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Role Playing (Games) The Almighty Buck

The Story of the Gold Farmer 66

Posted by Zonk from the making-a-dishonest-buck dept.
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."
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The Story of the Gold Farmer More

The Story of the Gold Farmer

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  • I hate to say it.... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by LordPhantom ( 763327 ) on Tuesday January 03, 2006 @01:45PM (#14385887)
    ...but I really don't like them wherever they're from - throwing race in as an issue in this seems cheap to me.

    • Re:I hate to say it.... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by supersocialist ( 884820 ) on Tuesday January 03, 2006 @01:48PM (#14385920) Journal
      When racism happens to accompany a real problem, the people who'd rather not see it solved cry "racism!" to make the pasty white boys shrink bank into their basements for fear of looking bad. I'd mention a few examples, but I'm already courting bad karma just by opening my mouth near the word racism!
    • Not much to say other than that I agree strongly with the parent. Playing the race card is just a weak way of ignoring the problem. It's like saying we shouldn't try to stop Islamic extremists from killing innocent people because they're (often) foreign and so to stop them would be racist.

    • Re:I hate to say it.... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      It isn't, though. Most gold selling companies are based in the US. It's SPECULATED that the majority of the gold they get comes from Chinese players who farm it for cash, but it's never been actually proven.

      Yet, even though it's quite clear that if you want to buy gold or characters in an online game you do it through an American, people still blame "Chinese gold farmers" for "ruining" the games.

      The clearest example I can think of is Final Fantasy XI, where Square-Enix recently changed the rules for how m
      • 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/spam
        • And then they're spamming me with broken English: "Fast come,fast serve!" amoung others (I'm sure players on my server recognise that).

          I think I lost count of the number of Americans I've met who use broken English in-game.

      • The idea that it's Chinese doing that work comes from the lower wages in China, even at minimum wages a US farming operation wouldn't be very profitable. China has lots of people and lots of internet access while having low wages.
      • I'd actually like to hear more about this situation, if you could be bothered. I have a friend that's tried to get me into FFXI for about a year now, but I've never committed. I'm curious about the general dynamic. What's everybody's beef? Are Americans just rude in general, is the economy as busted as I've heard, etc.?

    • Re:I hate to say it.... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by thesandtiger ( 819476 ) on Tuesday January 03, 2006 @02:02PM (#14386040)
      What brings race into this is that people are constantly referring to "Chinese" gold farmers, as if being Chinese is somehow part of the problem when it is only the gold farming that is objectionable. It would be like putting "Black spammers" or "Jewish phishers" or "Mexican telemarketers" as being a problem, rather than simply spammers, phishers and telemarketers.
      • Damn Nigerian 419 scammers.
      • Having read the article, all I'm getting at is this - his parallel to Xenophobia against Chineese people is interesting, but ultimately off-target. Anyone can go out on the internet and find trolls posting garbage, but I seriously doubt those examples are stastically valid samples - I could go out on the web and find 10 articles that are unfair to a particluar group and make the claim that there is a serious problem on the web with it too. Unlike the lynch mobs that happened with the Chineese laundry ser
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • What's really cheap is the fact that some fifteen year old kid in his mother's basement thought that he could help himself "blend in" with his cronies by tacking the word Chinese onto the front of "Gold Farmer" to be cute, or whatever, and everyone else follows right along with it. That's what's REALLY cheap.

      And YOU trying to dismiss it just because it makes you uncomfortable isn't much better. Here's a bit of news for you: Lots of people in the Good'ol US of A don't like minorities. Sure, they might not be
      • Oh come on. Firstly, how do you know I'm FROM the USA? You make a rather blatent assumption yourself, sir. Perhaps it's because you think I -sound- like an American based on a generalization you have about Americans? How....interesting
        Then again, perhaps you're just trying to show your wider worldview by assigning all racisim to the US.
        That, of course, is because all WoW players live in the US (naturally), thereby confining the problem to that country. How easy and simple for you.

        I hate
        • I never assumed that you were from the USA. I simply clarified that I was talking about the USA since I have never left the continent of my birth. I don't know how you thought I was implying that you were from the US.

