People who farm online games -- what is the typical hourly income for these folks?

[nauru]

For a popular game like Diablo 3 or something, what is the typical/average hourly income people make from farming gold/items/equivalent?

Educated guesses are welcome, actual sources for your claims are even better.

[Jorpho]

There is a widely-circulated story that some of them are actually political prisoners in China working slave labor.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/25/china-prisoners-internet-gaming-scam

[Chookman]

For a popular game like Diablo 3 or something, what is the typical/average hourly income people make from farming gold/items/equivalent?

Educated guesses are welcome, actual sources for your claims are even better.

Back in the day of Diablo 2 about 9 months after release, there used to be a program that you could run in the background to see what the town vendor was offering for sale. It lasted about 3 weeks before Blizzard patched it. There was an item called a Stone of Jordan that ended up being the defacto currency in the game. On ebay, they were selling for about $10 each. The probability of any ring being sold by a vendor being a Stone of Jordan was 3%. Since you could run the program in the background to see what was offered, you knew already whether the ring was worth buying or not.

It used to take about a minute to create a game and check all 4 vendors for their items. On average, about 1 out of every 33 visits netted you a Stone of Jordan. If 4 visits took about a minute, you could get a Stone of Jordan every 9-10 minutes or so. That worked out to about 6 Stones per hour. At $10 each on ebay, you could make $60 an hour farming the Stones.

Without the exploit, it was not worth it because you had to spend much more time farming gold to buy the rings blind. It was probably down to under $10 per hour.

[ShadowVlican]

i think it works better in the third world where the dollar is worth much more

[Hello-]

Depends on the market supply/demand and diversification on different servers and games. Buyers can appear at any time of the day and a seller has to be quick to jump on orders before others. Farming is done by bots. Assume a bot can make 50 cents per hour in cyber goodies. $12 per day multiplied by the number of bots. If you're planning to do it manually with a single account you'll make more money working a summer job. The people I know who do this devote the majority of their time to it.

Each account has a fixed cost. Initial game purchase and monthly fee for most mmo's. Factor in possible banned accounts and a decent computer setup to run multiple instances of the game. Standard desktops would be bogged down after 2-4 depending on the game. You'll want to mask your ip address, if all bots are farming the same game, using a vpn or proxy with multiple ip's assigned to each instance of the game.

Knowledge of basic programming, vm and networking would be helpful.

Demand can be sporadic following seasonal trends and peaks during new content releases.

Good luck

[duckdown]

Sounds like a pretty lame way to make a living IMO...