Talk:Farmer (gaming)
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[edit] computerization
any mention of computerized gold farmers?Yincrash 10:31, 24 December 2005 (UTC)
[edit] NPOV issue
See, now that I think about it, I can't figure out which version of this article is more neutral, the one that names the countries or the one that doesn't. Either way, the sentence reads perfectly fine and accurately, but I can't get over the fact that I feel the fact that gold farmers ARE usually considered Chinese needs to be mentioned, but under the context that it IS a stereotype. I wish I was at home, I could grab a third opinion via IRC. Mo0[talk] 23:23, 9 November 2005 (UTC)
- The reason I specifically mentioned China and Mexico were that China is the characteristic stereotype and Mexico was the location of the most famous gold farming operation to date (Lee Caldwell's BlackSnow Interactive). China and Mexico aren't the only locations that have gold farming operations, Thailand, Indonesia, and other countries (mostly in Southeast Asia or Eastern Europe) also have such things, they're just the two most prominent in my mind. - Flooey 04:26, 10 November 2005 (UTC)
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- The MMO that I play is World of Warcraft, and the prevalent stereotype there by far is that farmers are Chinese, even to the point where seeing guilds like CHINESE FARMERS UNITED, as a parody, is common. My issue with previous edits wasn't with the stereotype itself, but with the insertion during the factual statements at the beginning of the article of (who are mostly Chinese). That's what I took issue with, since there's really no way to verify any of that. Mo0[talk] 05:43, 10 November 2005 (UTC)
- I have merged in the Chinese Farmer article to this one. As the article already mentions that many of the farmers are chinese, I thought it was sufficient, but if you like, you can edit it up. As "Gold farmer" beat "Chinese farmer" by a wide margin in a google fight and is the commodity term used by commentary sites such as penny arcade, it seems that it is the more accepted term. --DDG 22:44, 30 January 2006 (UTC)
Ugh, you know something? This isn't neutral at all. It has links to online stores, and seems to actually favor gold farming (which I'm completely against, but beside the point), I think it's in need of some changes. Fr0 14:02, 2 February 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Page with similar content
[edit] Proposed merge
Similar content with Chinese farmer and perhaps renaming the article to Farming (gaming) or similar title. čĥàñľōŕď 03:23, 25 January 2006 (UTC)
[edit] RMT
Can someone edit the related article Real-money trading? Atm its filled with citation request tags, and text itself doesnt read well, while this article is much better written.
[edit] Chineese association
Many people from world of warcraft think that chineese people are the main source of gold farmers. That is just racist omfg, whenever i see someone on wow that is chineese ppl make fun of him cus hes a "gold farmer" and they say "ping ti tong tow you buy gold now" and say he works in a sweat shop. This is a discriminitation!
It's certainly rude, I'll give it that. And even if all farmers were Chinese (which they are not), it certainly would not automatically mean that all Chinese were farmers. People using a valid statistical extrapolation to justify their own xenophobia make me sick. The Daedalus Project has very good coverage of that.
WOW is not the only online game that exists. I know in guild Wars, there are few farmers that even exist and people use bots, not sweat shop workers. It isn't racist when, at least in horribly unmoderated games like wow, most farmers are Chinese. --68.192.188.142 19:26, 15 September 2006 (UTC)
[edit] "Ruins the economy"
In the first paragraph discussing how MMO's have a term in their EULA banning farming, I have removed the statement "as it negatively affects the game economy". This is definately POV. 100 man-hours of "gold farming" has the exact same impact as 100 man-hours of legitimate "self-farming", which is a staple of any MMO, and as stated throughout the rest of the article, it doesn't "negatively affect" as much as it merely "changes" the economy. Furthermore, I do not think it follows that the MMOs have that term in their EULA specifically because "it negatively affects the game economy". Sony's "Station Exchange" facilitates the transfer of item for cash, does it not? In other words, once MMOs can regulate the sale of in-game items (and thusly obtain their share of the proceeds) any statement about the "morality" of gold farming will look hypocritical at best.
