Crowdsourcing Legal Goldfarming?

When I learned about goldfarming in my own research for our tech talk in group 5, and after hearing Annie’s lecture about it in class, it got me thinking about crowdsourcing as well. To me these are two very interesting topics regarding the usage of technology and people. In my mind, I automatically think the crowdsourcing is good and legal, and that godlfarming is bad an illegal. Through my research both inside and outside of class I have come to a conclusion that this is not always the case.

As we know crowdsourcing is when a company or person needs to find a solution or get something done, so they post their problem to several people who do the research to try to find the answer, and a reward (usually money) is given to the person who gets it right. To me this sounds like a god idea. People search for others to do research for them and they get paid at the end. But this could easily be used to take advantage of people. One instance of old-school crowdsourcing comes to mind is in Huckle Berry Finn where he has to paint a fence, but gets others to do it for him. This would have been ok if he gave the people a reward who worked for him instead of just left them with nothing. This could easily be done today. A company could refuse to pay someone, or if the company is small enough, just take the solution, money, and run. Crowdsourcing is a great idea and can get a lot of stuff done, but like everything else, there are ways of getting around it, and people who will try to cheat others out of money.

Goldfarming isn’t always a bad thing. Lets look at one specific type of goldfarming, videogames. First off its cheating for the person to sell their character online to someone else to do the dirty work for them. The whole point of a game is to play it, and if you are paying someone else to play it, what’s the point? Why do you even have the game? But on another standpoint, when people sell their character to someone, they are providing a job for that person, and in many cases they are getting paid more working on someone’s character than they would if they had another job. Although the gamer doesn’t want to play certain parts of a game, they are giving other people money to play the game for them which is not only giving a source of income to the goldfarmer, but also opportunities to play the game. Although people are cheating because they are paying others to play the game for them, it’s their choice how they want to play the game. Just like crowdsourcing there are ways that people will get cheated out of their money. Sellers might not pay with a sufficient account, or the goldfarmer might not give the character back without receiving more money. A ransom if you will.

To me, I see goldfarming and crwodsourcing as something very similar. Both want to have a solution to a problem (or in the case of videogames, want to level up their character but either don’t have time, or don’t want to do the tedious job off leveling up) and pay others to find the solution to their problem. Likewise both crowdsourcing and goldfarming require many people to work on a solution for the seller. I think that in time crowdsourcing will become the best and most cost efficient way to get a solution to a problem a company has, and goldfarming will be very similar to crowdsourcing, where people pay others to do a tedious task for them where normally they wouldn’t have the time or the desire to do it themselves.

Here I have found a link to a video where a gamer has claimed how to get lost of gold very fast in the World of Warcraft. This eliminates the argument that paying someone real money to get you lots of gold is cheating, but does beating the system (by using the methods this person displays on their video) make it ok if you are doing it yourself for your character?
http://www.wowgoldfarmingguide.com/WoW/Gold-Farming-Guide/index.php