This is a real business in Raleigh (MMORPG)
 

http://www.gamepal.com/content.php

I'm not sure what is more sad, the fact that this is a real business with a location, or that people actually are buying from them. Either way it cracks me up.

You can pay them to power level your charachters in a bunch of MMORPG games, and also you can add charachters from their inventory to your cart and buy them.

Interesting concept, but I'm not sure how they make their money. I've never played WoW but maybe one of you guys can help me out.

Power Level 1 to 60 takes an average of 14 days and costs $189.99. That's $13.50 a day they make on average. I would assume that it probably takes more than 2 hours a day of play to level up that much. At 3 hours per day they are making less than minimum wage. I'm sure you can get some young teenagers to help out, but how much can they really do? I assume gold and other things will be picked up along the way they can sell, but I'd guess the margins on an operation like this are razor thin at best.

This is nothing new. They have sweatshops in China and other third world countries where they hire locals at low wages to play the games -- farming gold, powerleveling, etc.

I have seen people selling stuff on ebay etc. I couldn't believe it was an actual company in RTP with a building etc. haha.

I recently read a whole book written (by an economist) specifically about this type of business.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226096262/

I wonder if they have some automated script to play the games and level up? Then they wouldn't need many people, and could do several games at the same time depending on how many computers that have.

That's probably unlikely though. Probably just some dorks that are fine just sqeaking by getting paid to play a game. :D

One of my students owns a company (not sure which) that farms gold in Wow and FFXI. He supposedly finds exploits to get money very quickly and then sells it. I guess he's doing very well with it, since he alternates driving a Corvette, Dodge Viper, and Lamborghini Diablo to class.

you have a student that drives a Diablo? what does his daddy do?

His daddy doesn't do anything as far as I'm aware. From what I've heard, he rakes in thousands a month off of gold-farming on MMORPGs.