There is an argument that "negatively affects" is accurate insofar as it leads prices and costs to be out of equilibrium. In a fully functioning market, costs would increase as the money supply increases (inflation), though in WoW, certain costs (in this case, from NPC vendors and travel) do not rise when this happens. The effects from this are multitudinous, though to suggest just one example, the relative value of expensive (epic) items decreases as compated to a broadly-defined basket of goods when income devoted to fixed costs becomes a smaller part of the (now inflated) money supply.
- I'm not certain how badly this "ruins" the economy. That does not, however, mean that it is moral to farm gold or to buy farmed gold. MMORPGs are games, after all, and selling/buying items is against the stated rules of the game, which means it is cheating. It is no different than using a bot, or exploiting a bug. You're either advancing your character through illicit means, or enabling someone else to do so. To say that gold farming is harmless and moral is to say that all other forms of cheating are, which is ridiculous. If I know that someone else has achieved something through paying a farmer that I had to work for, that makes the game less fun. The fact that there is such a stigma in the gaming community about this (as evidenced by how commonly it is mocked) means that my opinion is not unusual. When you also have PvP in an MMORPG, that makes it even worse. While it is common to hear people claim that the economy is harmed through farming, the fact is that it is the advancement through cheating that it truly immoral. Atamasama 00:51, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
Ok, so .. you have a virtual community of say 4,000 on a low population server. There is an exponential amount of gold that will be generated from loot and other drops from mobs, auction house profits etc. That's an economy. You have players that will farm mobs repeatedly, increasing the supply, and decreasing the demand (simple Supply_and_demand). Since there becomes an abundance of items, the value must now go down to compete with other sellers thus having a negative impact on the economy. Now, put money as a motive to farm items for gold in game and have not just one person doing this for the sake of making money to be used in game, but to profit in real life and we have a problem. You've now a worker on a lengthy shift, being paid to farm items for gold and selling it in real life. That, in my opinion ruins the in-game economy. Fr0 05:05, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Please cite your sources
There are an awful lot of unsourced assertions in this article, many of which seem to be opinion or folklore. I have added a number of {{fact}} tags, and the {{citations missing}} template to the top of the article. Let's see if we can find verifiable, reliable sources for these assertions, and if not, remove them as per Wikipedia policy. --MCB 04:21, 30 September 2006 (UTC)
I'm sorry, but why is there 3 citations needed on the Public Opinion section?Cosmonaut3030 19:49, 24 December 2006 (UTC)
[edit] wenshen
I'm sorry, but "wenshen" is not the accepted common English-language term for... anything. Why does the article begin with it? Instead of "A yu wenshen is..." this should read "A gold farmer is...".
If you are going to use it in this article, please at least explain what it means, where it derives from, how widely used it is - I very much doubt that it's come into widespread usage among the majority of MMORPG players outside China. Not all gold farmers are Chinese, and it's just patently not a Chinese concept to begin with. LordAmeth 23:04, 19 December 2006 (UTC)
- Lol, thats just vandalism. I've reverted it. Anything that looks really weird and is not explained is most likely vandalism. Shinhan 12:30, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
[edit] er, what?
At present, I don't think the article is clear enough soon enough on exactly WHY anyone would farm. It needs to be said more explicitly how farming is turned into real world money and made into a real world market. Right now, it just seems like people are getting paid to farm for no reason... and only much later in the article can you piece together the realization that players are paying real world money for items of value.
[edit] The difference between repetition and duping
It strikes me as odd (to say it lightly) that this article does not discriminate between farming by repeating high-gain parts of a game over and over again to get and sell ingame items/currency for out-of-game money and farming by use of dupes, bugs, exploits etcetera, since the first type has a much lower impact on the game than the latter. For more information, read this. You may find it enlighting. Mzyxptlk 18:12, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
