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The Story of the Gold Farmer
The Deadalus Project has a massive update looking at Player Opinions of Gold Farmers. While farming activities are well documented, Mr. Yee opens up the dialogue about the topic by looking at player opinion in a larger context. From the piece: "Of course, the story of prejudice against the Chinese during the 1800s is far more complex and nuanced than stemming from just the laundry workers. And, of course, the parallel that I'm trying to draw isn't perfect. But the juxtaposition of this historical narrative with the much more recent narrative we typically tell about 'Chinese' gold farmers reveals its disturbing metaphors and framings. The contemporary narrative starts to feel too much like the historical one - Chinese immigrant workers being harassed and murdered by Westerners who feel they alone can arbitrate what constitutes acceptable labor."
...but I really don't like them wherever they're from - throwing race in as an issue in this seems cheap to me.
Just one more example where a global economy screws over legitimate consumers.
This has, actually, nothing at all to do with Chinese farmers except for the fact that the majority of sweatshop farmers are from China. Apologies to the writer if he doesn't want to admit it, but it's the truth. Thus, the birth of the Chinese farmer.
Add this: the "Chinese" part has nothing to do with it, either. The problem is farmers. They disrupt the economy in many online games and are generally harmful to the play of the game.
Conclusion: Farmers are bad. There's no getting around it, and pulling the race card on flimsy pretext isn't a defense. I could care less about their ethnicity or their race. I just want them to stop spamming my damn WoW mailbox with offers for cheap gold.
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
Farmers exist in WoW and other games because the designers don't work out the ramifications of their decisions. Then, once faced with those issues they instead go after the farmers instead of fixing the system which created the need for the farmers.
WoW is the perfect example. Early mounts, level 40 requirement, are only 100 gold. This is fairly simple to obtain. Level 60 mounts can be upwards of 1000 gold. This isn't easy, unless you want to spend hours collecting gold instead of playing the game. Hence for 6 to 7 dollars per 100 gold you can just go buy it. When compared to how much some gamers put into their machines this money is nothing. Add another example, rare patterns that are placed on the auction house for obscene amounts. How can sellers do this? Easy, the cost to place the auction is based on what the vendor would pay for the item, usually a pittance, and not what the person selling it put it up for. As a result they can create artificially high prices because there isn't a penalty for doing so.
Yet Blizzard will continue to go after the farmers and blame them for their own game design faults. Blizzard knows the fixes but they won't make them either out of lazinessor stubborness.
This issue has been around since the earliest days of large MMORPGs. It isn't going away until designers actually sit down and either accept it will happen or design away the need for it to happen.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Who cares about racism against the Chinese?!
They are the most racist people on this fucking rock. They systematically and regularly refer to black people as "black dogs" and "black ghosts," terms which viciously demean them to a subhuman level. So, Chinaman, shut the fuck up and make me a shirt or some capacitors. You pieces of shit are no better than the KKK.
You know, despite the ToS of nearly every MMO specifically forbidding RMT, it's really the playerbase of Westerners that are perpetrating in game race based hate crimes. I don't think I even want to bother reading the article if the person writing is such a simplistic moron.
"Systematic harassment and slaughter?" Get real. It's a game. Let's be honest: gold farmers are an annoyance. If you PK them, you're annoying them back, and you're doing it within the rule structure of whatever game you're playing. These people signed up for accounts on PVP servers, so they're going to have to deal with being PKed just like the rest of us. If they stopped being annoying, they wouldn't be PKed as much.
Also note that only one of the three comments is racist. The other two are just people having fun at the expense of other people who are being an annoyance and violating game rules.
Let's face it, 90% of us would love to get paid by people to sit on games like World of Warcraft and just play. Sure it's 'work', but with work like that, who need's fun?
I for one think it's moderately helpful. I've purchased gold before, because on months where I'm on the road, I can't rationalize my character just sitting around doing nothing.
I do agree however that such practices cause in game price inflation, and some problems with people 'ninja'ing items (ie taking it from right under your nose while you do real player stuff, like kill monsters)
But in disagreement with the Article, I've never been directly harassed by a farmer, but have gotten messages (PMs) from companies trying to sell me gold. I don't see the two as one in the same however, since the actual farmers themselves just do one thing, FARM.
The developers should just make it a non-viable option.
Somehow.
there is death in the hane
YOU come into a game, abuse the rules to make money, AND make the game less playable and less fun for the majority of the players.
Then YOU have the nerve to complain about it when they retaliate against you in manners that are well within the rules of the game?
