buy gold from a disreputable gold site..." So there are reputable gold sites? Do tell.

I always thought gold farming businesses were fairly legit. Is the problem as bad as Hartsman says it is?

I miss the days of honest Asian sweatshop gold farming.

I don't really follow the logic here.



There is a ton of credit card fraud on goldfarming sites *because* they are illicit, the same way buying drugs is dangerous because if you get ripped off the cops aren't going to take your case. It's a wild west.



But it's a wild west BECAUSE of the development attitude toward virtual currency, prior to the microtransaction wave that has catapulted entire new markets of online games into legitimacy. Clearly not only are there classes of players that want to be able to pay for their entertainment in smaller increments, these audiences exist within subscription MMOs, and a subgroup of those players are willing to risk credit card fraud -- which is equally if not more dangerous to the individual than to the developer -- in order to achieve it. If a credit card were stolen by a goldfarming site, the developer would likely never find out about it. Mechanically I don't even see how it would be possible.



This doesn't mean that subscription games that want to keep 'earning' based economies (the discussion of what constitutes earning is a separate congealed wicket) should go to microtransaction, or don't have the right to delegitimize goldfarming and try to stamp it out whenever they find it. But to say that goldfarming costs the developer in credit card fraud is bizarre. Goldfarming that results in credit card fraud does so toward the player, not toward the developer.



Controlling goldfarming is expensive, but it's a security expense that the developer opts into by essentially outsourcing the purchasing of gold to grey or black markets. Generating mechanics that prohibit gold selling are extremely difficult, so the response generally is to create overlay monitoring systems that target accounts suspected of engaging in goldfarming (which itself has an inherent cost in false positives, i.e. innocent players who get targeted and banned).



Separately, there is a credit card fraud cost in any business, especially an online business, that can be prohibitive, which is why there are so many virtual currency businesses like Vindicia and LiveGamer who know how to bridge relations with credit agencies. There is a ton of black market activity in online markets of all kinds, and certainly games; this is a serious issue but only very tangentially related to goldfarming. It is "real" crime that impacts both players and developers.



These issues are completely separate. I don't know if these were conflated by the editing process of getting his quotes in here, or if they're actually what he thinks, but in either case it's incorrect and clouds the problems around goldfarming, player rights, and economy design by saying "wah! goldfarming costs us money in credit card fraud!". The question is: what are your game mechanics going to do about it? You do control the vertical.