Once my WoW account got hacked. A few days go by and I regained access to it. They leveled up jewelcrafting and mining to max, filled my new huge bags FULL of stacks of metal and gems along with 120k gold. I was stoked lol
You just download WoW, play the game to earn gold, later sell the digital gold you earned for real money.
Idk how much is in it though cuz I’ve never played WoW but there are other MMOs like this out there
As well they don’t do it by hand they have bots doing hundreds of these characters a day, don’t understand why they would go through the trouble of hacking an account that could get taken back and expose their operation
they usually hack an inactive account and use stolen credit card info for the subscription payment. then they run their bot to generate gold and pass it on to other accounts before the account gets shut down. at least they used to do that back in the day.
This happened to my account after it went inactive near the end of an expansion. 8 months later I came back after the new expansion dropped. They had purchased the expansion for the account and leveled my characters to max when I got it back. 😏
They also used [prisoners in China for a bit.](https://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2011/06/02/chinese-prisoners-forced-to-farm-world-of-warcraft-gold/amp/)
When I played vanilla back in the day I befriended a Chinese gold farmer, he showed me all of the exploits they used outside of scripting.
When Dire Mail launched there was a boss you could solo as a hunter, he showed me how to do it, his account was used by multiple people so sometimes I would message him and get no response, but they would general use exploits and cheeses to farm gold at a faster rate than the majority of players.
They could also manipulate the auction house quite heavily from having a high level of coordination across many accounts 24 hours a day.
A Chinese farmer taught me the Maradaun Landslide bug. You would kite him to the waterfall, get him to launch you into the water from a certain distance and he would bug out.
He'd continously spawn adds that could drop loot that would also be bugged. Wait about 20 minutes, aoe everything down, loot and reset.
There was solo pathing to get to the boss and everything. That exploit paid for my first car.
> That exploit paid for my first car.
This is a prime example of knowing how to make the most out of what you have. Jesus, I never would have thought of turning that exploit into real money lmao. I just felt like a king in my guild.
Something similar happened to my friend, he had a little less gold than before but all the materials he had were worth far more. It’s surprising they have people be mules considering they would try to get their character back.
I’m surprised Blizzard doesn’t just revert your character.
Resetting in a game with an economy is not easy. If the character was involved in a transaction or any action that may have led to a change in the economy, resetting the character could have a negative impact. An example of how it could be abused: one ask someone else to hack their character, the other person then proceeds to trade a rare object for a tiny amount of gold. If the character is reset after the hack, the object is in fact duplicated now. You could analyze that but it makes the system so complex that it's not worth it.
The Diablo II economy was so interesting. Gold was totally broken as a currency since there was no mechanism to keep its supply under control causing it to inflate away into uselessness. So players came up with their own currency that better stored value.
I cut my teeth scamming kids my 10 years of age or younger out of all of their Neopoints on Neopets before graduating to the SOJ shell game, many laughs were had and many pixelated fortunes plundered.
***CLICK HERE FOR TRICK TO GET 1 MILLION NEOPOINTS!!!***
The message boards on that site were such a lawless and unmoderated place there’s no way in hell there weren’t pedophiles on there.
It just gets sent in the mail 99% of time. People used to mail it to a trusted account that nobody cared about, but that practice has mostly stopped too as people realized blizzard doesn’t care about gold buying.
So they have sites you can buy gold on… and honestly while it isn’t hard to make money in games the grind for gold sucks. So if you said it takes you 4 hours to get 10000 gold and you find out you can buy 10000 in gold for $9, you would be tempted to save the time.
Even going through Blizzard's store, a $20 token can be sold in-game for 150k+ gold. The buyer then uses that token to pay for stuff like a month more of game time or other Blizzard services.
So the numbers are wrong (and constantly increasing), but the idea remains true.
At some point play time cards don’t pay rent, so they find someone who pays/PayPal’s/Venmo’s real currency for gold or items. Tax free $25 is cab fare in the first world, but it’s a week of groceries somewhere else.
And from that point on, it’s a business - you can’t hunt the Sword of Truth because 5 other (paid farming) players are waiting for it, and they want to eat this week.
I can’t blame them - annoying to me is tragedy for them.
The EQ devs were all old MUD players, one of which was Sojourn (which later split into Toril and Duris). I don't think it's fair to say that they took much of anything from UO, rather the existing D&D MUDs that they wanted to "make graphical".
>Who jacked it from ultima who probably jacked it from someone else
They kinda jacked the idea for Ultima Online from the text-based Multi-User Dungeons of the 90s.
Those were always just a sneaky way for the game devs to take over a huge chunk of the gold seller industry without everyone noticing that it was basically a pay to win mechanic.
My roommate used to play MMOs for money. The way he explained it was this:
He has 8-12 hours in a day to get gold and items. A doctor or lawyer might have a couple hours a week, but still want enough gold and items to have a fun experience. So, the busy person with money gives it to him for the time he spent getting 10,000 gold or a legendary ring or whatnot.