Is that the 'waaaaaambulance' I hear?
People didn't start calling them Chinese farmers for no reason. This all began because of the evidence that the most prolific farmers were Chinese. Not only that, but these people set up a businesses in farming. Without a doubt there are farmers from countless other countries around the world, but the Chinese happened to be the most organized in this effort. If it had been German farmers doing this we'd be calling them German farmers right now.
To claim that there's a racist underpinning here is absurd. I mean, if they're Chinese, they're Chinese. Are we going to deny reality now for fear of offending someone? If it's established the majority of farmers are no longer from China, then it's time to drop the term. But while the majority of farmers are based in China the term is still justified.
This guy should be complaining about the scumbags making money off this and the deplorable working conditions their employees are subjected to.
Posting for the first time ever solely because of how offended I am. How this comment managed to get interesting PLUS a score above 1 is ludacrious. This comment is nothing but a racist flamebaiting troll.
Everyone goes about complaining that "Farmers are bad", "Farmers make baby jesus cry" and "farmers ate my first born", but the truth of the matter is that the game is broke and farmers take advantage of a system that needs to be fixed.
No matter how many farmers you ban or how much your game company threatens ebay to pull all game sales, you aren't going to solve the problem that your game is more tedious than real life work.
Make the game fun to play grinding from level 1 to level 60 without a single moment of the playing saying "Damn... I'm just so sick of killing 'x beast' to get 'x loot'".
The moment the players feels like this game is work is the moment a farmer can step in and play for them for a price.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
of the old world views.
Like the historical parallel, what we really have is a service industry of immigrant Chinese workers being driven by a market composed almost entirely of Westerners.
I couldn't disagree more. What we have is a game, where people can profit by annoying behavior.
BTW, if you're going to spend 10 pages of your article pointing out the wrongs of stereotyping gold-farmers as Chinese, then you really need to refrain from doing so yourself when trying to draw sympathy to their plight.
From your own survey you conclude...
The overall picture seems to be that many gold farms are based in China...
Then it would seem that for people to assume that they are Chinese could have nothing to do with the (to most long forgotten) racial stereotypes of the American Gold Rush, but instead to simple generalization. Most of the people using this label will be lazy, some unaware of the politically incorrect aspects, a few simply bad at math. Given the amount of this that goes on, there will be a number of people who have only ever encountered gold-farmers that happen to be from China. To ask the typical 14 year old to abstract himself as an invalid statistical sample of an overall picture is asking a bit much, don't you think?
The actual gold farmers are the losers in this market in several regards. These workers are harassed as they try to accumulate gold and then are fleeced by the middlemen.
Another cry for us to pity the gold farmers. Many of them will be poor and underpaid, we get it. If this is your first introduction to the level of "unfairness" in the world, then, um, good for you!
Why insist on tormenting foreign workers when Western players are equally culpable?
I'm a "Western player," but not culpable in any gold-farming endeavors. You could have said "some Western players," or "many Western players." But you didn't, because it was simpler this way. This doesn't make you a racist.
The racialized story is a very comfortable one for us to tell because it frames us as the victims...
No it's not. It's not remotely like comfortable. It's just more of the same old-world crap that clings to human consciousness, which, by design, carries forward some of the prejudices and fears of it's parents.
Just ditch it. The current generation of punk teenagers using this terminology are only doing so because it has legacy controversy attached to. To them it's like saying fsck in every other sentence. They don't don't understand the origins of racism any better than they know what Unlawful Carnal Knowledge would be, or why it might be considered "bad."
I play the games to have fun, not to win; not to make money. The fact that a combination of behavioral observations and a language tests is being used by players to determine the likelyhood that they are gold farmers is not an expression of any kind of underlying predjudice. The frustration that is expressed in these actions is due to people playing the games with conflicting goals. If everyone was there to make money no one would complain about what's fair or not. Every exploit used against them would be seen as an tool for exploiting others and thus valuable in itself. The game could then be called "Battles of Ferenginar" But I wouldn't buy it, as I wouldn't consider it fun.
The problem, as many other posters will have pointed out before I finished reading the (copiously lengthy) article, is that an economy is a non-trivial thing to design. The fact that this economy exists on the Internet, which allows the free, instantaneous exchange of cash around the globe, means that any economy that you design in the game is going to be layers on the economy of the real world. In the real world I can buy a nice, WWV synchronized, LCD alarm clock at Fry's ($6) cheaper than I can buy lunch next door, because the clock is made in China. From a design perspective this is a tough element to control.
