Every city seems to have one. That dirty street you walk down, you know there are prostitutes around, someone is selling drugs, sometimes it’s out in the open, sometimes it’s just beneath the surface. This weekend I was introduced to one such street online, while playing World of Warcraft.
How I Got Involved
It started innocently enough. My wife was trying to get her faster flying mount and it required a seemingly insurmountable amount of in game gold. She needed over 6,000 and working hard would take days and days. A quick search of the internet saw “Cash for Gold” and it was cheap. All the gold she needed was as little as $30. Since I had the PayPal account, I paid the fee and shortly an Asian woman speaking very poor English phoned telling us where to meet her “guy.” Then hung up, we went there, and got a message, “Will have to do it later.” and logged off. I tried to call the number back and it was disconnected. I filed a PayPal dispute and before long the woman called again, the guy showed up and Dawn got her gold.
This morning, selfishly, I was thinking about the cool gear I could buy with a little gold, so I searched again, found a top Google Ad, purchased some gold myself, promised as in stock, delivered in an hour. Time passed and I went back to the site, initiated a live Chat, and that’s where things got crazy.
It didn’t take too long to figure out that they lied about it being “In Stock” and had what turned out to be Chinese tweeners working their asses off to farm the gold I had asked for, but more on that later. So I asked for a refund, and seriously, no less than a dozen requests for a refund were met with apologies and responses that never once addressed me asking for a refund.
Next I filed a PayPal dispute for the company’s false advertising things in stock they don’t actually have. According to their website even right now they have up to 25,000 gold in stock right now, but they can’t fill my measly order for 3,000 in 7 hours.
5 hours in a get an email from the company asking why I had filed a dispute, they just didn’t understand. I responded with the full details and within a few minutes the woman in the chat window responded “Close your dispute with PayPal and we will refund your money at once.”
Of course I laughed and said, “That’s just not how disputes work, I’ll close it when I have my money back. At this point I was done with gold as I had started reading more about how this gold is acquired.
After 5-6 threats to “Close the dispute if I want my money back” I responded that I was fine, I was protected by PayPal, they would never get my money and were wasting their time asking. In an odd turn then they asked me to send an email to fig.dragon@gmail.com and then they would send my money back. I refused thinking this odd since they had my details and could easily revert the PayPal transaction, and then they responded “In order to preserve the evidence, we need you to send an email to us, thank you for your cooperation.” That’s when I said I was closing the Window, PayPal would ensure I got my money back, it wasn’t worth the trouble for $30.
Is it a Problem?
Absolutely, and it’s a two part issue. The first issue, and the minor issue to be clear, is that after reading and understanding more about in game economy, the massive amount of gold being generated and sold to players in the game has created inflation making normal items excessively expensive for players who earn their gold the right way.
This article has an interesting take on in game economy and the inflation, I recommend you read it.
The second issue is much darker.
What’s Really Happening
What might be a startling statistic. It’s estimated that nearly 1 million people in China are working for as little as $100 a month by farming gold for these places to sell to us lazy bastards in America and Europe. They sit in rooms described as looking like 24-hour LAN parties mixed with shabby dorm rooms, and they do nothing but play the game in a way that reaps the most gold profit. The trade itself is estimated at nearly $1 Billion per year.
The “gamers” typically work in 10-12 hour shifts and provide gold to well educated staffers at the brokerages that get the gold to the players who have purchased it.
That’s very sobering to me. I paid potentially a little kid, $0.42 per hour (assuming he works only 12 hours a day, 5 days a week) to save me a little time in the game.
Does World of Warcraft want it to stop?
Well, you would think they do. The humanitarian issue is something I sincerely hope they care about, but they have quite a pickle. It’s estimated that some 9 million subscribers pay for World of Warcraft. It’s also estimated that 30% of them are Gold Farmers. That means that eradicating Gold Farmers would eradicate 40.5 million dollars a month in revenue. You know they aren’t going to cut off their noses to spite their face.
What’s Next
I don’t know to be honest. It was awful easy for me to go out and buy gold without thinking about it. I am sure it is for millions of players, especially when they get to where the gold becomes an inhibiting factor to their enjoyment experience. When I played several years ago, expensive things on the auction were a few hundred gold, now seeing things for thousands of gold is common, that makes even legitimate players think about buying gold just to keep up, only exacerbating the problem. The more we buy, the more poor kids play the game for little to no money to provide it for us.
I hate to end an article with no answers, but awareness is good. Before you sign in to PayPal to pay for some in game money, think about who is getting it for you, what it’s doing to the game itself, and hope you actually get it. These people turn over accounts like you go through Toilet paper, customer service doesn’t rate very high as a priority. In my case they even resorted to extortion to try and keep my money.
