Virtual Worlds #20: Putting Your Money Where Your Mouse Is
Sep 20, 2006
Much has been written on the subject of the so-called "secondary" market -- where players can trade real money for virtual goods and services -- in massively multiplayer worlds, but accounts of actual experiences with real money services are hard to find.
Good reasons for this are plentiful: the threat of reprisals from vengeful publishers, the fear of unscrupulous companies playing fast and loose with your credit card details, and the very real stigma that surrounds the practice in most gaming circles, to name just a few. Are these companies as fly-by-night as their reputation indicates? I stepped up, opened my wallet, and secured the services of one powerleveling firm -- the perhaps concerningly named Dark Horse Leveling Studio -- to find out.
Dark Horse offers an impressive range of World of Warcraft services, priced anywhere between $2 for an hour of faction grinding up to $660 which gets you a character taken from level 1 to level 60, mastering two professions along the way. It also provides a similar range of services for just about every other MMO around, from popular games like Runescape and Lineage II to relative also-rans and unknowns like Silkroad and, er, Auto Assault. I opted for a mid-priced Warcraft offering: to take a character from level 1 to level 50, with a mount, 100 gold, and a First Aid level of 225 thrown in. Dark Horse asked $275.
Let's get a couple of things straight: I figured sending off my main Warcraft account details to an unknown firm wasn't too bright. For one thing, I wanted to keep my main account -- and for another, it'd be clear to anyone digging through the account details that it's a press account, and I wanted Dark Horse to approach this task just like any other. So I used a backup which already had a level 60 or two and a couple of lower-level alts -- no different than millions of other accounts around the world.
Mal'Ganis was the server I chose for my new character, mainly because I wanted to set Dark Horse a challenge. Mal'Ganis is both heavily populated and a highly competitive player-versus-player server, both factors that could increase the leveling time.
  |
I'm not going to publish the character name, for the sole reason that I'd quite like to keep my account. Let's call him Cyril. Cyril is a Troll priest, for the sole reason that I got fed up with Alliance priests using mind control on my other characters and I felt like getting myself a piece of the action. He started life like all Trolls, but little did he know the fate that awaited him: being sent off to the World of Warcraft equivalent of boot camp. I created the character, logged in to take a quick look around, and then handed over my account (and the sum of $275, paid through Paypal) to Dark Horse.
I heard nothing, beyond an initial email confirmation, for eight days. Cyril had abandoned me - but I kept tabs on his whereabouts, like an anxious father digging through the cellphone bills of his college-freshman daughter, just with the World of Warcraft web site and a spare Mal'Ganis character.
Cyril was busy. In fact, as would later become apparent, he was clocking over 12 hours a day, being piloted by person or persons unknown. Eight days later, an email dropped into my inbox: "We are pleased to inform you that your order for the following DHLS service has been successfully completed..."
In the end, I did a little better than I was expecting. Dark Horse delivered over 120 gold, a First Aid skill of 270 and the account was back in my hands after eight days, well under the promised 11. By any criteria, that's a good performance. I wouldn't doubt that Dark Horse intentionally over-delivers on all its contracts; nothing generates good word of mouth like the feeling that you've got something for nothing, and in the grand scheme of things 20 gold and a little first aid grinding isn't as much effort as other things.
And Cyril even had some equipment. I'm hard put to find much positive to say about it except that it was there, to be honest, but I was paying for levels, not gear. Flipping through his character information sheet reveals an unsurprising little factoid about the chosen priest config for professional powerlevelers -- a generic-looking shadowpriest loadout. I'd be curious to see how they configure other classes, but not curious enough to fork out all that money. Check the screens for the details.
That's the good. On the other hand, I was not pleased at all to see that the account password was being passed to and from their web server during the signup process in plain text, as far as I could tell. It also showed up in my email receipt together with my account name not once but twice, and that's certainly not a secure practice. Yes, they need the password to access the account, but there's no way they need to be sending me emails containing it.
Nothing came of it -- Dark Horse didn't change the password on the account while they were using it, and as soon as they relinquished it, I changed it myself, but the potential for a hijack is obvious nevertheless. Not good, and not particularly bright on the part of their techs, either.
I should point out, though, that my credit card payment went through Paypal and not Dark Horse's servers. Although Paypal might have its detractors, I know they're probably not going to send my card number around in plain text, and I'm happy with the payment system overall -- just not the method they choose to confirm my Warcraft account details.
Still, all's well that ends well. Dark Horse delivered more than they promised, a couple of days early, and considering that this is necessarily a time-consuming service, the price seems pretty fair to me. So far, the account remains unbarred, and I haven't been inundated with tells calling me a lousy gold farming scumbag either. Fix the stupid security holes and I'll have no complaints at all.
  |
Of course, Blizzard doesn't condone this activity, although I don't know whether it's something they actively dish out bans over. I don't see any particular reason why it would be. Sure, if a Blizzard rep were to look through my account history they'd see a password change followed by a week or two of almost continual access from a foreign machine, then another password change; a suspicious sight. But it's not in itself evidence that I've broken the terms of service, although I'm sure I certainly have.
