Farming for the Pharaoh: Buying Gold on World of Warcraft

I don’t pay for gold in WoW. But I have heard the sirens whisper sweetly: “Buy the gold, baby, it’s so easy.” Gold farming and its seductive exchange have been anything but silent since the launch of WoW.
I used to know a gold farmer named Romel. The undead mage took to farming Azshara, killing Blood Elf Reclaimers and Sorcerers day and night. But back then there was a code, an ethical agreement that trumped language barriers: if you wanted a piece of the action, you had to duel. If you won a few bouts, Romel would concede the land and take his farming operation elsewhere. In contrast, new-school gold farmers are without honor.


Old-school farming operations used mobs to generate money through drops. Now, new-schoolers prey upon the WoW community, hacking accounts and selling the spoils: like modern day alchemists, turning gold into yen. This bastardization of the virtual economy gets worse. By using a legitimate virtual auction house, new-schoolers launder their fraudulent funds. Thus, when Redtiger, a dimwitted Orc Warrior, buys runecloth bandages for 500 gold in the auction house, his purchase contributes to MMO thievery on a grand scale. Blizzard has taken action to prevent these transactions by forcing players to wait an hour for the transaction of an item to complete. Predictably, the problem with gold buyers and sellers persists (see comment 1).
Blizzard has made the once-grueling acquisition of virtual wealth even more structured in The Burning Crusade. When daily quests were first introduced, players were capped at 10, each averaging 10 gold apiece. Now, 25 quests can be completed in a day resulting in an abundance of gold and items that can be sold via the auction house.

Why do farmers still farm? Supply and demand. Now that casual players have access to vast virtual resources, the idea of slaying monsters to farm gold legitimately is made pretentious. And what gold farmer doesn’t have their ultimate scores? The hacked account of an M.D. who buys gold because he has the real world resources to make himself virtually wealthy — who, however, does not have the real time to commit to a virtual world to do it through legitimate means (see comment 1). Why not steal his gold and sell it back to him?
Ultimately, it comes down to this: purchasing virtual gold with real money allows you buy real-time on-line (instead of “spending” the time yourself). The virtual world still requires someone’s real-time investment, however, and this means that selling gold is a reflection of the differential value of human time across the globe. So, who’s the thief? Perhaps the title for this article shouldn’t be “Farming for the Pharaoh,” but instead Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.