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. "

Comments

Don't farmers just work with other farmers?

[KingSkippus]

So if you're a gold farmer, hanging around with your gold farming buddies at the gold farming office, wouldn't you just team up with them instead of trying to solicit groups with American players, who are likely to just slow you down?

And if you are a non-gold farming player, and someone wants to team up with you to help accomplish missions, what difference does it make what their motive is? Given that gold (or influence or whatever) is required to get stuff, to some extent, aren't we all gold farmers? For your practical gaming purposes, what makes a player who is accruing it to sell different from a player who is accruing it to buy a neat new sword (or new enhancements or whatever)?

If someone doesn't want to team up with foreigners, I'm guessing that there's something going on other than not wanting to support gold farming. It's probably because either a) for roleplaying purposes, you need to be able to communicate with your teammates (optimism), b) the farmer is not playing they way the group leader wishes and puts high pressure on him or her to rush through the missions (neutral), or c) they just don't like foreigners (pessimism).

Re:Ultima Online

[vertinox]

If they weren't farmers, they'd be on their native language server.

I don't know about you, but when UO was released in Japan and Korea, a great many US players played on those servers.

1. Because there was a chance to actually have a place to put a house.
2. Most of the US servers were overcrowded and laggy at times.
3. It was soon discovered that the influx of foreign "noobs" were ripe for the theifs and player killers.

Ever have some guy scream at you in ghost language in Korean... No? Well... Its the same as US ghosts screaming at you in anger. Oh raiding Covetous dungeons... Those were days.

The funny thing was when we were building up newbie characters in the woods on the Ariang server and out of the blue (no pun intended) a red jumped out and went "cor por cor por!" and killed my friend and I shouted "wait wait! don't kill us we are americans!"

And the PK said... "Oh my bad" Rezzed my friend and went on his way.

So yeah... What you are saying works both ways. I bet a few Americans on WoW go on Asian servers to grief and their gaming sites are complaining about the American greifers.

Just join a good Guild

[l33tlamer]

Whoever you are, Chinese gold farmer, PvP addict, PvE carebear, if you join a good guild in WoW, you end up having a great time and not having to worry about group with "randoms". Just make some friends in the game, or find people you know that play on your server, and join or make a guild. Thats half the fun of WoW, seriously.

I used to play WoW religiously (clocked in 55 days of play) before I quit a few months ago. For around 3 to 4 weeks, I was a guild leader on the Blackrock realm for the Guild NoMaam on a character called "Ruins". The guild had around 100 or so people, all with max level (60) characters. We did all the high end content, including Molten Core, 40 man PvP, raiding enemy towns and the obligatory 40-man fishing squads that kill players with fishing poles in between catches. It was very entertaining, especially since we used voice chat software whenever we did things in a group. Nothing is funnier than secretly bribing a friend to wipe the entire 40-man raid out as a joke, and hearing the mixture of laughter and angry screams when a tiny gnome leads a train of 10-story tall giants towards the group.

Back on topic, I personally did not like people that only farmed gold, as it is only a small part of the game. Playing on a PvP server, which allows you to kill opposing faction players, the unspoken rule of repeatedly killing farmers is pretty much a given for most guilds. The only farming that gets done is when you are in a group, which led to the formation of farming guilds. I am not joking. I once killed a few farmers solo, and in 15 minutes, a group of 40 arrived, all from the same guild. Then, my guild arrived. Ah... good times. WoW: Gang Warfare.

I was born in Hong Kong and lived there until I was 10. I have friends in the guild that are Chinese international students, with heavy accents and poor English. I had real trouble understanding one of them when he spoke in English, typed or vocal. We always joked about their poor English, but as they are in the guild, everyone got along, especially since the higher level content demanded group work. Sometimes, we had a guy translate raid instructions to Chinese for a few of the players, which always had a lot more swearing in it for some reason. "If you get the "Living Bomb" curse, run the fuck away from your group" translates to something a Chinese sailor wouldn't say at a Bachelor Party lol.