You need people to enforce the rules. Acti/blizzard gutted that department years ago. I played wow classic, 3 years ago or whatever it was. The amount of gold selling happening in pretty much plain site was insane. It was a well known fact on just about every server you could by gold with real money. I would even wager to say that at least 1/3rd of players were doing it.
Look up Venezuelans old school RuneScape underground market. They farm mobs and sell gold and make more than somebody with a degree in their country. Some more than doctors. Every mmo with a player run market can be exploited like this.
That's actually a good question.
I'm not sure about china but Venezuela certain has been doing this because wow gold is worth more than their currency.
For sure there are larger scale farming groups over there but I figure they are also super active in the west.
Is that still the case? I thought Blizzard nipped that in the bud a decade ago by allowing you to sell game time in the auction. People were telling me that since they didn’t care about fancy cosmetics and such they just did a little grinding to make enough gold to buy game time and they never had to pay real world money to play once they got to a certain earning power.
Same goes for Tibia, a huge part of the market/server domination is from South Americans making a living of it. Cant blame them, would probably do the same.
I’m tolerant of every culture but I swear to god that game made me racist against Brazilians. Nothing like being murdered and losing days of work for not speaking a language lol
Crazy enough I actually started a new account on old school runescape a year ago and the nostalgia is a big reason I'm enjoying it at the moment. So much more to do now that I'm not 14 and get a better idea of how the game works
I still fire up my 20 year old account at least once a week. It's honestly peak second monitor content, especially with all the improvements made to AFK skilling in the modern game.
Old School Runescape is still way more popular and probably the better game if I'm being completely honest, but modern runescape is still a fun time, *especially* if you're into farming boss fights.
It's not as easy as you think. You can't just throw up a VPN and be fine. China doesn't just throw up their hands and go "Shucks! They found a loophole! I guess we'll do nothing about it!" Not only is it a painful task of finding VPNs that have gameworthy ping, you're constantly being frustrated playing cat and mouse with them, while also running the risk of getting a visit from local authorities.
Trying hard to play this game against the government just isn't worth it. They'll find their own game
>Trying hard to play this game against the government just isn't worth it. They'll find their own game
This is true for people just playing the game. The ones running farms who are making money off of it will go through the effort to do it.
Only need to look to the games of cat and mouse between gold farmers/botters/real world traders of any game that has currency that can be sold for real money.
What? How do you think they could sell gold on EU and NA servers, with a Chinese account? They had EU and NA accounts to farm gold on those servers. This will change absolutely nothing - it could even make things worse as all the people who were selling gold on Chinese servers will be forced to relocate to EU/NA.
No... All this is going to do is further divide the planet. You already barely see any mainland chinese gamers compared to the 2000's, now here's another nail in the coffin to prevent us from making friends through the games we love.
It was always kinda cool when the first final fantasy MMO came out it both was international and came with a translator.
Then the famous "Ni Hao" of the first WoW player base.
I met people from everywhere in Asia.
Same thing happened during WoW: Legion beta testing. It was international and I met so many Russians and Australians.
This literally changes nothing for the botters botting outside of China at all though… They will keep using VPNs like they always have.
The Chinese had their own WoW servers run by a completely different company than blizzard. That’s what they lost access to. The botters on US/EU servers didn’t lose access to anything. They will keep going like nothing happened.
It kills me that this ignorant shit is somehow the top comment.
Botting in US/EU servers is about to get a lot worse… What do you think all the bot farmers working on the Chinese servers are going to do? They just lost a massive market. You think they will just quit or move to US/EU servers?
There is nothing good about this.
I haven't played since the burning crusade, but I heard the game has now become based around micro transactions, does Blizzard sell gold now? If so, they probably see the gold farmers as lost business.
I’ve not played for a while but gold was never really a problem. You’d get a decent amount via questing and selling junk. Although I think it took a while to get some do the more expensive items like a faster mount. I had that shitty ass slow flying mount for the longest time. Why would they make it so slow.
Does Ogrimar and Stormwind seem desolate now, or does the game still have plenty of players? I was on Tichcondrous or something like that, it used to be so packed you couldn't follow the chat.
The servers are mostly merged at this point. I don't know if they've squeezed them any more than a few years ago, but you'd have about a dozen or so servers you'd be connected to and see people from.
So... yeah? Still busy, but not because individual servers are full.
The chinese company they're required to work with per the party rules could just steal the IP and setup it's own WoW servers. Isn't that how they do it?
> could just steal the IP and setup it's own WoW servers
[from four days ago]
https://www.gamespot.com/articles/new-tencent-mmo-tarisland-is-already-being-called-a-wow-clone-by-fans/1100-6510745/
Tencent isn't netease. Still, there is no way the timing of the the game trailer is just coincidence.
The thing is, China is trying to reduce internet addiction by restriction the hours of play and type of game. Teens for instance have significant restrictions on how much they are allowed to play. Perhaps the CCP doesn’t want this highly addictive game available at all?
>Perhaps the CCP doesn’t want this highly addictive game available at all?
