Interview with a Former Gold Farming Shop Manager, Part I

April 24th, 2006 Jun Sok Huhh Posted in news |

I’ve read an interesting interview at a Korean gaming web-zine. It’s a little bit late(sorry for my laziness), but some part of interview deserves to be observed. People around gaming scene already well know that flourishing sweatshops in developing countries (China, Vietnam etc…) are not so ‘sweaty’ as the word looks.

It is definitely true that lower wage is the underlying reason for these offshore RMT workplaces. But, working picture of gold farming in the concrete is a little bit surprising to me. I had vaguely thought that one ‘human’ worker could handle at most 2 or 3 characters with each client simultaneously. But, hacking tools tuned for a specific game make it possible to handle incredibly many accounts/characters per worker. The capital-labor ratio in gold farming business might be much higher than generally expected. Also, the sheer number of farming characters in action might be a lot higher than thoght. If someone tries to calculate total size of gold farming business, these informal pieces of information might be helpful. I translated some parts of interview which seem to bear some importance. If you can read Korean language, jump directly on this full original one.

* Gameabout is the webzine that arranged the interview
* Mister X is the former gold farming shop manager

Gameabout: Please, introduce yourself briefly.

Mister X: Male. Lived in Seoul. I played Lineage for 6 years, and operated a sweatshop for around 2 years.

Gameabout: You said to us that you could give us good information about Auto hunting… ¹

Mister X: At first, 60 or 70% of auto hunting in Lineage are done in China, Vietnam and Philippine, not in Korea. Except some of servers that are under strict surveillance by GM, there are between 600 and 900 characters of auto hunting in operation on the average.
Recently, since shop bosses or managers of gold farming are in full consideration of account/character confiscation when detected, they starts hunting with much lower 'item set'² than before. As I’ve run shop with auto hunting, I can tell easily which character is automated one or not. I definitely say that most of automated characters are from abroad gold farming shops. Also, their IDs look strange(can’t find any specific meaning).
To examine recent situation, I’ve research automated characters in hunting at the 'Widawood' server³ on the Feb. 8th. I heard that GM did a big sweep on these automated accounts/characters a few days ago. There, however, 480 automated characters.

Gameabout: How many characters from abroad that are not controlled by automating tools are there?

Mister X: Recently, human managed gold farming characters are hard to find. But, even nowadays, you can find them in some specific spots.

Gameabout: If automated characters/accounts be taken over and banned, there might be considerable financial damage…

Mister X: If you run a shop in Korea with 100 computers, considering those confiscations and labor costs, you just get 3M Won(1000 Won = 1 USD) a month. In China, labor costs are really cheap. It’s their core competitive edge. Moreover, with the help of cheap labor, the speed to spawn new accounts/characters is really amazing. Recently GMs are painfully working hard to detect automated characters. But, if 100 automated characters be blocked and banned by GM, Chinese sweatshops would make 300 new characters within an hour.⁴

Gameabout: I heard that reporting-by-other-players option in the game was added and lively used. But, in spite of that, why are automated characters actually increasing?

Mister X: The number of sweatshops using automation hacking tools in Korea is actually decreasing. That reporting option is somewhat useless, because automated characters for gold farming are in use for just 7 days.⁵ 7 days is too short for managing gold farming business in Korea, considering subscription fee, costs of automating tools, and particularly labor costs. When you would get juicy profits from farming, a character should go over at least level 40. But, it takes almost 7 days for reaching this level.

Gameabout: Even so, is it possible for Chinese shops to get satisfied in operating just for 7 days?

Mister X: In the past, Korean bosses or managers had hired Chinese farmers. In that situation, there were no way to get satisfactory profit under today’s business condition. But, nowadays, shops in China are mostly made by the native. Their satisfactory level of profit is much lower than us.

Gameabout: Could you tell me about hacking tools that you had used?

Mister X: For around 2 years of operating shops, I’ve used “LinMe”, “LinPle”, “Program B”⁶ in order.

“Program B” is very intelligent. If someone hits it, he would react to say that “Who are you?”, “Why do this to me!”, “What!”, “-_-+”⁷. If someone buffs it without knowing the identity, he would say “Thx!" Or “Thank you!”. If operator sets a certain level on character's each weapon, it would go to village automatically to fix it. It can change weapon in pre-assigned order. It is possble to do 24 hours hunting without any serious technical break. It is basic part to enter into dungeons.

(to be continued)

1. This word means that act of playing with hacking tools that enable in-game character to gather, hunt, and interact in the game without on-the-spot human player who controls the character. [back]
2. As a player who started Lineage in Korea generally begins with some sets or systems of amours and weapons by their choice of class, she/he must buy some in-game money. This sets and systems are called ‘item set’ in Korea. This is implicit starting point among Lineage players. [back]
3. It is the name of a servers in the Korean Lineage. [back]
4. This is an special strategy to circumvent GMs' surveillance. But, in doing so, start-up costs for doing farming business would going up, and profit margin tends to be much lower down. [back]
5. He hinted that 7 days might be optimal terms which could go on without GM’s detection. [back]
6. All of these were different versions of hacking tools for automated hunting. He didn't said exact name of "program B" for some reason. [back]
7. This is an Korean emoticon expressing perplexity. [back]