What can free money tell us on the virtual black market

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