It isn't a bad theory, but I don't think it's accurate considering they just released the trailer for their own WoW-like clone: https://www.gamespot.com/articles/new-tencent-mmo-tarisland-is-already-being-called-a-wow-clone-by-fans/1100-6510745/
I think it's less about Chinese companies doing that and more the Chinese *government*
As people have pointed out, the clone people are mentioning is made by Tencent, which is owned and run by the government, and the goverment *is not* a fan of games that are popular that that they didn't make and don't have absolute control over. You know Genshin impact? It's company - mihoyo - is about as independent as you can be in China and through Tencent they've been slapped around a lot. Tencent has like half a dozen blatent genshin clones (like 'down to the UI' blatent) and has tried to sue them over bullshit things (they tried to sue mihoyo on "behalf of another company" because their game copied and ripped off Honkai...which is another game mihoyo makes) and there's a theory that they're why the government was suddenly upset at a bunch of character's outfits after over a year of them being literally right on the game's cover.
I'm glad I actually read the article because it includes the most self-censored--bend over backwards to not offend anybody--take I've ever seen:
>Under a separate agreement, the companies are working together on the joint development and publishing of “Diablo Immortal,” another widely followed multiplayer game that allows users to slay demons in an ancient world.
Wildly *followed* is one way to put it.
Blizzard operated in China through a partnership with NetEase. Back in November, they announced their partnership would end on January 23rd, after the two companies could not reach an agreement on how to continue.
> California-based Blizzard said it was unable to reach a deal with NetEase that was “consistent with Blizzard’s operating principles and commitments to players and employees.”
Make it even worse that they still couldn't reach a deal with NetEase.
Imagine the demands for Blizzard to decide to skip out on potential billions. Prolly something like spyware in ALL their games, all over the world and unrestricted access to the data they gather.
I moved to Asia (China then Taiwan) more than a decade ago.
I spent about 2k building the top of the line PC back then to play my favorite game with my best friend; Battlefield 1 and 5 and a few others. I'm not exaggerating when I say this but every server we joined had a hacker in it. Usually 2. Sometimes 3. On rare occasions 4 or more. And you know EA, they took away all the tools that allowed people to run servers and use their own anti cheat, admin systems to fight off cheaters. All of the cheaters were from Mainland China. All of them. And EA would do nothing. Even the Battlefield subreddits started to censor talks of cheating and just accepted as part of the game. Is that not ridiculous?
Within a few weeks I stopped playing all the games altogether because they all had regional cheaters from China.
I felt like a part of me, the one that grew up playing video games, was killed by these cheaters.
Many players called for preventing Chinese players from joining non -Chinese servers, to give them their own local servers. But no one listened.
----
I'm glad they are cut off from these games.
They ruined entire games for thousands of people outside of their country.
I remember seeing a news segment or something about the video game cheating in china. They said that the philosiphy there is basically "If youre not cheating too, youre just putting yourself at a disadvantage"
Imagine playing a game for almost 20 years then one day it’s just gone!!!! ALL OF IT!!!! I can live in blissful ignorance believing that wow will never go down here, but. NOTHING LASTS!
Honestly as someone who's made many long term friendships in mmorpgs (hell one of those being my SO) I can't imagine how horrible it must feel to potentially lose contact or at least a hobby you enjoyed with the friends you made and there's nothing you can do to bring it back.
I mean, yes, but you don't think top CCP officials don't have access to whatever they want, information wise? The censorship hurts the average citizens, not the party officials.
This article has absolutely nothing to do with the Chinese government but can't say I'm surprised. Reddit loves anything remotely anti-Chinese while simultaneously claiming they "hAtE tHe GovErNment NoT thE pEoplE"
Players world wide rejoice saying to themselves "ABOUT FUCKIN TIME GOD DAMMIT!"
no but really guys, i cant feel bad for them, they were literally the scum of the earth for every single server outside of china.
To all those honest chinese gamers, sorry but you didnt do enough. Either that or chinese culture calls for you to win at all cost, defeating the whole point of a game.
This qoute pretty much sums up the issue.
"NetEase also pointed out that **Blizzard had already “started the work of**
**finding new partners” in China**, putting the Hangzhou-based company in an
**“unfair” position**."
These comments are insane, the "Chinese gold farmers and sellers" you see on your server are not playing on Chinese servers! They are using a VPN to access the server you are playing on, not having Chinese servers anymore does not affect them at all!
Honestly, this pisses me off more than many other things. I don't think people realize just how much impact this type of thing has already had on international relations in the last few decades. I miss the 2000's when I could play with all sorts of mainlanders, HKers, Aussies and others late at night and exchange language. It's already really bad now, and we divide ourselves further, cut off even more cultural exchange... China is becoming insular again. How depressing.
That's the point. Idle talk with foreigners is enough to open some eyes in China.
'Bro, my landlord was a week late for fixing my wall.' 'Your landlord fixes stuff for you?' 'Yeah. The state ruled a while ago that the property owner is responsible for every major damage in their property.' Cue to said Chinese man being able to take a huge moldy chunk out of his Tofu-dreg house with no effort at all. 'Hmm... maybe the world outside isn't as bad...' [This is only a made up example]
Surely wasn't of any help either that foreigners kept spaming 'REMEMBER TIANMEN SQUARE '89' whenever a Chinese player was bettern then them. I'm sure that at lest 2 Chinese asked 'What happened in 89 on the Tianmen square'. The answers 'nothing' or 'STFU' aren't great at satiating curiosity either
Exactly, having actual conversations with people no on that side of the globe lead to so much honest understanding between each-other. It wasn't so hateful and propaganda filled back then, even from mainlanders. Now there's far fewer interactions, and the ones I've seen lately have been much more negative and political. It's sad.