The problem with farmers
"As pointed out above, the problem with this is that the adjective maybe factually correctly, but it's inconsequential to the problem."
The reason I have called farmers from China, Chinese during in game dialogue - is because they SPEAK Chinese. Which is important because it means that unless you have someone who speaks Chinese with you, you will probably not be able to communicate with them. A small percentage of these Chinese know English or enough English to communicate. Most do not.
Why is this consequential? Well, because I can't say things like "Don't steal my kills" or "Don't train mobs on me" or "You ninja'd that item". I have gone so far as to learn some simple Chinese phrases in order to communicate with them. I wouldn't have done that if they weren't Chinese.
Besides, Chinese is a NATIONALITY. I have no idea what they look like, what their racial heritage is. I can't see them. I can only read what they write and most of them write the Chinese language.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
Isn't from US companies. Or if it is, the companies that spam in game are TRYING to look Chinese(/asian) by having Chinese(/asian) looking names. 'chengchang', 'llw', 'lz', etc. (the latter two may not look asian, but I have local users at my university with logins like those and very asian names) And then they're spamming me with broken English: "Fast come,fast serve!" amoung others (I'm sure players on my server recognise that).
What really irritates me is that despite Blizzard claiming to ban farming/spamming accounts, I get the same "Fast come,fast serve!" spam literally character for character over and over and over again across weeks of time. I'd think with enough account bans, it wouldn't be profitable anymore. It isn't like the boxed game is super cheap, and if they'd ban an account for spamming like they claim to, they'd need easily 3.5 boxes a week (trial account + real account in each box). I'd think baning c-card numbers would be even better, but unfortunatly I think they support time-cards now, so even that wouldn't work so well.
And the driving force isn't American companies, it's Americans who will spend $$$ on in-game gold. Much like spam, all we'd need to do to end it (spam or gold farming or the RIAA) would be to have everyone quit buying from them.
And we know that, if nothing else, Americans excel at that. [/sarcasm]
Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
...are the fucktards who BUY the gold.
All this finger pointing at the farmers. I remember a saying "Thou protest too much."
It's the losers that buy the gold that creates the demand for this service. I find farming annoying. But I would really like to find out who is buying the gold on the game that I play and have a chance to roll them. Repeatedly.
I love the excuse that they do it because it takes too much time to gather up said gold. Hello! It's an online game! Of course it's going to take time! Everything about this kind of game takes time! The game takes time!
-- What's this '-r *' file doing here? -- Oh well, a simple 'rm' should do the trick.
1) Much of this stems from the ignorance/provincalism of Americans. Once the meme of "Chinese" as gold farmers was established - with some justification, mind you - it fits the concept of 'asian as worker ant toiling mindlessly' so popular to a certain individualist demographic here. Same for the Anglo-xenophobia. Most Americans don't even own a passport, much less speak a foreign language - and unfortunately, assume someone who can't speak english doesn't 'belong'.
2) In TFA, let's avoid guilt-by association, particularly regarding the more extreme language of extermination:
"he only good kind of farmer is a dead one. [WoW, M, 38]
Yes. I enjoy killing gold farmers repeatedly. I play on PvP servers. [WoW, M, 26]
In Lineage 2 there were constantly Korea farmers and we hated them and killed them constantly. I can honestly say the way Korean players acted in that game was enough for myself and my guild to stereotype Korean teenagers, then hunt them down and kill them all. [WoW, M, 40]
They are talking about FARMERS, not Chinese. Even the mention of Koreans is hardly egregious; the overwhelming majority of Lineage players are korean.
The problem with farmers is that they are seen to be exploiting the system. If the game allows an exploit to continue unchecked, then it's the developers fault, but since the developers can't be directly messed-with (read the forums, they are certainly being directly insulted about it regularly), "Chinese Farmers" make a handy scapegoat in the best/worst lynch-mob tradition.
I think TFA goes quite a bit too far, however:
The theme of immigrant worker being harassed by Westerners who feel they own the land and can arbitrate what constitutes as acceptable labor is one that is hard to escape. Another player draws out why this is so frustrating for her.
Please. If there is something in the game that shows up once every 18 hours, and because there is ALWAYS a farmer camped on it, that destroys the fun value of that encounter. People harass FARMERS. Yes, suggesting that they are all Chinese is overtly racist and wrong. But this doesn't ipso facto mean that harassing farmers is wrong.
