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Bad Press For Gold Farmers Affects Chinese Players
Next Generation is running a piece entitled Why PC Gamer Kicked Out Gold Farmers. Editor-in-chief Greg Vederman talks about why they decided to no longer accept advertising from 'Gold Farming' services for Massively Multiplayer games like World of Warcraft. Though there are moral grounds for this decision, it contrasts with a Eurogamer piece on the negative reactions Chinese players recieve on English-speaking servers. From that article:"Apparently there is a common belief among English speaking players that most non-English speakers are gold farmers and are only playing for commercial gain. As a result, players are asking anyone who wants to join a group to type one or two sentences in English. If the sentences contain spelling or grammar mistakes, the player is rejected. Since you have to join groups to complete certain quests in WOW, this is presenting many Chinese players with a serious problem. "
In other serious news today, some WoW gamers cannot complete their quests...
Gosh, I can think of at least a few good reasons.
Like I said, those are just a few off the top of my head. I'm sure there are plenty more.
As a long time non-american MMORPG player (I played from '99 to 2004), I'll tell you how I see it: first, localization usually sucks. Second, you don't necessarily want to meet the retarded 14 yo from your own country, at least on english-speaking servers you don't meet them, and since you're not playing during the top hours of the server you don't get hit by the TardTrains of the english speaking servers. Third, when you're playing on a US server as a european or asian, you're basically playing in the low-load hours of the server, while you'd be playing at rush hour on your own server, and it's much simpler and less stressing to play with a slightly lower population.
Other factors may include overseas/net friends (meet someone on the web, they introduce you to a game, you'll want to play it with them, even if you're chinese and the guy is canadian), desire to better your knowledge of foreign languages (spending 3+ hours every day typing mostly english can help there), ...
Considering that someone not playing on a localized server is a gold farmer is stupid and sad, it's akin to considering everyone from out of your country a proven terrorist.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
As a result, players are asking anyone who wants to join a group to type one or two sentences in English.
Just because they are asking people to pass a literacy test doesn't mean that they are descriminating because they dont like gold farmers. It might actually be beneficial to be able to talk to the people you are playing with, if just to be able to set up strategy. Nobody wants someone on their team who cannot communicate because that person might get the whole group killed for not paying attention to directions.
As a result, players are asking anyone who wants to join a group to type one or two sentences in English. If the sentences contain spelling or grammar mistakes, the player is rejected.
If this were the standard WoW players were held to, there would be very, very few groups indeed!
However, I do know plenty of people who have kicked group members for not being able to type well enough to communicate with the group. I have grouped with people like that (Chinese or otherwise, I have no idea), and I must say it sucks. The whole point of grouping is cooperation after all, which is pretty damn difficult without communication. I have a pretty high tolerance for all manner of bad grammar and spelling in MMORPGs, but if I flat out cannot make heads nor tails of what another character is saying? Some multiplayer quests in WoW take several hours -- if my hours are wasted because a party member can't understand an instruction, I'm going to be understandably pissed off and reticent to group with such people in the future.
Keep an open mind? Absolutely.
Put up with people who do all manner of stupid shit AND we can't communicate with each other? I don't think so.
Though the issue wasn't as loudly protested in FFXI as it is WoW, there was quite a bit of segregation between American and Japanese players as well. Japanese would refuse to group with Americans for reasons I never precisely found out, but the common sentiment was that Japanese felt Americans were too stupid to group with.
Americans would refuse to group with Japanese for the same reason.
The game didn't really require much communication to be able to function in a group, and any communication that did need to happen could be done by building comments with pre-translated keywords. And yet the two sides almost exclusively played in their own little world, despite sharing servers with others. Only the bilingual folks were able to exist in both worlds.
Based on my experiences with FFXI, I think the anti-Chinese sentiment in WoW is simply a human's innate tendency towards racism. Don't get me wrong, a lot of gold farmers are in fact Chinese, but a lot of them are European and American as well. Yet, everyone "knows" that all the farmers ruining the game are Chinese.