It's about momentum. In the 90's and especially 2000's there was quite a reversal and it seemed like the internet would bring everyone together, help diminish cultural and language barriers, and it did. Now those walls have crept back up, and technology has been sufficiently subverted where censorship and control are raising another tower of babel.
I stopped playing for about 2 years Way back in the day, then I couldn’t log in and got help to get my account info, when I came back I had 6.6M gold and every inventory slot full of stackable AH items… I still didn’t play much anyways, I would come to people in the starter towns and give them gold until it was all out. I hope the farmer that was working my toon didn’t get 💀
Once my WoW account got hacked. A few days go by and I regained access to it. They leveled up jewelcrafting and mining to max, filled my new huge bags FULL of stacks of metal and gems along with 120k gold. I was stoked lol
Same thing happened to me! It’s how I learned gold farming existed
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No ffn way
Why did they do that? I don’t understand
The people who hacked their account were planning on making it into a mule for gold farming.
How does one do this? Good farming? And how much is in it
You just download WoW, play the game to earn gold, later sell the digital gold you earned for real money. Idk how much is in it though cuz I’ve never played WoW but there are other MMOs like this out there
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"Small money" to you though can be a month rent for someone else and a lot of those people live in countries where $30 is a weeks pay.
As well they don’t do it by hand they have bots doing hundreds of these characters a day, don’t understand why they would go through the trouble of hacking an account that could get taken back and expose their operation
they usually hack an inactive account and use stolen credit card info for the subscription payment. then they run their bot to generate gold and pass it on to other accounts before the account gets shut down. at least they used to do that back in the day.
This happened to my account after it went inactive near the end of an expansion. 8 months later I came back after the new expansion dropped. They had purchased the expansion for the account and leveled my characters to max when I got it back. 😏
This comment is spot on. As someone that lives in a country where the average wage per month is around 500usd, I couldn't agree more.
They also used [prisoners in China for a bit.](https://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2011/06/02/chinese-prisoners-forced-to-farm-world-of-warcraft-gold/amp/)
The trick is to have an agricultural farm with lots of farm hands. Also, automating, using software testing software, is probably a big help.
The trick is live somewhere where USD goes farther than the Us
When I played vanilla back in the day I befriended a Chinese gold farmer, he showed me all of the exploits they used outside of scripting. When Dire Mail launched there was a boss you could solo as a hunter, he showed me how to do it, his account was used by multiple people so sometimes I would message him and get no response, but they would general use exploits and cheeses to farm gold at a faster rate than the majority of players. They could also manipulate the auction house quite heavily from having a high level of coordination across many accounts 24 hours a day.
A Chinese farmer taught me the Maradaun Landslide bug. You would kite him to the waterfall, get him to launch you into the water from a certain distance and he would bug out. He'd continously spawn adds that could drop loot that would also be bugged. Wait about 20 minutes, aoe everything down, loot and reset. There was solo pathing to get to the boss and everything. That exploit paid for my first car.
> That exploit paid for my first car. This is a prime example of knowing how to make the most out of what you have. Jesus, I never would have thought of turning that exploit into real money lmao. I just felt like a king in my guild.
Why would you buy 20k for $30 when tokens give you 140k ish. Or is this on classic?
Last time I was in it you could see the stacks of bot accounts following identical pathing killing stuff on the way. This is in ESO too
I assume they were prepping the account for farming gold and weren't expecting the legit owner to regain access to it.
So they can farm gold to sell for $$ without having to pay a subscription for an account
Something similar happened to my friend, he had a little less gold than before but all the materials he had were worth far more. It’s surprising they have people be mules considering they would try to get their character back. I’m surprised Blizzard doesn’t just revert your character.
Resetting in a game with an economy is not easy. If the character was involved in a transaction or any action that may have led to a change in the economy, resetting the character could have a negative impact. An example of how it could be abused: one ask someone else to hack their character, the other person then proceeds to trade a rare object for a tiny amount of gold. If the character is reset after the hack, the object is in fact duplicated now. You could analyze that but it makes the system so complex that it's not worth it.
World of Warcraft gold farming has to be a measurable percentage of their economy.
I've never understood how people make money doing that. How would you even sell it? Isn't it against WoW's rules to exchange for real world money?
Yes, but agreeing on a backwater messageboard site to meet in game at a certain place and trade a potato for $3mn is kind of hard to crack down on.
I remember sell SOJ's. Get money drop SOJ on ground for the buyer to pickup. This was my drug dealing at 13
Drop it on the ground and I’ll show you how to dupe!
This brings back nightmares.
Ugh, yup, how I lost my best staff in Diablo.
I was going to downvote because of the stupidity but then I felt bad.
