Abstract
The environment of massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPG) creates opportunities for emergence of virtual societies with specific social hierarchies, systems of economy and wealth distribution. The World of Warcraft game is the most prominent representative of such a genre.
In its world, players are organized into several communities based on servers and parties called guilds. For finishing tasks of various difficulty, guilds are rewarded with in-game items of corresponding value.
However, the distribution system of the items among players designed by game developers was abandoned and many subsequent systems were developed by players themselves. Some systems tend towards fairness, they are based, e.g., on random number generators or game-theoretic auction models, others focus rather on group profit as a whole and some even manifest characteristics of dictatorship or exploitation.
After the item distribution systems were more closely linked with the in-game currency, the virtual economy intertwined with the real world. On the one hand, the in-game currency can be mined nearly without any limits, especially with illegal use of game bots.
On the other hand, the in-game currency is being illicitly sold for real money outside the system of the virtual world, e.g. on dedicated web pages. This leads to a positive feedback loop of bot and human currency farming, inflation of the virtual currency, alternative income opportunities in countries with lower GDP or lack of motivation for newcoming players.
Using the case of the World of Warcraft game we introduce the most common systems of item distribution, their evolution over time and their disadvantages. Based on studies of item distributions in games, statistical data, game logs, informal interviews with other players and personal experience we map phenomena connected to various systems of virtual item distribution and their impact on the real world.