What would be incontrovertible grounds for a banning, though, would be evidence of hacking program usage. Dark Horse say they don't use hacks - but then they would say that, wouldn't they? I have no way of knowing either way, and it's certainly a possibility in principle, and if that account takes a trip to Bansville in the next round, I won't be in too much doubt as to what happened. We'll see -- but getting its customers banned isn't a good way for Dark Horse to guarantee repeat business. I doubt it's an issue.
It's tempting to wonder how much the people that played Cyril were paid. I tried to talk to the employee (or, more likely, employees) playing the character, by logging on with another account and posing as an acquaintance, but I was not successful. No big surprise, as the Dark Horse website plainly states their workers will ignore all attempts at communication from other players. Besides, given what most Warcraft players know about gold farming and powerleveling firms, it's probably a reasonable assumption that they didn't speak English anyway.
Reading between the lines, though, It's possible to do a little handwaving and come up with at least a plausible guess at an hourly rate for these individuals. I paid the company $275, and the account came back with five days and four hours of played time. What's a realistic profit margin for the company, allowing for equipment, premises, electricity and so on? 50% probably isn't out of the question. They logged 124 hours with my character, putting their overall revenue at $2.22 per hour. I'd be surprised if the people actually doing the work made more than a buck and a quarter per hour, and it could well be a lot less.
But these folks could be absolutely anywhere. Dark Horse's website is registered to an address in Taiwan, but there's no guarantee the people actually doing the work are based there, or even employed directly by Dark Horse at all. Apocryphally, most gold farmers and powerlevelers appear to be based in East Asia or the Pacific Rim, however, so it's possible to take the figures a little further than that.
According to the National Labor Committee, a New York-based non-profit workers' rights organization, a living wage in China is just 87 cents per hour. Looking online at freelance data entry services, it's easy to find companies or individuals prepared to transcribe "captchas" -- the little number and letter pictures you've probably seen when signing up for web site accounts -- for as little as 60 cents per hour. Although I don't think wages so low are morally justifiable, depending on exactly what Dark Horse pays, they are likely to be some distance from the worst offenders.
Not that this is any kind of justification, of course - but low wages in foreign countries aren't a problem that's exclusive to MMO services or data entry firms. If you've ever bought clothes at a chain store or owned branded sneakers, chances are the workers that produced those goods were being paid far, far less than what we'd consider a living wage. This, rightly or wrongly, is a fact of modern life, and avoiding it is next to impossible - but users of powerleveling firms see it in somewhat closer focus than most. How many man-hours does it take to make a pair of sneakers? I have no idea - but I have a pretty clear idea how many hours it takes to take a Warcraft character to level 50.
Should users of such firms -- and now I'm obliged to count myself in that category -- accept some moral culpability for this situation? I think so, but not significantly more than buyers of any other product that relies on low-waged foreign labor. This might be a large sum of money for a single transaction, but how much do you spend on intensively produced foreign products in a year? Debatably, it's an undesirable situation, but that money is just a drop in the ocean. If you're concerned about such things, there are more productive avenues down which to pursue change. Criticizing powerleveling firms for supporting sweatshops while wearing a few hundred dollars in Chinese- or Indian-made apparel seems hypocritical.
   |
Besides, powerleveling raises moral concerns that are more specifically significant to MMO players. How would you react if you found out a guildmate had used a powerleveling service? If you're anything like me, you'd probably laugh. Cyril's a long way from being ready for the major guilds, especially on an old, highly populated server like Mal'Ganis. He'd need a lot more work on his woeful equipment for starters, not to mention another week or so's full-time play to bring him up to 60. It's hardly a golden ticket to the big time.
Some MMO players, though, will see a legitimate use for these services. It's easy to see a small-time guild identifying a hole in their regular line-up and having one member employ Dark Horse, or a similar firm, to level up an alternate character to fill that specific need. With the resources of an entire guild to tap, they'd have no trouble outfitting him, and without enlisting guild members to play the new character in rotation it's hard to see a faster way of doing it. If you need a high level alt quickly, and you value your time higher than $2.22 per hour (I know I do), it's automatically a good value proposition into the bargain.
Mind you, the prospect of paying not to play the game still seems backward. What other entertainment medium could spawn a concept like this? I guess it all comes down to what you consider the "playing" to be. If the high-end content is the aim, then the leveling process is just a grind. For me, though, I still haven't had a better time in WOW than that first time I ran the Deadmines, with a full group of my buddies, way back at level 17 just after the game launched.
Cyril just skipped all that. Or as far as I'm concerned he did. If I'm honest, I doubt I'll play him much. Although someone certainly put a lot of effort into building him up, the last time I saw him he was running around Newb Village, checking out starter quests. Given that Warcraft is (debatably) light on high level content if you're not into uber-guilds or hardcore PVP, I rather feel like I've missed out on the best years of his life, and I'm not sure that I'll take the trouble even to kit him out properly. Dark Horse's services may be slick and good value -- apart from the aforementioned security problems -- but I don't think I'll be using them again.
Recent columns:
- Virtual Worlds #19: A New Hope?
- Virtual Worlds #18: Underachieving and Under Assault
- Virtual Worlds #17: A Mythical Union
- Have something to say? Email us your comments.