And let's finally not mix cause and effect too carelessly: remember WHY the farmers and their offline gold for sale sells so well? Because of the artificial rarity and ridiculously inflated pricing....caused by the commercialized farming of these same rare items.
-Styopa
It's not the farmers we hate, it's the purchasers.
Why?
The farmers can actually be decent people. This is their job. Go back and actually read TFA, read past the somewhat valid comments on race, and read the part which talks about their lives.
In response to one of the posts on TFA's page, no, you're not supposed to feel guilty. You're supposed to feel sorry for them. Asshole.
No, we hate the purchasers, and they are why we hate the whole system, because games are intended to escape.
In life, some of us are given opportunities, some aren't. And like it or not, this is getting worse, especially in America. Bush's "Ownership Society" is a neo-conservative codeword for "Aristocracy", which, for better or worse, means that those who have more, get more, and those who don't have anything are out of luck.
A game is your chance to start over. You don't have to already be a millionaire to make money in this game. You don't have to be from a long line of ninjas or Jedi or whatever to become a skilled fighter. You just need a little time and a little patience.
It's a chance to escape from the reality of being controlled by parents or of living paycheck to paycheck with little real possibility of advancement, of becoming richer or working less, and explore a reality designed to be a Utopia, where you may not have the best of everything -- in my favorite MMO, Nexus, there is only one Chaos Blade, and one person owns it -- you can still have a lot of fun and advance in the world no matter where you're at.
We hate players who simply buy wealth, experience (leeches), or wholesale characters because they are intruding on our escape. Suddenly, it matters again how much real wealth someone has, and wealthy people can definitely be assholes about it. And of course, nobody wants a player who hasn't earned their exp or gold. "This is the Chaos Blade? Cool. How do I swing it?" This is why higher-level content is usually designed to be harder, and require groups -- if you actually got there on your own, you'll be able to handle it. If you didn't, if you bought your way there, you'll be a burden to your group -- you'll probably be ditched as soon as they can find a decent player.
For that matter, I don't think the game is less fun if you're lower-level or poor. It's all relative anyway, and the less money you have, the more it means if you randomly get some huge amount.
And does it really matter so much if you can only put in so much time? That just means you'll take longer to get there than anyone else. The process of acquiring wealth and experience should be fun, not just the end result. And there are games that have accomplished that.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
The line isn't actually supposed to be ironic either. Queen Gertrude is the speaker, and she makes this comment about a character in a play (within the play) who grieves that now her husband is dead she shall never marry again. Of course, queen Gertrude obviously disagrees, as she has just remarried within a week of her ex-husbands death.
I see this, "We hate the purchasers", thing too much.
I would just like to comment on ingame economies and inflation. There is a game called "Ragnarok Online" where such activies are illegal all the same. Buying and Selling of gear and cash for Real World Money doesnt happen so often. In fact I dont even think it happens at all, although I could be wrong. Accounts for this game show up on Ebay, but they usually end up banned in a vigilant fashion.
the Economy there is terrible. Things that normally cost 10k at the beginning of the game, now cost 100k, or up to 500k. I'm noticing this exact same thing on the game servers.
My conclusion? After switching between 5 servers and finding a stack of wool for one gold, while a stack of silk is 50 silver, its the blame game again. It's not the purchasing of gold that jacks up the economies. Its the fact that We're all greedy SOB's that does it.
If they make a mount cost 1000 dollars then you get someone playing a month to get that money. That's a month extra that you've hooked that person for, that's an extra month's worth of subscription fees if you work off the assumption that if he gets the mount in less time, plays around with it a bit he might just move on.
;-p) and eventually gets his 100 GameGold. If Trey goes to an auction, he can't see the Cleaver of Slicing that Grissom bought, because Grissom isn't allowed to sell the item. So anything that Trey sees on Auction was gotten the old fashioned way.
If a level 20 player needs to gather 100 gold, and it takes the average casual player (the majority) two weeks to do that, then you've stretched out level 20 just that much longer, meaning just that much more you've increased that subscribers 'game lifetime'.
A lot of the difficulty of these titles is not totally 'Fun' based, it is real world profit and economics based as well. Apart from not wanting you to be able to hit level 60 in a week because it won't be 'fun' for you to do that, this will cut into their subscription fee structure. This will cut into profits if there is nothing really to DO at level 60 as compared to levels 1 to 59 and thus people stop playing.It's a balancing act between keeping the player involved over a lengthy period of time and keeping the game fun and fresh. It's like a Soap Opera that stretches 10 minutes worth of plot over two weeks.