          I don't know how the WoW population breaks down, but I'd be willing to bet that a very significant percentage of the WoW subscribers are from the US. At least on the servers I play on because, well, they're US servers. So I guess my generalizations about my WoW server's population are, in many

  • You've got to be kidding me. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Southpaw018 ( 793465 ) * on Tuesday January 03, 2006 @01:52PM (#14385954) Journal
    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.
    • 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. Hen
      • The designers could take the alternate approach:

        Let players buy their characters. Simple. For $120 upfront, start at level 50 with a greater mount and the inventory of your choice. That would let you compete in the CTF, be on-par with your guild, etc. Simple way for latecomers to catch up with their friends. It would avoid the "my char got nerfed, I want to make a new one, but I gotta play through 40 hours of gameplay to get to the good multiplayer parts of the game" problem.
        • Here's the problem with that approach. If you want proof, find any of the hundreds of "ebay" characters on any server.

          The people who buy characters that are levelled up are not the kind of people most players want to group with. Almost without exception, they are VERY poor in the general game mechanics AND their class specific abilities, generally have a sense of entitlement that rates them as "assholes" of the first caliber, behave rather poorly in most situations involving other people (ninja loot, dram
          • Yes, but many people just don't have time on their hands and just want to game online socially with their group of friends. Such people often have the money - these are where goldfarmers get their cash. And if Blizzard themselves (or whatever company runs your game of choice) offered the premium-priced top-end-characters, they could allow you to design and outfit the character yourself.
            • Perhaps playing a different game would be a better choice then. There are thousands of games that don't require such immense time investments in order to be able to play with your friends.
              • Notice I said friends. My friends play game X. Game Y may be 100 times the game that X is, but if I wish to play with my friends, my choices become
                (a) play X,
                (b) bug them to abandon their progress in X and play Y (which is what I do, with minimal success).
            • I don't know if you've ever played one of these games, but I can assure you that it is VERY obvious when you're playing with an someone who ebayed their character. Even in WoW which is a relatively simple game, there is quite a bit of complexity that just have to be learned by experience. The character progression is designed to slowly introduce you to your different abilities, and give you a chance to digest them before adding more to the pile. You also learn about other classes capabilities through thi
          • From personal experience, I highly doubt the bulk of ebayers are reasonable, mature people who simply want to be "social" with their friends. The people you meet who bought their characters usually act very obnoxiously and take an inordinate pride in their "premium top-end" status...which is ironic since they did not earn it, they bought it...against the TOS I might add.

            In any case, as stated by myself and many others, you don't get play a game like this simply to be social...if all you want to do is hang
      • "This isn't easy, unless you want to spend hours collecting gold instead of playing the game."

        'Collecting gold' is part of the game. The idea is that PvP or PvE combat is just one facet of the game; players would need to develop their characters economically as well, in order to become uberleet.

        The unforeseen problem, I think, is the nature of the userbase -- seems to me like Blizzard expected their base to more resemble traditional MMORPG players, instead of MOFPS players. This is what created the m

      • ...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.

        Prices are high because (some) people are willing to pay those prices.
        Even accepting that prices of rare items are "artificially" high, it

    • Re:You've got to be kidding me. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by NexusTw1n ( 580394 ) on Tuesday January 03, 2006 @02:53PM (#14386433) Journal
      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.
      I'd like to make a couple of points - and I'm not singling you out for this, your post struck my eye but there are plenty of others saying the same thing.

      I'm curious, is there any proof of this "fact"?

      We know farmers exist, we know they earn cents per hour because gold prices aren't that high. We know they don't talk much other than spamming "WTS .....", so they may be non English speakers but how do you know the majority are Chinese?

      How do you know they aren't Mexicans working in an Arizona sweatshop for example? Or a bunch of school kids earning after school allowance money? Or SE Asian net cafe owners?
      How do you know the farmers aren't US coded bots?

      I'm not trying to argue with you, I'm just interested where the "fact" that gold farmers are chinese comes from.

      My second point is to question what does their nationality have to do with anything? If you don't like gold farmers then say you don't like gold farmers. Saying "I don't like Chinese gold farmers" is superfluous unless you're trying to make a point about the Chinese.

