Figure 1: The number of trading links in the network is unevenly distributed such that a few characters have most of the connections. While it is difficult for typical accounts to maintain more than 20 or 30 connections, gold farmers actually tend to trade with fewer players than typical players.

Figure 2: Typical players and unidentified affiliates with many connections trade with other characters who have many other connections. Gold farmers and offline drug traffickers with many connections prefer to trade with actors with have few other connections.

attempt to limit who they trade with, this effort is futile because they are still identified. Conversely, the affiliate accounts appear to avoid detection by emulating the behavior of the population at large. However agency in this context goes both ways; game administrators appear to only identify particular subclass of farmers with limited connectivity while many likely farmers not only continue to operate undetected, but remain well-connected.

Second, the three broad character categories we identified—farmer, affiliate, non-affiliate—occupy very different positions in the network relative to each other. Following our findings here, although farmers have fewer trade connections to other characters compared to non-affiliate characters, what few trade connections they have are employed much more intensely than we see among non-affiliate characters. Unlike farmers, affiliate characters have both more connections than non-affiliates but, like farmers, affiliates use these connections much more intensely than non-affiliates. This suggests that farmers and affiliates are both repeatedly exchanging gold and items with other trusted members of their organization. This point is further corroborated by examining differences in the tendency for characters’ to form clustered trading patterns where characters A and C trade because they both also trade with B. Farmers have significantly higher clustering than non-affiliates, while affiliates have insignificantly less clustering. Farming characters form tight-knit trading groups with other trusted co-offend-ers, which must support important efficiencies because it is a distinct and intuitive signature for administrators to identify.

The third and final topological feature of the gold farming network we examined was its assortativity. We have an intuitive notion (certainly honed in middle and high school) that, rather than being randomly mixed together, well-connected people tend to be connected to other well-connected people while poorly connected people tend to be connected to other poorly-connected people. Statistical physicists like Mark Newman have termed this structural tendency as assortativ-