MMORPG=>RMT

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Follow the money
For every reseller of gold, there's a wholesaler who supplies it to gamers with real money to burn. And the biggest name in gold resale is IGE, or Internet Gaming Entertainment. "It's not that they pay the best; they are the most well known, and so [stuff] sells fast," says Smooth Criminal. He knows sales are good because resellers can track profits in real time—and because IGE is one of the biggest fish in the secondary gold market. In fact, IGE has been on a buying spree. It is acquiring the competition and creating a virtual monopoly in this market.

IGE president Steve Salyer tells CGW, "We don't farm assets, nor do we endorse any type of cheating or abusive farming practices. IGE is leading the way in efforts to help prevent these abuses. We spend a lot of time speaking with sellers and educating people involved in the secondary market. IGE is against abusive farming practices wherever they are taking place." But finding and shutting down these farming sweatshops is a hard thing to do. Kiblinger says that IGE's customer service is based in Hong Kong, its employees working for sweatshop wages. IGE's response: "The reason we have customer service in Hong Kong is because it's the gateway to Asia, and our customer service reps earn a fair salary in relation to the profession in that country." This is the same rationale for major companies shipping their customer service desks to India.

Even though IGE itself doesn't farm, and IGE representatives recently told us the company is working to ferret out and ban such behavior, it does buy from farmers who could use exploits. "Whoever supplies IGE controls the market," says Smooth Criminal. Even worse, he continues, "IGE looks the other way when you give them currency. They don't care where it came from even if you tell them you duped it." In fact, Smooth Criminal alleges that IGE helped him hide the illegal credits. "They had to keep moving [Star Wars Galaxies] credits around from account to account to avoid the credit trail (i.e., duped credits) because we told them they were duped." (We asked an IGE representative about Smooth Criminal's experience and received no response.) Currently, Chinese farmers are the main suppliers of WOW's in-game items and gold, and they control the market. Does this mean IGE needs to buy from these suppliers to stay competitive?

Smooth Criminal owns 30 percent of an Indonesian farm, and he just bought a Chinese one that was entirely funded by a recent WOW exploit. When he doesn't have a currency exploit, he falls back on his shops to do some wholesale farming. "Farmers in WOW will be stationed on like a 20-gold-per-hour spot. They have to make at least 15 gold per hour," says Smooth Criminal. However, he has only 10 computers in place so far.

"Ten computers? We have 100 employees for one game!" laughs "Sell." Sell is a recent graduate from Nanjing University. At 24, he's a manager for Vpgamesell, a large SWG Chinese farming center that wholesales to popular resellers. He started off by selling gil in Final Fantasy XI, but his farming days are over. He's moved up to manager status, helping with marketing and delivery. His many farmers work 10-hour rotations and are paid $121 a month. Sell gets $180 a month and works closer to 14 hours a day because he lives at the office, which is a fairly common practice at farming centers—if you lose your job, you also lose your home. Sell negotiates with resellers online to determine the amount of credits they promise to purchase from Vpgamesell. While chatting with me, he's messaging five different people and making contracts for 5 million credits for each server per day.

"HeRog," the owner of Your Virtual Seller, does the same thing as Sell but gets paid well here in America. "I was able to quit my full-time, six-figure-income job," HeRog says.

Smooth Criminal tells me the hiring process at his Indonesian farm is through word of mouth, and the farm turns down 10 to 20 people a day. But that process can get difficult, especially in poor countries.

Adrian2001, a manager for Gamer's Loot, says of his hiring process, "Trust is most important." He gives an example: "I have one boy here [in Romania] that raises goats. So imagine someone who has never seen a PC in his life. I hired the boy because his family is very poor, and he is honest. I tested him by putting money where he might notice it. The money never moved from the spot. I do that with everyone I hire."

For all the so-called virtual sweatshops discovered, a lot of these young men and boys don't mind their jobs, and they aren't exactly working in sweatshop conditions. There's a world of difference between making sneakers and watching bots fight all day. However, they are underpaid, or as Smooth Criminal puts it, "They get paid dirt. But dirt is good where they live."