Tales of an Ex-Gold Farmer

Developer Jeff Lyndon's short stint in the dark world of illicit RMT



The Online Gaming in China
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In the short period between EverQuest’s heyday and the rise of World of Warcraft, Jeff Lyndon ran a Shanghai online game economics research outfit that grew - seemingly overnight - into a monster: one of Shanghai’s first, largest, and most lucrative goldfarming outfits.

Jeff got his start in the early days of Internet gaming as the owner-operator of a Hong Kong cyber cafe, running hugely popular events focused on the first-person shooters of the day, like the original Quake. Jeff’s singular efforts attracted the attention of En-Tranz Entertainment, the Asia Pacific publisher of Shadowbane, and when the popularity of Internet gaming fueled the growth of competing cybercafes in Hong Kong (itself just absorbed into the People’s Republic of China), Jeff read the writing on the wall and joined En-Tranz as a QA tester. With a knack for detecting poor game design and the potential for exploits, he rose through the ranks quickly and soon attracted the attention of Shadowbane’s developer, Wolfpack Studios, becoming one of the first native Asians to earn launch credits (Support Team lead) on a popular Western game.

Long before Wolfpack met its demise in 2006, Jeff returned to China and signed on with a Shanghai thinktank charged with analyzing online game economies. Himself, a game designer, and researcher with a master’s degree in economics focused on the top MMORPGs of the time: Lineage, Lineage 2, and Final Fantasy XI. Scrawling hypotheses, flowcharts, and formulas on the paper-lined floors of entire rooms, Jeff and his team discovered a world (or virtual worlds, if you prefer) full of opportunity. Long before the FFXI auctionhouse became an industry-wide object of ridicule, an early breakthrough came when the team discovered that the market for crystals in Final Fantasy XI could be rather easily manipulated with the appropriate resources and timing.

Jeff’s team discovered methods like this that preyed upon the weaknesses of the game, rather than brute force attempts to harvest resources wholesale. This was bold-faced exploitation to be sure, but it (at that time) lacked the instant-ban ToS-breaking implications of traditional methods of small-scale farming, such as running bots (automated player characters programmed to tirelessly gather resources). It wasn’t long before the entire operation turned to the dark side.

Riding an emotional high from his recent discoveries, Jeff initially signed on to the concept. It wasn’t long before he started to have misgivings. “ I told [our new HR manager] that we need to staff up our team, like 60 people, in two months, and I guess that’s a big task for you. You know what his reply was? He was like, ‘Jeff, if you ask me to find a 100 dogs, that’s going to tough, you ask me to find a 100 guys, that’s nothing.’ That’s one of the hardest truths about China.”

And staff the operation he did. “He actually managed to staff up our studio with 60 people in like 3 weeks... It’s 30 days work a month, it’s a 12-hour workday. You have no holiday, you only have one day off at the end of the month, that’s all. The staff have no problem with it... On average, they can make like 3-4000 RMB ($440 to $585 USD) in a month. Compared to what they would make in the same time, like nothing more than 1000 RMB ($147 USD). That’s very good money for them.”

As for the conditions inside the studio: “Air is bad, everyone is smoking in the studio—talking about like everybody smoking like two or three packs of cigarettes, just because it’s so fast-paced.” Food and lodging are provided, but there's still no such thing as a free lunch. Crunching the numbers, Jeff found out that the HR manager was supplying the workers with very inexpensive food. “How they keep the price that low is that at the night, the father and the son, will go around Shanghai collecting food from kitchens, thrown out foods. At dawn, the whole family will wake up and sort out the food, meat, vegatables, rice, and so on. Then the wife would cook the food, deep fry it, add a lot of spices, cover up the taste, you couldn’t even taste what you’re eating, right?

“I told my manager that this is not the right way to treat our staff. Like… you know, let’s try some decent food. I don’t want my staff to be sick. My manager tells me , ‘Jeff—I will gamble with you. If any worker get sick during the first week, I’ll resign my job and I will pay for staff meals for 30 days.’ So for a whole week I’m going into the studio every day asking are you guys okay? Is the food good? Are there any problems? There’s no problems, no one was sick, everyone likes the food... Nobody got sick for like 3 months, so I couldn’t blame the food.”

Food fear factor aside, with all the attention paid to the bottom line you might think that the profit margin for this sort of operation is razor thin. “No—it’s not that! There’s a huge profit margin! In fact, with every worker that we hire, we’re making at least back that 7 times what he’s making. Last time I checked, two years ago, that’s still true.” So why not just keep adding workers? Jeff shrugged, “This is a business where when you get big, you get banned.”

As it was, things finally came to a head when the operation overcame their startup costs and began to make money. “I was always hoping that things would get better. Once they started making money, they’d offer more to the staff - but that never happened. On top of that, I felt responsible because I started the business.”

“Every single day I would go into the office, and I’d feel bad. I was seeking help for all kinds of health problems. I tried confessing, I tried going to doctors, but eventually I just feel like everyone was telling me the same thing: ‘If you feel that doing something is wrong, why continue?’”

Jeff took that advice, and after the company’s second profit-making month, Jeff packed up, left, and hasn’t looked back since. After heading up his own consultancy outfit, Jeff returned to game development, launching five casual games with Hong Kong developers DuoGeo Entertainment and Phantaxia Entertainment before taking on his current executive role with Interzone’s China Operations.

Though the conditions for many Chinese workers are the same or worse today as they were when Jeff left that Shanghai goldfarming operation, it’s hard not to draw parallels between Jeff’s journey and that of modern China at large. While in the West our industrial revolution took more than a century, many parts of Asia are only just now coming to terms with their economic might. In the Chinese games industry, if not the economy at large, a new wave of highly creative and globally connected talent is emerging from a turbulent past. At the forefront are folks like Jeff Lyndon, and we offer our sincerest thanks for sharing part of his past experience with us.

 

Last Updated: Mar 13, 2016

About The Author

Jeff joined the Ten Ton Hammer team in 2004 covering EverQuest II, and he's had his hands on just about every PC online and multiplayer game he could since.

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