Bad Press For Gold Farmers Affects Chinese Players 640
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. "
Don't farmers just work with other farmers? (Score:5, Interesting)
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).
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
You know, sometimes.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:If they weren't farmers, they'd be on their own (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:I hate to break it to them... (Score:2, Interesting)
You are dead wrong. Up til I quit WoW last june, (we downed Onyxia and Domo) I was in a guild where everyone could type more than 2 sentences. Smart people and nice people. Oh and I never ever looked or had to look for a random pickup group.
Plenty of good guilds/clans exist with smart people who type more elaborate sentences than "d00d u ned any1 to fill grp?" or "OMGLOLZ!!!!!1111oneonetwo!!!. You will find these guilds in any MMOG, just have to do a bit of searching.
Racial Harmony (Score:2, Interesting)
"This would go a long way to bringing some racial harmony to World of Warcraft and the world in general."
It's ironic to talk about racial harmony in WoW, since the game is completely setup along the lines of race war. You can't even talk to players in the other faction; it's prevented by the server code and if you try to circumvent it you get banned. The result is a high level of distrust between the opposing factions, which I am guessing is completely by design.
It would be interesting if Blizzard opened some servers where Horde and Alliance could communicate; I wonder what would happen (and I'd certainly start a character on one!)
the other problem with non-english speakers (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Ultima Online (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Gold Farming? (Score:3, Interesting)
In these online games the currency is gold, platinum or some rare magical rings (Stone of Jordan, D2). Some people repeatedly kill the same bunch of monsters (who respawn and have treasure some amount of gold) and amass a big quantity of currency. These same people sell this ingame currency to other players for real world currency, $$. It has become a plague in some games, like WoW, where people hire many people to "play" and gather gold. Boss sells this gold for real world currency and makes a killing out of it. Chinese enterpreneurs are the most known "farmers", they essentialy hire many many people to work in shifts and play the same set of characters 24h a day doing the same mundane repetitive task of killing the mob, getting gold.
Re:Common in FFXI too. (Score:3, Interesting)
YMMV. Among English-speakers, I tend to see admiration of Japanese players, with people speaking in hushed tones of the times they found themselves in a Japanese party and got mad (in their words) experience points.
Personally, I think the main cause of the segregation (other than time zones, they're 14 hours ahead of EST) is problems with the auto-translate function. There's no easy way to ask "What monsters should we fight now?" for example. I say this as someone who's been unlucky enough to be stuck with leadership of a party where I was the only one who spoke English (and if anything, I suspect some of them were complaining among each other of the stupidity of one of the Japanese party members, not me).
Good English should be encouraged (Score:3, Interesting)
(Note, the last sentence was made using a "l33t translator" and reads as: who thinks they are elite because they can type in symbols.)
Just join a good Guild (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:WOW is too complex to have language barriers (Score:2, Interesting)
We don't use ventrillo (or teamspeak) precisely because of the language difficulties.
Oddly enough, we also have no problem taking on the end-game content. Ah well.
Of course, there is some xenophobia - wtf is blizzard hosting our server in France for? Can't keep the server up, can't keep the link up, can't keep the website up..
Re:Don't farmers just work with other farmers? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:If they weren't farmers, they'd be on their own (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't care how uber you are: your group's success is directly proportional to your ability to communicate. If somebody needs to redo a debuff or a crowd control, there's nothing that beats shouting into a microphone at the top of your lungs and adding a few cuss words for emphasis.
If everybody grew up on IRC and can type 100 WPM, you're fine. Most people can't. My girlfriend types really well, but she doesn't always notice when somebody's talking to her on the chat window. That's why you have TeamSpeak and Ventrilo. Now, I'm just doing pick-up groups these days, mostly, but the difference between playing with teamspeak and without is night and day. I ran all of Scholomance, 5-man, with only 2 60's. I, the MT, was 58 and had sub-par gear. The difference was that we were using Teamspeak.
That, and the ninjas really, really piss me off. I hardly think all of the non-English speakers who've screwed me out of loot are gold farmers, but just because they screwed me out of an inability to understand, "EVERYBODY PASS, LET'S DISCUSS" as opposed to capitalist greed does not negate the screwing. And I have noticed a correlation: nobody who I could talk to has ever stolen an epic or blue item.
I won't play with anybody who can't speak English, any more than I would work with somebody I couldn't communicate with.
gold farming in China (Score:1, Interesting)
Ironic that Comunist Chinese are critized by English speaking capitalits working for economic profit.