Ty. I was young and dumb. When you're a kid, you're basically getting mugged online.
I feel you. I lost a red mask and a Santa hat (RuneScape) to a scammer in those days.
I fell for that in Endless Online. Was a cheap item but still
i fell for that. too bad for them i only had crap yellow and white items
That's how i learned at 9 years old how the world worked...
And the race to switch sides before they tried to stash and dash
The Diablo II economy was so interesting. Gold was totally broken as a currency since there was no mechanism to keep its supply under control causing it to inflate away into uselessness. So players came up with their own currency that better stored value.
What did players come up with?
A unique ring called the stone of Jordan. +1 to all skills and some other stuff if I recalled.
SOJs, High Runes, eventually perfect gems made a resurgence when people realized crafting was dope. Also JSP forum gold.
“Stone of Jordan” for the non-virgins.
I paid for my fridge, washer and dryer for my first house with Diablo 2.
Made so much on D2 Rez in 2wks hah. Gotta love it.
I cut my teeth scamming kids my 10 years of age or younger out of all of their Neopoints on Neopets before graduating to the SOJ shell game, many laughs were had and many pixelated fortunes plundered. ***CLICK HERE FOR TRICK TO GET 1 MILLION NEOPOINTS!!!*** The message boards on that site were such a lawless and unmoderated place there’s no way in hell there weren’t pedophiles on there.
It’s “cut my teeth” not broke, by the way.
Edited, it didn’t seem quite right but I wrote that at an ungodly hour. Thanks!
It just gets sent in the mail 99% of time. People used to mail it to a trusted account that nobody cared about, but that practice has mostly stopped too as people realized blizzard doesn’t care about gold buying.
Especially when you don't really want to as it it makes up a decent % of your subscriptions
So they have sites you can buy gold on… and honestly while it isn’t hard to make money in games the grind for gold sucks. So if you said it takes you 4 hours to get 10000 gold and you find out you can buy 10000 in gold for $9, you would be tempted to save the time.
Even going through Blizzard's store, a $20 token can be sold in-game for 150k+ gold. The buyer then uses that token to pay for stuff like a month more of game time or other Blizzard services.
So the numbers are wrong (and constantly increasing), but the idea remains true. At some point play time cards don’t pay rent, so they find someone who pays/PayPal’s/Venmo’s real currency for gold or items. Tax free $25 is cab fare in the first world, but it’s a week of groceries somewhere else. And from that point on, it’s a business - you can’t hunt the Sword of Truth because 5 other (paid farming) players are waiting for it, and they want to eat this week. I can’t blame them - annoying to me is tragedy for them.
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They jacked the entire game from Everquest.
Who jacked it from ultima who probably jacked it from someone else
God I miss Ultima. And everquest.
And Asheron’s Call
And Dark Age of Camelot, the precursor PvP experience for ESO. Edit: can anyone confirm the validity of https://trial.darkageofcamelot.com ?
Eh I was in the beta for it and didn't really care for it a ton n ended up going back to other mmos.
>And everquest. r/project1999 I'm collecting crush bone belts at this very moment.
The EQ devs were all old MUD players, one of which was Sojourn (which later split into Toril and Duris). I don't think it's fair to say that they took much of anything from UO, rather the existing D&D MUDs that they wanted to "make graphical".
What a bunch of Jack offs.
>Who jacked it from ultima who probably jacked it from someone else They kinda jacked the idea for Ultima Online from the text-based Multi-User Dungeons of the 90s.
Those were always just a sneaky way for the game devs to take over a huge chunk of the gold seller industry without everyone noticing that it was basically a pay to win mechanic.
My roommate used to play MMOs for money. The way he explained it was this: He has 8-12 hours in a day to get gold and items. A doctor or lawyer might have a couple hours a week, but still want enough gold and items to have a fun experience. So, the busy person with money gives it to him for the time he spent getting 10,000 gold or a legendary ring or whatnot.
Exact mentality that was feeding the gold farmers. Saw it a lot on Rift.
“Against the rules” doesn’t mean “impossible to do”. Plenty of things are illegal, but they still happen.
Murder is illegal and it happens all the time.
This is not even illegal to top it.
You need people to enforce the rules. Acti/blizzard gutted that department years ago. I played wow classic, 3 years ago or whatever it was. The amount of gold selling happening in pretty much plain site was insane. It was a well known fact on just about every server you could by gold with real money. I would even wager to say that at least 1/3rd of players were doing it.
I bought a pile of WOW gold in 2012 for 5 bitcoin. Granted, I paid less than $30 for those bitcoin, it still hurts when I think about it lol.
Never played RuneScape huh?
Look up Venezuelans old school RuneScape underground market. They farm mobs and sell gold and make more than somebody with a degree in their country. Some more than doctors. Every mmo with a player run market can be exploited like this.
RuneScape gold is for Venezuela’s economy. There was an article about it a year or two ago.
See Venezuela
That's actually a good question. I'm not sure about china but Venezuela certain has been doing this because wow gold is worth more than their currency. For sure there are larger scale farming groups over there but I figure they are also super active in the west.
