Since Mobley began playing RuneScape in the aughts, a black market had been growing under the computer game's economy. In the world of RS 2007 Items Gielinor it is possible to trade items--mithril longswords, yak-hide armor, herb harvested from herbiboars and gold, the game's currency. Eventually, players began exchanging gold in game with real dollars. This is known as real-world trade. Jagex, the game's developer has a ban on these exchanges.
Initially, trades in real time was conducted informally. "You could buy some gold from a friend you met at college," Jacob Reed, an acclaimed creator of YouTube videos about RuneScape who goes by the name of Crumb wrote in an email to me. In the following years, demand for gold outstripped supply and some players were full-time gold farmers, or players who create the currency in game to trade for real-world cash.
Internet-age miners have always been part of by massively multiplayer online gaming, or MMOs like Ultima Online or World of Warcraft. They even toiled away in some text-based virtual worlds, explained Julian Dibbell, now a technology transactions lawyer who wrote about virtual economies in his journalistic work.
In the past, many of these gold-miners were mostly located in China. Some hunkered down in makeshift factories, where they slaughtered virtual ogres and looted their corpses in 12-hour shifts. There were accounts of Chinese government using prisoners to cultivate gold.
In RuneScape, the black-market economy of gold farmers was very small until 2013. Many players were not happy with the extent to which the game has changed since it was first introduced in 2001. So, they asked the developer to return to an earlier version. Jagex published a new version from its archive, and subscribers flocked back to what came to be known as Old School RuneScape.
Many of them were similar to Mobley. They played RuneScape in their teens, and then loved the sharp graphics and the Buy OSRS Account fun soundtrack. Even though these 20- to 30-year-olds had time to themselves when they were younger and had no responsibilities, they soon had obligations beyond their homework.