I don’t want this gold now, I just want my money back, hopefully PayPal will be sure to make sure that happens.
Details
I dealt with Gold4Power.com, they have turned out to be a company with decidedly no scruples in lying, false advertising and trying to bully customers. In the past few hours they have:
sent emails trying to get me to confirm I accepted shipment of the gold, which I obviously didn’t.
They tried to get me to close my dispute I filed at PayPal by saying the couldn’t refund my money until the dispute was closed because PayPal wouldn’t allow them to see the transaction until it was closed.
They tried to tell me it was a Chinese holiday and that’s why they couldn’t give me the gold yet, nobody was working (even though this person was obviously working logged in to the game to tell me this.)
They told me they did not have the gold and were trying hard to get it together for me.
They told me they did have the gold and someone was in the process of delivering it.
A pattern of lies.
Related Reading
NY Times – The Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer
Chinese Gold Farmers in the Game World
Fox News – Chinese ‘Gold Farmers’ Play Computer Games for Cash
While watching Heroes tonight, I read a little Digg.com (I don’t know why I bother sometimes!) I came across an image titled:
How To Force Blizzard To Add LAN Support To Starcraft II (PIC)
Looking at the image, you see that a customer is canceling his World of Warcraft account in order to protest the dubiously misused term DRM that’s being used to prove customers are trusted to play the game. The exact phrasing is:
I am cancelling my account because you chose DRM as an acceptable means of deployment in StarCraft II, and refused to allow me to play the game as I wish, where I wish without connecting to your system to authenticate my purchase. You have lost me as a customer because I cannot play your game without proving to you every time I play it that I am a legitimate customer.
Since you have decided your game is too good to trust me with, I have decided my money is too good to leave in your hands.
I have seen this tactic before. My 11 year old uses it from time to time. He doesn’t want to have to wear a coat, so he decides he doesn’t want to go outside anymore. Childish much? The reality is this user really has very little idea what the motivating factor behind this decision was. It’s quite possible that it uses network resources to stay up to date, allow social features, etc. Blizzard is making gobs of money with World of Warcraft so it’s feasible that they are mashing it up with an MMORPG. But that’s not the point.
The point is that Blizzard has and will have millions of customers, and quite probably this guy too. Once all his friends are playing and talking about how good it is, or his WoW Crack addiction grips him, he’ll be back. Blizzard, just like most software companies, write software for the greater group, not the super hardcore contingent (which this guy obviously is) and will include a feature set that appeals to the broader base. I can guarantee that adding a LAN support mode is no trivial feat, and Blizzard isn’t going to be blackmailed into redeveloping the entire game this close to release by $15 per month.
Get a grip, sure, vote with your wallet, but drop the “screw you guys, I am going home” Cartman routine, it’s a game.
Recently I have been playing Star Wars: The Force Unleashed on Xbox 360. I am not sure where these sequences got their start, I first remember them in the Tomb Raider games, but please, for the love of God, QUIT!
Surely you have seen it, in TFU, I am fighting this big monster, I get him just about killed, and it goes into a long cut scene, and randomly it flashes a button on the screen. If you don’t hit the button fast enough, or hit the wrong button, the game punts you out of the cut scene and you have to attack again to restart it. This may be pessimistic, a talent I have, but this seems like very lazy development to me. Does anyone find these things fun?
Make me actually have to DO the action, don’t make me simulate it by guiding a cut scene with carefully timed button presses.
Thoughts?
Recently I signed back up for World of Warcraft to do some testing on Windows 7 and the new ATI series of video cards. Today I wanted to cancel the account so I didn’t get charged again, and had to laugh at the options for quitting. There are two drop downs to explain your reason for quitting, let’s take a look:
Hmm, profession issues? Lost or stolen item? There is pretty much every possible option here except “I just don’t play it” or “I don’t like the game.” So I chose other, and then I see:
Now I have to choose the specific reason. Do people cancel to take vacations? How long are these vacations? You pay by the month! How about the latest patch is so bad it makes you quit? I really like “I play too much” I know a few people who should use that one. It seems obvious to me, but I had to write in “I just don’t play it anymore.”
I guess Blizzard doesn’t think that’s possible.
Author’s Note: Oh you silly internet peoples. It’s obvious that you missed something from my blog post, and let’s be clear, it’s a personal blog post. It’s a little thing called Satire, cousin to humor, in other words, a joke. Obviously I know that Blizzard is not that stupid, and I understand the point and subtleties of statistical analysis, I work in Business Intelligence for Pete’s sake. The point was that I found it “funny” that when I just wanted to cancel, I had this huge mountain of options, some of which I found funny. Moral of this story is don’t bad mouth World of Warcraft or the nerds will put down their mouses, quit their raid, and come Pwn you on your blog. *grin*