I can't be trying to do a quest and have people who can't understand "Ok, sap that guy." or "Please don't break that sheep"
Most end game raids require CTRaid, Ventrillo, Decursive....So non-english speaking players set this up with ease? and then communicate on vent easily? No...it's a matter of "is this guy gonna wipe us..." the answer is usually yes.
Unless you are Boccd.
I can't belive that both /. and Eurogamer fell for this! It's obviously a bogus article POSTED BY A GOLD SELLER to get hits on his site.
The idea that people are using English typing skill tests is ludicrous. Anyone who has played an online game (such as many of the people who have posted comments here already) will tell you that the average level of writing skill on such games is abysmal.
Arguing about vi versus Emacs is like arguing whether it's better to make fire by rubbing sticks or banging rocks.
Add...maybe Blizz added the servers in China MUCH later than the ones in the US, and people wanted to play the game NOW! And once you have a high level player, it's not fun to start over...
By the way, much of this is FUD. I'm sure that the things in the article actually do happen, but they're so far from commonplace that it's barely worth reporting on.
Chaos, panic, disorder...my work here is done.
As a result, players are asking anyone who wants to join a group to type one or two sentences in English. If the sentences contain spelling or grammar mistakes, the player is rejected.
You also seem to be able to speak English better than your average American "LOLZ HI@U I WHAT A ITAM PLX OK !!" gamer kid. Typing one or two sentences in English shouldn't pose a major problem for you. It's the American kids that should really be worried about this practice. =)
"Bother," said Pooh, as lightning knocked out hi%#&(F*@NO CARRIER
I was thinking that maybe the "type two or three sentences in english" thing was also to keep annoying kids out of the group. That's more of an immediate annoyance than any goldfarmers.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
More to the point, someone who can't communicate with the rest of the party is a serious liability in any dangerous situation. For many people, the fun of games like this lies in cooperation with a group to overcome dangerous situations.
If you can't speak english, you have every right to play on an English server, but don't be surprised or upset that people don't want to play with you. It's just common sense to want a party that can operate as a party.
I just had an argument with someone on another MMORPG's fan board about the very point you make. Some people do in fact learn english playing on english language servers, but unfortunately some of the examples of english they learn from are filled with slang, colloquialisms, horrible grammar and inept orthography. While I suppose it is admirable that they are making the effort to learn english, it is truly unfortunate that some of what they are learning is about as useful in real life as pig latin. Even worse, they may not even realize it and make posts in other english language venues that are a mishmash of styles, which can lead to great confusion for readers who don't know whether they should take their post seriously or not.
The pursuit of absolute tolerance leads to the most rigorous and ludicrous intolerance. - REX MURPHY
First off, Blizzard should just recognize that the reason farmers exist is due to their game design. If I am paying $15/month to play some game and I find parts of it to be boring, why should Blizzard care if I want to pay someone else to play that part? It is no different from real life, where I pay someone else to grow (and sometimes cook) my food, kill cows for me, etc. If someone is hacking their system, they should crack down on that, but most farmers have real paid accounts. You can say it causes inflation, but I would counter that this is just normal economics - market forces bringing down an artificial economy.
Second - no chinese farmers want to group with non-farmers. I actually know some farmers in China. They have about 40 people working there, each playing several characters at a time in different windows. The pay is OK and the work is easy, but the hours are long (10 hours per day, seven days a week, plus the next day off if you work the night shift). They employ a few english speakers who handle the case where someone tries to talk to them, so the idea that asking a few English questions will identify a farmer is just wrong. They are very polite and don't use bots, etc., because they don't want to be caught. Most of the problem farmers are not the chinese companies but the western college students trying to make beer money on eBay.
I think a larger part of this is racism. Look at the ads for gold on eBay. People actually say "not chinese gold" in their ads - as if the fact that a chinese person farmed it instead of a Westerner makes a difference!
