What can free money tell us on the virtual black market?
Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2011 conference
Guild play in MMOGs: rethinking common group dynamics models
SocInfo'11 Proceedings of the Third international conference on Social informatics
Cheaters in a gaming social network
ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review
Branded with a scarlet "C": cheaters in a gaming social network
Proceedings of the 21st international conference on World Wide Web
10,000 gold for 20 dollars: an exploratory study of World of Warcraft gold buyers
Proceedings of the International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games
Theoretical and methodological challenges (and opportunities) in virtual worlds research
Proceedings of the International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games
Streaming driving behavior data
Proceedings of the Third ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on GeoStreaming
Proceedings of the 3rd International Web Science Conference
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Gold farming is a set of illicit practices in which players in massively multiplayer online games gather and distribute virtual goods for real money. Using anonymized data from a popular online game to construct networks of characters involved in gold farming, we examine the trade networks of gold farmers, their trading affiliates, and uninvolved characters at large. Our analysis of these complex networks’ connectivity, assortativity, and attack tolerance indicate that farmers exhibit distinctive behavioral signatures which are masked by brokering affiliates. Our findings are compared against a real world drug trafficking network and suggest similarities in both organizations’ network structures which reflect similar effects of secrecy, resilience, and efficiency.