What can free money tell us on the virtual black market?

Abstract

ABSTRACT"Real money trading" or "Gold farming" refers to a set of illicit practices for gathering and distributing virtual goods in online games for real money. Unlike previous work, we use network-wide economic interactions among in-game characters as a lens to monitor, detect and identify gold farming networks. Our work is based on a set of real ingame trade activity logs collected for one month in year 2010 from the world's second largest MMORPG called AION (with 3.4 million subscribers). This is the first work that empirically (i) shows that "free money network" is a promising measure/approximation for detecting and characterizing gold farming networks, and (ii) measures the size of the free money net and in-game virtual economy in a large-scale MMORPG in terms of the cash flow.

Multimodal game bot detection using user behavioral characteristics

“…We assume that game bots have roles [9,1]. For instance, some game bots are responsible for gold farming, while other game bots gather game money and items from gold farmers or sell them for real money [25].…”

No Silk Road for Online Gamers!: Using Social Network Analysis to Unveil Black Markets in Online Games

“…Consequently, the standard deviation of the degree in this type is very high, while degree assortativity is close to -1 (see Fig. Previous studies [19,20,33] showed that gold farming groups tend to construct communities similar to this type. e reasoning why this type is a gold farming group follows.…”

“…is is proof that analyzing a community network in an online game can assist in understanding a real world community structure. Woo et al [33] analyzed the free money trade referring that people only give game money without ge ing any goods in return for GFG detection. Fujita et al [11] proposed a RMT detection method based on the observation that RMT traders tend to form dense relationships with each other.…”

“…Game users, who are consumers in RMT, usually trade virtual goods with their friends and acquaintances rather than strangers, and as such, form a highly clustered structure in a virtual goods trading network. Moreover, previous studies [18,33] demonstrated that members in a GFG, who are main providers in RMT, are also likely to form a separate community in a virtual goods trading network because a GFG member is obligated to frequently perform trading activities with another member in the same GFG. at is, the trading activities between di erent communities, especially provider communities and consumer communities, may represent RMT transactions, while the trading activities between users within a community may represent legitimate trading activities.…”

A survey and categorization of anomaly detection in online games

“…-"Bot Detection Based on Social Interactions in MMORPGs" [21] Adaboost [8], [18], [21], [33] -Low error rate and Fast computation speed -Sensitiveness in noise data -"Mining for gold farmers: Automatic detection of deviant players in mmogs" [33] Neural Network [18], [27], [45] -High accuracy and lots of computation time because of lots of computation quantities -Difficult to interpret grounds of result -"The ones that got away: False negative estimation based approaches for gold farmer detection" [18] Character travel path [6], [11], [26], [37], [48] -Easy to classification because of difference of travel path each to each -Requiring differential application depending on using map -"Second life: a social network of humans and bots" [10] User behavior [13], [28], [36][37], [41][42], [46] -Easy to classification because of difference of Window event between normal user and abnormal user -Requiring client module to analysis -"An automatic and proactive identity theft detection model in MMORPGs" [36] Social network [7], [8], [10], [18], [20][21], [27], [29], [30][31], [39] -Applicable in online game, easy to classification between normal user and abnormal user -Difficult to classification between normal user and abnormal user in solo play game -"Battle of botcraft: fighting bots in online games with human observational proofs" [27] Network traffic [43]…”