So I'm sorry, I'm not upset at people who choose to purchase Gold or items in these games at all.
I'm also not upset at the innovative and ingenious Chinese who see a business oppurtunity and go out and make it happen. The West, including America has fed off of these countries for centuries to enrich themselves.All the Richest Nations of the world were built off the exploitation of blood, sweat and tears from these people. And the economies of the Richest Nations are still driven today by this exploitation. Anything China, India, The Caribbean, Africa and other territories can do to get something back whether it is IT Outsourcing, Oil or what have you then good for them.
And lastly, it has been established as a point of fact that many people would rather pay real cash for an item and get on with gaming than sit grinding or camping for weeks to get that item (And who the hell can blame them!??). So why not build support for this player base into the game? Why not have a player flag where one is either tied to the Game Economy, or Real World Currency?
If you go to a merchant you can purchase a variety of In Game power items at merchants using your Real Money if you wish (you fill up your character's gold on the website with a credit card). This item can only be used by yourself, and cannot be given, or Sold, or Auctioned to another player who has not paid the subscription to use Real World Currency (If developers want to they can charge a buck more per month to enable this feature for players that want it for example).
That's the solution right there. The developer and Publisher make EXTRA money from all these sales, and the Game Economy is protected. Those players that don't want to spend real money now have more access to In Game items, creature spots etc. And those that do want to use Real Money and can afford it can do so whilst still supporting the game's future development and profit of the developers.The two don't interfere with each other, they are kept seperate.
If Grissom the Dwarf has 100RealGold and wishes to buy the Mighty Cleaver of Slicing for 100GameGold, then he does so. The 100RealGold actually costs him 5 bucks US.
Trey the Gnome wants to buy the same Mighty Cleaver and instead Mines veins (which are in amazing high supply since no one is farming them) and kills creatures for dropped loot to sell (which are also somehow surprisingly plentiful
The RealGold option is a purely personal one, for personal use for Grissom. If Grissom does not want to, or simply cannot camp a creature to get that epic level Azkr
-Gel214th
This certainly has provoked some opinions; charges of racism and 'counter-racism' abound, and some posters bringing George Bush into the discussion (what, did Rove send mind-control rays into the Blizzard designers' heads?) or blaming all of Western civilization.
'Farming' is a scourge to people who want to play the game. The majority of people farming happen to be overseas because the profit/time ratio for farming is not viable in the U.S., unless you're managing a whole operation.
If, for instance, I were an unemployed 15-year-old American (I'm not), I'd make much better money flipping burgers than farming gold, and there are labor laws. On the other hand in China the average manufacturing wage was $0.57/hr in 2002 (largely due to fixed currency pegs) and it might be a step up to spend 12 hours a day in a chair farming gold rather than 15 hours a day standing up in a factory.
The second layer is of course those who purchase the gold for real money. I happen to earn a decent wage and in terms of time/progress it would certainly be more efficient to work an hour of overtime and buy in-game stuff rather than to spend that hour actually in the game playing to earn it. Who cares? The point of the game IS the hour I spend playing it, not whether I end up with 10k gold. That's why it's a game. Nonetheless, people pay because the game prices are inflated, and items are inflated because they're being farmed.
That brings up the third layer, which is the game design. MMOGs are designed to control the rate of influx of resources, whether it's XP or gold or items. Why? Because if everything is trivially obtained, players reach 'the end' quickly and become bored, and unsubscribe. So, something that allows players to obtain the Magic Whatsit only appears every so many hours.
This passes for challenge, because honestly the game mechanics of MMOGs are not terribly complex. They *can't* be since they're server-bound, and they're server-bound since you cannot trust the client; people can and will hack their FEs if it'll help them. Furthermore even the most puzzling content is published to the Web moments after being first solved.
OK, so the challenge is not skill-based but time-based; be there at the right time and get the prize, or play long enough and earn the game money to trade for the prize. Playing the game as a game is far less efficient than botting or ruthlessly farming. And THAT is why farmers exist.
Game companies do what they can to find and delete botting accounts but with the size of the 'secondary market' reaching $1B annually banning a few thousand accounts is like stopping a truck full of pot coming across the border; looks good on the news but the cartel hardly registers a blip.
When a MMOG is designed where it's too hard or complex to simply farm, or where it's more productive to play "as intended" instead of farming, then farming will stop. Of course, complex games like that don't sell as well.