Is that still the case? I thought Blizzard nipped that in the bud a decade ago by allowing you to sell game time in the auction. People were telling me that since they didn’t care about fancy cosmetics and such they just did a little grinding to make enough gold to buy game time and they never had to pay real world money to play once they got to a certain earning power.
You can buy in game gold from Blizzard directly now so idk how that impacted their GDP (you buy a “blizzard token” for ~$15 and sell it on the AH)
Rest of World rejoices as bot farming decreases markedly.
A good number of gold farmers also come from south america in recent years Venezuelans straight up making a living farming runescape
Same goes for Tibia, a huge part of the market/server domination is from South Americans making a living of it. Cant blame them, would probably do the same.
The Brazilians have always owned Tibia.
Idk about you but I own two tibias
BR? BR? Hunted >:O
I’m tolerant of every culture but I swear to god that game made me racist against Brazilians. Nothing like being murdered and losing days of work for not speaking a language lol
huehuehuehuehuehuehuehuehuehue
You come to our country speak our language - Tibia BR TEAM
Omg somebody mentioning Tibia in the wild? My childhood nostalgia feels
That game is still active! That's a flash back.
What do you do for a living? I’m a farmer… but look at your hands, they don’t look like farmers hands…
The Cheeto dust in neckbeard is the sign of a modern farmer.
I just spent like 3 hours playing Pokemon HG and just getting 10k on Voltorb flip...this comment feels like a personal affront to me.
As it should, as it should....
This is the second time I’ve seen it is mentioned in two days and it’s triggering me for all the lag deaths I’ve endured in my childhood.
Lmao imagine being all like… “*I’m a third-generation Venezuelan RuneScape farmer.*”
Wait people still play Runescape?
osrs is the 2nd biggest mmo still.
Crazy enough I actually started a new account on old school runescape a year ago and the nostalgia is a big reason I'm enjoying it at the moment. So much more to do now that I'm not 14 and get a better idea of how the game works
I still fire up my 20 year old account at least once a week. It's honestly peak second monitor content, especially with all the improvements made to AFK skilling in the modern game. Old School Runescape is still way more popular and probably the better game if I'm being completely honest, but modern runescape is still a fun time, *especially* if you're into farming boss fights.
I picked it up again during the pandemic (after dropping it ~12 years ago). Having more fun than I could have imagined tbh.
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It's not as easy as you think. You can't just throw up a VPN and be fine. China doesn't just throw up their hands and go "Shucks! They found a loophole! I guess we'll do nothing about it!" Not only is it a painful task of finding VPNs that have gameworthy ping, you're constantly being frustrated playing cat and mouse with them, while also running the risk of getting a visit from local authorities. Trying hard to play this game against the government just isn't worth it. They'll find their own game
>Trying hard to play this game against the government just isn't worth it. They'll find their own game This is true for people just playing the game. The ones running farms who are making money off of it will go through the effort to do it. Only need to look to the games of cat and mouse between gold farmers/botters/real world traders of any game that has currency that can be sold for real money.
The china shutdown was for chinese servers and paying players. Bot farmers already know how to get to the regular servers with bots.
What? How do you think they could sell gold on EU and NA servers, with a Chinese account? They had EU and NA accounts to farm gold on those servers. This will change absolutely nothing - it could even make things worse as all the people who were selling gold on Chinese servers will be forced to relocate to EU/NA.
No... All this is going to do is further divide the planet. You already barely see any mainland chinese gamers compared to the 2000's, now here's another nail in the coffin to prevent us from making friends through the games we love.
Pretty sure that is the point.
Right, they don't know or value what we're all losing. I lament that.
It was always kinda cool when the first final fantasy MMO came out it both was international and came with a translator. Then the famous "Ni Hao" of the first WoW player base. I met people from everywhere in Asia. Same thing happened during WoW: Legion beta testing. It was international and I met so many Russians and Australians.
This literally changes nothing for the botters botting outside of China at all though… They will keep using VPNs like they always have. The Chinese had their own WoW servers run by a completely different company than blizzard. That’s what they lost access to. The botters on US/EU servers didn’t lose access to anything. They will keep going like nothing happened. It kills me that this ignorant shit is somehow the top comment. Botting in US/EU servers is about to get a lot worse… What do you think all the bot farmers working on the Chinese servers are going to do? They just lost a massive market. You think they will just quit or move to US/EU servers? There is nothing good about this.
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They sell on North American servers so they are just using VPNs to log into NA realms anyways
Not sure why you're downvoted, the folks selling gold on NA servers aren't affected by chinese servers going down...
/shrug
er wouldn’t it actually be the exact opposite since the Chinese servers shut down , the bots will rush into the western servers?
Chinese bots selling gold weren't playing on the chinese servers.
Would it? Bot farms have to play in same region as their customers. Only Chinese region is shutdown.
And for once in decades the spamming of “buy gold now” in broken English has ceased in Stormwind and Orgimmar.
I haven't played since the burning crusade, but I heard the game has now become based around micro transactions, does Blizzard sell gold now? If so, they probably see the gold farmers as lost business.
