World of Warcraft Gold Buying Reviewed

There is a culture of players in World of Warcraft that play the game not for fun, but for profit. To the citizens of Azeroth, these players are known as Farmers. Farmers spend their time killing monsters in out of the way places for the items they drop. A farmer hopes to get rare and valuable items for the hours spent mindlessly killing. They then hock all the items gathered to vendors or to other players via the Auction House. A majority of the gold farmers active in World of Warcraft are Chinese, and often speak little to no English. Though they are often the focus of ridicule by American players, and playing video games for money is something that most American kids would dream of, their lives are not easy as it may sound.

In near sweat-shop conditions, the accounts are manned in twelve to fourteen hour shifts, without holidays or vacations. It is rare for a gold farming account to spend much time offline, as each account has two or three players assigned to it in these shifts. In tightly packed rooms, between ten to thirty computers can be running the game simultaneously. Each account has a quota, most commonly twenty gold an hour. The average price for an American player to purchase gold is $70 for one thousand gold. Using these figures, each hour of game play earns approximately $3.50. A pittance is paid to the farmer, between 45 to 55 cents an hour is the normal wage. With World of Warcraft's subscription cost of $15 a month, the first 5 hours of the farmers first shift pays for that, everything else is profit for the company.

The American players who are up in arms at the gold farming epidemic are not lobbying for more fair work conditions, or attempting to help farmers unionize. The plight of the Chinese gold farmer isn't even a consideration. They are worried that it has an adverse effect on the game's economy. A farmer grinding for gold initiates a perpetual cycle. They sell the items to players for gold to give to their company, who in turn sells their gold back to the players. People buy the gold from the farming services so they can afford the things they want for their character. The purists in World of Warcraft believe that it should be hard work on the player's behalf that earns them the best gear, not real world currency.

Blizzard takes the side of these purists, but they do not necessarily hold the same moral convictions. All items, gold, characters, likenesses... everything in World of Warcraft is intellectual property of Blizzard Entertainment. The players pay their subscription fees each month to "rent" their character. Selling items or gold is strictly forbidden by the Terms of Service Blizzard has written. According to blizzard the only thing a player owns is their log on ID and their password, even sharing that is a terminable offense. A player or account proved to be engaged in the sale of items or gold and the account selling and buying can be suspended. With the long days spent farming, and the vigilant-in-text regulations set in World of Warcraft, Blizzard has still done little to stop the farmers or the buyers.

Future Improvements To The Game World Of Warcraft

After a year of its release the game world of warcraft had alot of mistakes to fix. Imabalances and a lack of enough high end content didn't bring in alot of interest in the game at the beginning. Of course now the originator has fixed the problem and interest in the game has taken off like a storm.

The first months of being live the game servers were constantly taken down for maintenance and the player base was upset with the base of the game. Problems caused with servers being down were quite upset with the response time ( sometimes for days ) were handled with players affected getting free time to make up for the delay. Now of course all the major problems are fixed and the only delay is the time it takes to add a new patch to the game when it comes out. Usually a day or so to impliment.

The raid content of the game on release was limited to The Molten Core and Onyxia. The first three months that was plenty, most avid WOW players were still busy leveling and getting good gear from the high level five man instances. The top guilds, however, would have these encounters mastered in short order once they got into them. After two months of raiding nothing but these encounters they became tedious. Many players lacked faith in Blizzard grew bored with the game. Blackwing Lair was released a few months ago, and has proven to be a sufficient challenge to the game. Ahn'Qiraj was just released also. Those finished with Blackwing Lair will be looking forward to the new challenges it presents. As long as Blizzard can keep up with the progression of best raiding group, no player can complain about lack of activity at level 60.

The honor system and battlegrounds released half a year after the game hit shelves brought more structure to Player versus Player interaction (PvP) by ranking and rewarding players for killing other players close to their own level. While it doesn't discourage 'ganking,' killing a player much lower in level than the attacker, it provides purpose to fighting the opposing faction.

At the core of every good video game is a high quality user interface. It's the way the player interacts with the game environment. WOW provided a fine interface at the start, but as the game progressed, it became clear certain things were lacking within the game. Thankfully, Blizzard supported Custom User Interfaces by allowing 'add-ons' to be incorporated easily into their game. Using these custom interfaces, players can get exactly what they need out of the game to play to the maximum efficiency. The best of the interfaces have been incorporated into WOW's base user interface.

Blizzard does a lot to make sure their games are of the highest quality when they are released to the public. After a full year of beta testing, world of warcraft is a much better game than when it first started out. Over the last year, the game has made leaps and bounds to become the best massively multi-player game on the market. With a larger test group, and user input, Blizzard has been able to shape WOW into the game it should have been on release.