So do you hate MMO gold farmers too?

There's a fascinating article on Wired.com about IGE - Internet Gaming Entertainment, a company that for a few years in the middle part of this decade controlled just about all of the MMO gold farming in the world - and it's founder, a former child actor and dot.com investor named Brock Pierce. It's amazing how much I never knew about gold farming and the shady business environment that surrounded it.

Some interesting quotes from the article:

"There were times I came outside," he says, "and the sun hurt."


In the real world Pierce was just a 19-year-old washed-up child actor living far from home and going slowly broke. But in Norrath he was none of that. In Norrath he was the dark-elf wizard Athrex, and he was a champion.


The source of those profits, ultimately, was operations like the one owned and operated by 26-year-old Liu Haibin in Jinhua, China, which I visited a few years ago. With about 30 workers on staff, Liu was able to keep a gold-farming setup running around the clock. While the night shift slept upstairs on plywood bunks, day-shift workers sat in the hot, dimly lit workshop, each tending three or four computers.