The real mystery for me is why someone would pay someone else to play their character for them... THAT seems really strange... but I can imagine that it would be easier to pay $5 for an item that makes the game more fun for me than playing the same instance 100 times in a row hoping for a drop.
I have ran into many chinese gold farmers who say "i no farm, i jsut chinese, like to play game, you take me to group ok?!" You let them in despite your better judgement. Once the final boss is down they steal everyting and say "im sorry i not good english i not know rules kthxbye".
If you think this is stereotypical or racist then you haven't played WoW. YES chinese farmers DO speak like that if they speak at all. Some are fluent in english but many speak in a perfect stereotype of how a chinese native speaker forms their english sentances.
It might be racist to screen out chinese players but let me tell you that it DOES save you from being ninja looted randomly. Im not so worried about how this is a bad thing becuase they CAN play on official chinese servers if they just want to play a game.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
Assuming a Chinese player is more likely to be a gold farmer isn't much different than assuming a Middle Eastern looking person is more likely to be a terrorist. This is prejudice, and if your prejudice translates into denying goods or services solely because of the ethnicity of the person, it's racism. So even people who consider themselves rational become racist when convenient because it's easier to assume a Chinese person is a gold farmer and deny him access than to actually find a better way to screen.
Vote for Pedro
No. There's nothing new here. Games met the economy thousands of years ago.
There have always been people willing to cheat to get ahead in a game; and when there is real money to be made the cheaters come out of the woodwork.
Its simple really.
Games have rules.
Those rules may forbid the sale of in game assets for real world assets or they don't. People who violate the rules are cheating and should be removed from the game, and prevented from playing again.
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You can't go to a Scrabble competition and pay the guy to your left for the letters you want. You can't go to Vegas and pay the dealer to give you the hand you'd like to have. You can't slip the monopoly banker an extra $20 for some additional monopoly money, and maybe the title to Boardwalk. etc etc etc.
Doing so is called cheating. Getting caught will get you removed from the game, and likely ensure that the people you play with will refuse to play with you in the future. Even being suspected of cheating will rapidly diminish the number of people willing to play with you.
MMogs are no different. Except that right now the other players have a hard time isolating cheaters and a limited ability to do anything about them except refuse to group with them; and the game host has little incentive to remove them; as they are paying customers. As long as the host feels they are getting more customers by allowing the cheaters to play then they lose from people refusing to the play the game due to the hosts inaction cheaters will prosper.
So ostracising suspected cheaters has become the prevalent, and really the only way to retaliate at this time.
I think eventually we'll see mmogs stabilize into games that explicitly allow gold farming, and games (or servers) that in response to a customer demand for 'purity' - do not. It will be interesting to see how the two models fare... but there is certainly room for both.
Magic the Gathering has 'draft' tournaments for players who like to compete on luck of the draw and skill, and 'constructed' for players who like to bring their wallets.
Some people do in fact learn english playing on english language servers, but unfortunately some of the examples of english they learn from are filled with slang, colloquialisms, horrible grammar and inept orthography.
LOL. ne1 nos y?
You make a good point. A MMORPG is a rather bad place to learn a language. What with abbreviations and unavoidable typos and the like. Some people argue that it's a good way to learn slang and colloquialism, but a lot of those are the kind that would never be used outside an online context.
Best way to learn them, imho, movies, tv and the written word (fiction works: novels, comic books). Of course, you might end up with an accent that's all over the place (say, a mix of Frasier and Walker Texas Ranger) but what the heck.
As to legitimate chinese users on US servers: asian servers didn't come online until several months after the US servers did, and even then they were only the Korean servers. So it's not unthinkable that a chinese player might have invested considerable time and effort in leveling his chars to simply give them up for new chars on chinese servers.
He (they) might not have a choice eventually, tho. Wasn't there a rumor that China was going to impose restrictions on online games? And then curfew them? Eve online states that they have a single universe except for a separate universe for chinese players for "legal reasons". They don't explain what those reasons are, tho, so it might be something unrelated.