      If you have a problem with gang bangers then you say "I don't like gang bangers", if you say "I don't like black gang bangers" then the sentence takes on an entirely new meaning.

      The constant use of chinese gold farmer, rather than gold farmer, is a form of racism whether players are doing it subconciously or not.
      It isn't the people crying racism that are "pulling the race card", it's the people who are unecessarily bringing race and nationality into it in the first place.
      • We don't "know" they're from China... but if they're not, they really want you to think they are. When you speak to them with a relatively complex English sentence, they will either not respond or will respond with rudimentary English, consisting of yes, no, you buy, a price, or whatever. If you insult them with well-known English insults, you usually get some form of "cao ni ma" or some other well-known Chinese insult.

        As to your second point, you're forgetting the order of events...

        The game opened.
        Players
      • You bring up valid points. The only reason I could think to differentiate them is the tactics they use. There are certainly Westerners that do these sorts of things to make a quick (or slow) buck on an auction site. But Chinese gold farmers generally use group tactics and work together to do there farming. Sure, they could be Koreans or some other race, but probably the majority of these people are Chinese. It's not like people are saying all Chinese are gold farmers...that's racism. They are saying t
    • Seriously. What is with mods lately using "overrated" to mod a post down they don't personally like? It's against the moderator guidelines.
  • 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.
    • It is actually a very good article, more like an essay with a bunch of anectdotes from people who have had experience with other players who they though were farmers. There is nothing moronic about the article.

      It is 16 pages though. Took me about 20 minutes to read (counting falling asleep) at work while waiting for a patch to complete.

  • This article is a bit silly... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Lendrick ( 314723 ) on Tuesday January 03, 2006 @02:22PM (#14386214) Homepage Journal
    The "Extermination" section was amusing:

    The pestilence trope then brings into forefront notions of eradication and extermination. Depending on the game and the game mechanics, this is typically a combination of systematic harassment and slaughter:

    The 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]

    In 2004, a fan video titled "Farm the Farmers Day" showed actual footage as players tracked down and massacred players they suspected to be adena farmers (see Constance's paper for more on this).


    "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.

  • Developers (Score:2, Insightful)

    by PeterAllen ( 883320 )
    The developers should just make it a non-viable option.

    Somehow.

  • So let me get this Straight... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Banner ( 17158 ) on Tuesday January 03, 2006 @02:32PM (#14386286) Journal
    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?

  • Priorities (Score:2, Interesting)

    by MaWeiTao ( 908546 )
    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 me

    • Re:Priorities (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ryarger ( 69279 ) on Tuesday January 03, 2006 @03:05PM (#14386544) Homepage
      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.


      As pointed out above, the problem with this is that the adjective maybe factually correctly, but it's inconsequential to the problem. The farmers are also human, have two hands and breathe oxygen, but would it make sense to describe them as two-handed, oxygen breathing, human Chinese farmers? Of course not. Because the problem is *farming*.

      It doesn't matter *one bit* that they are from China, so why point it out unless you're hoping to play on racial feelings, one way or the other?
      • "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 consequent
      • First off, I'm in agreement. There's no need to point to nationality here.

        Second of all, it's nationality, not "race".

        Third of all, just to play devil's advocate, if a particularily large segment of farmers are operating under the protection of their nationality (can't touch them because they're in China), then that could be a reason to raise the issue.

        Again, just to be clear, I don't think we need nationality here. But I could see a case where it could be an issue.

        -Jeff
  • 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
    • I was out getting my hair cut yesterday when half way through someone came into the shop and asked if anyone wanted to buy something. I don't even know what it was that he was flogging because the stylist mumbled "no thank you!" so quickly that I didn't get a chance to hear him. He then truddled off to the next shop to try his luck there. Now what would happen if someone interrupted a battle or some other goings on in a MMORPG in an attempt to sell something? 99% of the players would tell him to piss of
  • 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 yo
  • ...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
    • It's from Shakespeare, which hardly makes it a "saying" It from "the tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark."

      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.

  • 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 associa
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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.

    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
  • 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

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