A peculiar blog entry about AreaNet (via WarCry) has many wondering if the publishers of Guild Wars are guilty of a little foul play. The game itself is free to play after the initial purchase, and the only way users might spend more is on expansions or if your account gets banned for something like, for instance, purchasing virtual assets through a third party broker.
According to the blog entry, however, AreaNet has been working closely with the larger gold farming services for some time. This would imply that they're profiting from the brokerage of items they say aren't supposed to be for sale, and doing so in a rather underhanded way.
While the blog may be a complete fraud, it does bring up an interesting point about security when it comes to administration of a virtual world. If you are building a world, or selling virtual goods in someone else's, knowing that the transactions in the system are secure is critical. With a little help from inside the company users could duplicate items without permission, or even print their own virtual currency, and unbalance the entire virtual economy.
Steven Davis, security expert of PlayNoEvil.com fame, pointed out some interesting avenues of exploitation that should be kept in mind:
- Companies whose model involves profit from sign-ups could possibly benefit by mass-banning users for gold farming related offenses.
- Employees at any level may collude with gold farming companies. (It's happened before.) Securing access privileges, auditing, and staff management are critical.
- Larger gold farming companies could target smaller ones for banning with a little help from game company employees to eliminate competition.
- A game company could give a "head's up" to preferred gold farming companies about upcoming mass bannings. The farmers can switch accounts and lay low for a bit and stay in business while the game company looks great in public.
- Employees know the technical vulnerabilities of the system better than anyone, and can advise select individuals of how to best exploit the system. (The blog entry details an item duplication exploit.) Again, auditing and access control would help here.
Know of any he missed?
Where's there's value, there's fraud. For the most part, insider fraud accounts classically for the majority of loss, although this might be more so in the future of a stable business than in startup conditions.
The combination of new monies and non-regulation is a particularly interesting area for fraud. In unregulated payments systems, we've developed a battery of techniques to deal with this which we call "open governance." The essential principle is to push as much as possible into the open domain so that the public can do the auditing function. For free, as their contribution to the community. The benefits are stability, low cost base, and unbeatable loyalty, the downsides are embattled issuers and obvious high-risk competitive plays.
Estimated about 200.000 people work in the chinese goldfarms, the regular workers earning around 2 dollars a day. Just imagine how much money is going on in this market everyday. (modern slavery)
As long people are willing to spend real money for virtual items, this bussiness will continue I Feel.
http://newmw.wordpress.com/2006/12/23/cyberkoelies-buying-your-world-of-...
I personally don't view the original article as credible. While this type of corruption between developer and gold farmers *may* occur in *some* companies, someone with absolutely no inside information could have written the entire article, with only public knowledge of how virtual worlds and gold farmers operate. Until the author provides some information that is verifiable as both accurate and proprietary, I will file this under "hoaxes and conspiracy theories."