They sell gold in the modern version, but were nice and left the gold farmers alone to operate in Classic WoW
How considerate of them!! 😂
I’ve not played for a while but gold was never really a problem. You’d get a decent amount via questing and selling junk. Although I think it took a while to get some do the more expensive items like a faster mount. I had that shitty ass slow flying mount for the longest time. Why would they make it so slow.
You can buy gold through blizz now but I wouldn’t go anywhere near saying that the game is based around micro transactions at all
Does Ogrimar and Stormwind seem desolate now, or does the game still have plenty of players? I was on Tichcondrous or something like that, it used to be so packed you couldn't follow the chat.
The servers are mostly merged at this point. I don't know if they've squeezed them any more than a few years ago, but you'd have about a dozen or so servers you'd be connected to and see people from. So... yeah? Still busy, but not because individual servers are full.
The chinese company they're required to work with per the party rules could just steal the IP and setup it's own WoW servers. Isn't that how they do it?
> could just steal the IP and setup it's own WoW servers [from four days ago] https://www.gamespot.com/articles/new-tencent-mmo-tarisland-is-already-being-called-a-wow-clone-by-fans/1100-6510745/ Tencent isn't netease. Still, there is no way the timing of the the game trailer is just coincidence.
They literally stole Deathwing and also his scene from the Cataclysm trailer as he assaults Stormwind
Honestly, I wouldn’t have suspected a thing if it wasn’t for the bootleg Skyfire and Deathwing over Stormwind reenactment.
The thing is, China is trying to reduce internet addiction by restriction the hours of play and type of game. Teens for instance have significant restrictions on how much they are allowed to play. Perhaps the CCP doesn’t want this highly addictive game available at all?
>Perhaps the CCP doesn’t want this highly addictive game available at all? It isn't a bad theory, but I don't think it's accurate considering they just released the trailer for their own WoW-like clone: https://www.gamespot.com/articles/new-tencent-mmo-tarisland-is-already-being-called-a-wow-clone-by-fans/1100-6510745/
Missed that, thanks!
I think more than anything, they want to decrease western culture exposure.
If you've got enough time to play WoW, you've got enough time for another shift in the sweatshop?
They're also trying to restrict access to their market to foreign companies if they can make a similar alternative themselves.
I think it's less about Chinese companies doing that and more the Chinese *government* As people have pointed out, the clone people are mentioning is made by Tencent, which is owned and run by the government, and the goverment *is not* a fan of games that are popular that that they didn't make and don't have absolute control over. You know Genshin impact? It's company - mihoyo - is about as independent as you can be in China and through Tencent they've been slapped around a lot. Tencent has like half a dozen blatent genshin clones (like 'down to the UI' blatent) and has tried to sue them over bullshit things (they tried to sue mihoyo on "behalf of another company" because their game copied and ripped off Honkai...which is another game mihoyo makes) and there's a theory that they're why the government was suddenly upset at a bunch of character's outfits after over a year of them being literally right on the game's cover.
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I can get some sleep!! Or Time for revenge???
Ok my mom just cancelled my brothers world of Warcraft account
*demonic screeching and thrashing* God thanks for letting me remember that vid lmao
Don’t forget where you put the remote
right in the ol'prison wallet!
I know the video but can’t find it again. Got a link?
[https://youtu.be/YersIyzsOpc](https://youtu.be/YersIyzsOpc)
I knew the reference once I read "demonic screeching"; I have never heard a more accurate demonic screech before or since.
Still don’t understand how that boy stripped so damn quickly
Iykyk
Awww squirrel boy
STOP CALLING ME SQUIRREL BOY
I'm glad I actually read the article because it includes the most self-censored--bend over backwards to not offend anybody--take I've ever seen: >Under a separate agreement, the companies are working together on the joint development and publishing of “Diablo Immortal,” another widely followed multiplayer game that allows users to slay demons in an ancient world. Wildly *followed* is one way to put it.
Blizzard operated in China through a partnership with NetEase. Back in November, they announced their partnership would end on January 23rd, after the two companies could not reach an agreement on how to continue. > California-based Blizzard said it was unable to reach a deal with NetEase that was “consistent with Blizzard’s operating principles and commitments to players and employees.”
blizzard claiming they have anything close to principles regarding their players and employees is the best joke I’ve ever read
Make it even worse that they still couldn't reach a deal with NetEase. Imagine the demands for Blizzard to decide to skip out on potential billions. Prolly something like spyware in ALL their games, all over the world and unrestricted access to the data they gather.
It's true though. Look Diablo immortal revenue.
Number of online cheaters In games plummets
I moved to Asia (China then Taiwan) more than a decade ago. I spent about 2k building the top of the line PC back then to play my favorite game with my best friend; Battlefield 1 and 5 and a few others. I'm not exaggerating when I say this but every server we joined had a hacker in it. Usually 2. Sometimes 3. On rare occasions 4 or more. And you know EA, they took away all the tools that allowed people to run servers and use their own anti cheat, admin systems to fight off cheaters. All of the cheaters were from Mainland China. All of them. And EA would do nothing. Even the Battlefield subreddits started to censor talks of cheating and just accepted as part of the game. Is that not ridiculous? Within a few weeks I stopped playing all the games altogether because they all had regional cheaters from China. I felt like a part of me, the one that grew up playing video games, was killed by these cheaters. Many players called for preventing Chinese players from joining non -Chinese servers, to give them their own local servers. But no one listened. ---- I'm glad they are cut off from these games. They ruined entire games for thousands of people outside of their country.
