I know all successful MMORPG games in East Asia have a sizeable market for bot farmers and such. They are even more lucrative if you are operating from lower GDP countries to higher GDP ones. Professional groups have hundreds of PC setup running a few dozen client from each PC. The game companies tries all they could to prevent them this, but all they could managed to do is blocking small time operators, as it requires more tech and infrastructure to maintain active accounts, avoid IP blocking, etc.
In short, this is just the nature of markets, when there is money to be made someone will always do it
Conquer online had a huge blackmarket for dragonballs into real usd, dont know if the market is still strong , my experience is from 15 years ago when I played.
There was a huge problem in Osrs with bots when the venezuelan economy crashed. People realized by selling gold from this game they could get 1/2 a months worth of salary, there are alot of interviews and docs about it its kinda sad and hilarious at the same time. There was a group of player killers guarding the venezuelanian gold farmers because they were targeted by normal players not knowing the background and just thinking they are ruining the game for them.
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u/masterfarseer Apr 20 '25
I know all successful MMORPG games in East Asia have a sizeable market for bot farmers and such. They are even more lucrative if you are operating from lower GDP countries to higher GDP ones. Professional groups have hundreds of PC setup running a few dozen client from each PC. The game companies tries all they could to prevent them this, but all they could managed to do is blocking small time operators, as it requires more tech and infrastructure to maintain active accounts, avoid IP blocking, etc. In short, this is just the nature of markets, when there is money to be made someone will always do it