The game that Corporation 9592 built had any number of novel features, but in Richard’s mind their most fundamental innovation was that they built it from the ground up to be gold-farmer-friendly. Gold farming had been an unwelcome by-product, an epiphenomenon, of earlier games, which had done all that they could to suppress the practice, even to the point of getting the Chinese government to ban such transactions in 2009. But in Richard’s opinion, any industry that was clocking between $1 and $10 billion a year deserved more respect. Allowing that tail to wag that dog could only lead to increased revenue and customer loyalty. It was only necessary to structure the game’s virtual economy around the certainty that gold farmers would colonize it in vast numbers.