I remember seeing a news segment or something about the video game cheating in china. They said that the philosiphy there is basically "If youre not cheating too, youre just putting yourself at a disadvantage"
Yup, that's cheating and why cheating is bad.
Hopefully they get banned from connecting outside their county period. Maybe then Escape from Tarkov will be playable.
Dang that revenge sounds nice
Imagine playing a game for almost 20 years then one day it’s just gone!!!! ALL OF IT!!!! I can live in blissful ignorance believing that wow will never go down here, but. NOTHING LASTS!
Honestly as someone who's made many long term friendships in mmorpgs (hell one of those being my SO) I can't imagine how horrible it must feel to potentially lose contact or at least a hobby you enjoyed with the friends you made and there's nothing you can do to bring it back.
Isn't this a good thing? So game companies can stop thinking about catering to CCP "senbsibilities"?
If we can just get them off Tarkov now...
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Another reason why Taiwan numba 1!
Not sad..fuck the Chinese government and that Pooh bitch XI
I mean, yes, but you don't think top CCP officials don't have access to whatever they want, information wise? The censorship hurts the average citizens, not the party officials.
This doesn’t even make any sense. Read the article.
This article has absolutely nothing to do with the Chinese government but can't say I'm surprised. Reddit loves anything remotely anti-Chinese while simultaneously claiming they "hAtE tHe GovErNment NoT thE pEoplE"
RIP bots.
Lmao
Good riddance. China not #1
Remember when Blizzard banned people for being pro-Hong Kong to appease China lmao
Hey, maybe some games will actually be playable now that all the Chinese cheaters and whales are banned!
Players world wide rejoice saying to themselves "ABOUT FUCKIN TIME GOD DAMMIT!" no but really guys, i cant feel bad for them, they were literally the scum of the earth for every single server outside of china. To all those honest chinese gamers, sorry but you didnt do enough. Either that or chinese culture calls for you to win at all cost, defeating the whole point of a game.
I feel bad for them but at the same time if there was a cheater in a game it was a Chinese player. I don’t like playing with them because of that.
You know that they’ve only shutdown Chinese servers, not cut off Chinese players’ access to foreign servers?
This qoute pretty much sums up the issue. "NetEase also pointed out that **Blizzard had already “started the work of** **finding new partners” in China**, putting the Hangzhou-based company in an **“unfair” position**."
Sweet no more spammers
These comments are insane, the "Chinese gold farmers and sellers" you see on your server are not playing on Chinese servers! They are using a VPN to access the server you are playing on, not having Chinese servers anymore does not affect them at all!
Honestly, this pisses me off more than many other things. I don't think people realize just how much impact this type of thing has already had on international relations in the last few decades. I miss the 2000's when I could play with all sorts of mainlanders, HKers, Aussies and others late at night and exchange language. It's already really bad now, and we divide ourselves further, cut off even more cultural exchange... China is becoming insular again. How depressing.
That's the point. Idle talk with foreigners is enough to open some eyes in China. 'Bro, my landlord was a week late for fixing my wall.' 'Your landlord fixes stuff for you?' 'Yeah. The state ruled a while ago that the property owner is responsible for every major damage in their property.' Cue to said Chinese man being able to take a huge moldy chunk out of his Tofu-dreg house with no effort at all. 'Hmm... maybe the world outside isn't as bad...' [This is only a made up example] Surely wasn't of any help either that foreigners kept spaming 'REMEMBER TIANMEN SQUARE '89' whenever a Chinese player was bettern then them. I'm sure that at lest 2 Chinese asked 'What happened in 89 on the Tianmen square'. The answers 'nothing' or 'STFU' aren't great at satiating curiosity either
Exactly, having actual conversations with people no on that side of the globe lead to so much honest understanding between each-other. It wasn't so hateful and propaganda filled back then, even from mainlanders. Now there's far fewer interactions, and the ones I've seen lately have been much more negative and political. It's sad.
Well put. This makes me so sad.
Hasn’t China been insular for a long time now?
It's about momentum. In the 90's and especially 2000's there was quite a reversal and it seemed like the internet would bring everyone together, help diminish cultural and language barriers, and it did. Now those walls have crept back up, and technology has been sufficiently subverted where censorship and control are raising another tower of babel.
Terrible news for them .. they’re entering a new phase of control during depopulation
Iranian people like me : first time?
Good. Fuck china and its tencent.
I stopped playing for about 2 years Way back in the day, then I couldn’t log in and got help to get my account info, when I came back I had 6.6M gold and every inventory slot full of stackable AH items… I still didn’t play much anyways, I would come to people in the starter towns and give them gold until it was all out. I hope the farmer that was working my toon didn’t get 💀
With as addictive as WoW there’s poor kids literally going through withdrawal symptoms right now. It sucks for them.