No sig
This was actually a decently big problem in EQ2. On pretty much every server there's an underlying current of hatred towards the mysterious plat farmers, which degenerates very quickly into a rant about Chinese players.
There were a couple communities I actually left because I was sick of people talking about "those damn Chinese players" and crap like that, except descending into more slurs and epithets. Yeah, a lot of plat farmers are Chinese, but I found the backlash to be much more offensive than the initial "problem."
What people seem to fail to realize is also that plat farmers don't want to group with non-plat farmers. I have no idea why someone turning a profit wouldn't buy five more accounts (or whatever fills a group in WoW) and gain the ability to loot everything that drops, and efficiently. Finding a group can already be hell, and then if you turn up incompetent companions, or you don't win the roll... forget about it. Chances are you're just running into an idiot ninjalooter of the garden variety if someone with poor english skills up and offs with your loot.
What these games need is a "Fed," an entity which controls and regulates the dispensation of large sums of gold. It doesn't need to be implemented in an even remotely similar way to in the real world, but some kind of control has to exist.
When the real world price of Game Gold starts going up, the "Fed" should pump more gold into the game, somehow, in order to deflate its value relative to the dollar. I have no idea how to implement this in a way that's true to the character of the game -- somebody who actually plays these games a lot might get some creative ideas about it. It seems like you should also be able to "sell short" the game gold, and increase your game wealth, since the value of the gold is decreasing relative to some other currency. Converting between game gold and real dollars give you all sorts of opportunities.
If I was a player in one of these games, and rumors got started that the game economy was about to be regulated, I would be overjoyed. I would purchase, with real dollars, huge quantities of gold, and wait until regulation caused the value of gold to rise. Then I'd auction it back off and walk away with real cash.
Personally I don't care where you from or what language you speak or how old you are. I DO however care whether or not you can understand enough to be a contributing member of the group. If I can't count on you to follow instructions because you don't understand....I can't count on you to not steal someone elses item that they have been working for. With some items taking upwards of 50 runs through the same dungeon, thats just not a chance I am willing to take.
I don't have hours and hours to play all the time so you can be damn sure that I am going to do a communication check at the beginning of a large run to make sure everyone understands thier part and the loot rules. Some people call this a farmer check and I can't say I don't disagree, but it is not designed to discriminate because they are chineese or french or mexican. If you can't communicate effectively then you are liability. I have knowingly grouped with people from Japan and while thier english was broken they could communicate enough to get the job done and they played an active part in our group.
As far as dumping ads from gold selling services, I say good. Its kind of sketchy for a any publication to host ads for services which violate the terms of service for the games/services they review. They don't have banner ads for companies that will sell you a downloadable copy of autocad, windows xp or OfficeXP, how is gold selling any different?(yeah I guess theres the whole stolen and then sold vs bought and then sold, but if its not technically yours to sell in the first place....bah. I don't want to go down that road.)
MMORPGs favor people who have oodles of spare time. Time is money. Someone is paying for your rent, clothing, food, electricity, and broadband while you are online. And there's an opportunity cost -- every hour you spend online could have otherwise been spent doing something else, like working for money.
You're welcome to spend your time and money however you like. If you prefer to play WoW for 20 hours a week, and you take great pride in having done everything for yourself, that's fine. I'm glad that having this hobby makes you happy. But don't pretend that you're somehow morally superior to the guy who pays for Chinese-farmed gold. Both of you are spending money to advance in WoW. The difference is that you are spending more money, because an hour of your time is worth more than an hour of a gold-farmer's time. (If this is not true, you should consider becoming a gold farmer!)
If you find this disturbing, perhaps you need to switch to a game that places more emphasis on actual skill (obtained through hours of practice) and less emphasis on "skill points" (obtained through hours of work that could just as well be done by someone else). Try chess. Try poker. Try any of several hundred other online games.