Personally, if people play on a PvE server that is inherently based on conquering the environment, farming is inevitable. Whether the player sells what they farm on Ebay is up to them, and the punishment should be dealt by Blizzard. On a PvP server, I usually kill any opposing faction player I see unless I know them on IRC or IRL. Most PvP-oriented guilds like us had farmer-killing runs where we visit every popular farming spot and get some PvP points off farmers for our guild members. Farmers have a tough time in general, and if they want to suffer to earn money, its up to Blizzard to ban them.

The idea of using grammar and spelling levels as a filter has its good points, to allow for easier communication for giving raid instructions, loot disputes and friendly chat like "ROFL we have 3 healers not healing, a tank not tanking and me, the mage, dying in 2 seconds..." It will likely reject the following people:
1) Foreign players
2) Kids in general, of all ages (up to 30 years old at times...)
3) Most members of my Guild, including me
4) Anyone on a WoW binge, going for a full 24 hours or more
5) People that find it stupid and offensive to be tested and leave the party

Multiculturalism FTL

[ShakaUVM]

About a week ago, I was by the AH in Org with my mage when a person (rather rudely) demanded, "Make me food." I was about to blow him off when I saw the character name was Chinese.

I'm a white guy, living in California, but I've taken a year of Chinese, so I don't know enough to really talk to Chinese players in WOW, but I have faked it well enough to get into all-Chinese parties. =)

[lai = come
qu = go
xia = down
shang = up
"qing lai" == please come (here), etc.]

So I asked the person in Chinese if they wanted food, and, sure enough, in Chinese they were a lot more polite (using "qing", please, instead of the imperative form they used in English).

Since then, whenever the player logs in, he asks for food in Chinese, and I make it for him. In exchange, I apparently get stacks of major healing and mana potions in the mail every day. =)

So, the Chinese guy (who I later learned was a woman, living in Manchuria) has been asking me to take her to UBRS. So last night I put together a party, went to UBRS... and yeah.

My Chinese friend accidentally clicked Need on an item she didn't need. So it pissed off the party, especially when they found out she was Chinese. But I smoothed it over. Then she Needed a loxbox. That just totally pissed off the party, so they wanted me to boot her. I puzzled out what she said, and apparently she just needed it for the lockpicking. So again, I got the item from her, and then lotted it to the party. After that, she passed on everything, and gave away all the other items she even legitimately won, because she was on the verge of tears after being yelled at by everyone. So yeah. I'd left some of the people in the party as assistant leaders, and at some point down the road, they booted her. So I reinvited...

Anyhow, to make a long story short, it was a pretty crap experience. They all called her a Ninja Chinese Gold Farmer, she was desperately trying to explain that the 1st was a mistake and the 2nd was for her LP skill (and yeah, I agree she should have just greeded it and LPed it later), so she started the run happy (because she could never find a Chinese speaking UBRS party), and ended sad and hurt, and the Americans left with a further deepening of the stereotype that all Chinese people are Ninja Gold Farmers. And I was in the middle having to deal with both sides with only a year of Chinese under my belt.

Sigh, multiculturalism for the loss.

The ironic twist here, of course, is that I think she does sell gold. Or maybe she buys gold (without tone mai (buy) and mai (sell) are the same, or maybe she was just asking if all Americans buy gold. My Chinese really isn't that good. :p

The Benefit Of Farmers

[jjohnson]

Everyone hates the farmers as players because they're jerks in game. But they have a massively stabilizing influence on the economy of the world. They increase the size of the overall economy for the shard by maintaining a constant flow of gold and drops into the system, which is deflationary. The gold that other players buy from IGN and others gets dumped into the economy in lots for epic items, and trickles down to regular players selling hot drops; or is simply recirculated through the farmers, who are making more blue and purple drops available on auction than would otherwise be available (again, deflationary); or goes into a money sink like an epic mount which removes it from the game.

The problem isn't that the farmers exist, it's that they're assholes. If they were smart, they'd be good, co-operative players, exerting a net benefit on their chosen shard.