The Loot Directive
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.
And more, way more, to be read at 1Up.com, publishing this article about “videogame sweatshops”. Where there is money to be made by trading in-game gold and items against real dollars, there are some people who get paid dirt to “play” all day long and farm as much loot as they can for profit. Use of scripts or dupes? Macros and exploits? You name them, it’s likely have been done. An interesting insight on the dark side of the MMOGs industry, from more than one perspective, actually.
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