A mysterious blog, "Confessions of an Ex-Arena.Net Employee" -- sniffed out by the folks at WarCry -- has set tongues wagging. Arena.Net is responsible for the popular MMO Guild Wars, which only charges for the game itself and is free-to-play thereafter. Gold-farming or the exchange of real-world money for in-game items or gains is a ban-able offense -- but the self-styled ex-employee is claiming that the folks behind the scenes are actually working with the gold farmers to profit secretly from those sales.

There's no way of knowing whether the ex-employee is for real, but as the folks at Metaversed point out, it raises the issue of security in virtual worlds administration. Users with connections on the inside or a way of accessing employee information could be devastating to a virtual economy, especially if security is not strictly ensured at every level. To that end, Steven Davis of security software developer SecurePlay responded at his PlayNoEvil news site by highlighting five major ways in which he feels virtual economies might be leaving themselves open to exploitation (as paraphrased here from Metaversed):

1. Companies whose model involves profit from sign-ups could possibly benefit by mass-banning users for gold farming related offenses.
2. Employees at any level may collude with gold farming companies. (It's happened before.) Securing access privileges, auditing, and staff management are critical.
3. Larger gold farming companies could target smaller ones for banning with a little help from game company employees to eliminate competition.
4. A game company could give a "head's up" to preferred gold farming companies about upcoming mass bannings. The farmers can switch accounts and lay low for a bit and stay in business while the game company looks great in public.
5 Employees know the technical vulnerabilities of the system better than anyone, and can advise select individuals of how to best exploit the system.

[Via Metaversed]