What Can Free Money Tell Us on the Virtual Black Market?

Hyun-chul Kim

Abstract:

“Real money trading” or “Gold farming” refers to a set of
illicit practices for gathering and distributing virtual goods
in online games for real money. Unlike previous work, we
use network-wide economic interactions among in-game
characters as a lens to monitor, detect and identify gold
farming networks. Our work is based on a set of real ingame trade activity logs collected for one month in year
2010 from the world’s second largest MMORPG called
AION (with 3.4 million subscribers). This is the first work
that empirically (i) shows that “free money network” is a
promising measure/approximation for detecting and
characterizing gold farming networks, and (ii) measures the
size of the free money net and in-game virtual economy in
a large-scale MMORPG in terms of the cash flow.