Multiculturalism FTL (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:If they weren't farmers, they'd be on their own (Score:2, Interesting)
Shouldn't players be angry at the gold buyers? (Score:2, Interesting)
That's why I no longer group with Chinese players (Score:4, Interesting)
As a result, I refuse to group with anyone who can't speak decent English, and also have 2-3 predominantly Chinese guilds blacklisted.
The Benefit Of Farmers (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Multiculturalism FTL (Score:3, Interesting)
It's quite annoying when what you just spent 2 hours in an instance for you lose to someone who rolled need "on accident". It doesn't matter if they're Chinese or not, but if they can't speak English and communicate (or you don't have someone who speaks Chinese), then how do you know if they know what's going on?
I'm one of the people who's started quizzing people who join PUGs, when I do them. "Rogue in group 2, respond or get booted." No response. Boot. And you don't hear back from them asking why they were booted. I've had too much stuff stolen from me to put up with any more crap.
Horsepucky (Score:3, Interesting)
It's true that people id'd as gold farmers will get worse treatment, but not true that people with poor language skills are treated like this. Honestly, have you seen the chat in any MMO lately? I call bullshit.
Re:MMORPGs don't have an "egalitarian nature"! (Score:3, Interesting)
Once the rules of the game have been set forth, anybody who buys or sells gold is in violations of the rules of the game (and what is a game if not a set of rules and constraints within which to explore possibilities?) However, if the rules were not in place, I don't think people would feel moral superiority over those who buy gold so much as a sadness that reality seeped into what was intended to be a realm of fantasy in such an obscene way.
The game was not intended to be impacted by how much money you make outside of the game, because such a factor would have been a great unequalizer. The game required little skill that could not be easily learned, as that too would have been a great unequalizer. There are MMORPGS where game money is meant to have a relationship to real money, or where reflexes or intelligence are designed to make a big impact to the game. There is an egalitarian ideal to the game, even if not everybody can be equal. Just because things are not completely equal does not mean that it is ok to add additional elements of inequality to the game. Just because you equate time and money does not mean that the two should be interchangeable in this instance.
Why do we hate them? (Score:2, Interesting)
Gold Farmers, aka Chinese Gold Farmers, aka CGFs (Racist, perhaps, but it's the name everyone uses) are, for those of you not familiar with the game, people who play the game professionally (The stereotype used to be a sweat-shop environment), being paid to gather large amounts of in-game items and currency, to be sold on the Internet for real-life currency, violating Blizzard's terms of service.
The "Chinese" part of this at least began from facts, since originally (I don't know if it's changed since then), an overwhelming percentage of these farmers were doing so from China (I don't speak the language, so I can't say for sure).
So you might ask what the problem is, besides the TOS violations...
1) They have a large effect on the game economy, introducing more gold into the in-game market than would normally be there. In accordance with good old supply-and-demand, the market inflates and prices rise (Blizzard has put mechanisms in the game to prevent this, known as "gold sinks"). I'm a programmer, not an economist, so I can't really predict the full effect of their actions.
2) Since there are many items that can only be obtained in dungeons, with the assistance of a group, these CGFs often join dungeon groups/raids in order to get them. This leads to several problems:
3) Most of them don't speak English, or rather they speak JUST enough to carry out a business transaction ("WTS [Linked Item] 5g", where "WTS" = "Want to Sell"). This means the group can't properly communicate with them to plan battle tactics or organize. Without teamwork, well, bad things happen.
4) Assuming (2a) doesn't get everyone killed, they're often overly-greedy when it comes time to distribute the loot ("loot" = Items dropped from enemies). They'll often say they desperately need an item, when they only intend to sell it for some quick cash (Players who need an item as an upgrade to their current character are given priority over those who just want to sell it). This means less rewards for other players.
5) Sometimes, they are just joining a dungeon raid to get one particular item. In that case, they'll just abandon the group as soon as they get it, leaving the others shorthanded. If a dungeon is designed to be completed by a 5-player group, 4-players will have a harder time, and may not be able to complete it at all.
So these players really do disrupt gameplay, and can ruin it for those of us who play for fun instead of profit. I admit, I've done some of what the article says, booting players who are unable to communicate (I don't care if they're fluent or use proper grammar - Hell, even my grandparents have started saying the hated "lol" online, but communication is vital), and I will continue to do so.
An analogy for those of you who haven't fallen into MMORPG addictions... Take a football team, any team, and replace the quarterback with someone who doesn't speak the same language as the rest of the players. He can play just by watching his teammates and going along with them, but he can't follow the plays and is therefore ineffective. Same thing.
Ok, I'll stop ranting now.