Sorry for the double posting I’ve been doing in this thread. I have a bad habit of remembering stuff as soon as I hit Submit.
I’ve been trying to keep my own arguments against the gold farmers/sellers as neutral as I can, personally. It doesn’t matter to me if they’re Chinese or American; it just happens that China is more permissive about this than the US is. The article mentions how many of the farmers, after work, will log on and actually play the games they’ve been farming on, and that’s cool by me; they’re acting as players, and I welcome them then. It’s the farming itself that hurts the game, regardless of who does it.
Maybe. On the other hand, if I wrote a song, or a story, or a sketch on a piece of paper that belonged to you, the paper would be yours, but the creation - the intellectual property - would be mine.
I’d argue that property rights aren’t determined just by saying something’s mine, they’re determined by whether or not I control it. If players are able to control their characters, as a practical matter, they own them.
But it is funny. My point is that when someone is willing to pay you to further your penetration in the most desirable consumer market for the next century, you let them. You might protest, or make the occasional example. But you’ll never be so foolish as to actually try and stop them.
What exactly about a character is intellectual property that belongs to you? You didn’t do anything creative, all you did was modify a few database entries on someone else’s database. The only part that I could even conceive is anything creative is the character’s name.
That is, you’re right, that if you wrote a song or a story on someone else’s paper, the intellectual property rights of that would still be yours. But if you took a Driver’s License Application (or some other form) and filled it in, just because you did the work of writing your name and checking some boxes, that doesn’t mean you inherently “own” what is written on the form, because nothing about filling in that application is a creative work.
I think you’re cutting the concept down to a more fundamental, disassociated aspect than I would, but otherwise you’ve got it right.
To join in the analogy pile: you go to a miniature golf course, where for $15 you get to play through 9 holes, plus they provide you with a putter and golf ball, each in a color of your choice. You play through the golf course and score a perfect game, recording 9 holes in one on your scorecard. Do you now own the red club and yellow ball you played with? Are you now legally empowered to sell that combination of club and ball to another person? No; even though you’ll be remembered among the miniature golf club community (an elite class, to be sure) as the Red And Yellow Perfect Scorer, those objects are not yours; the golf course merely allowed you to rent them and the grounds to have fun, but once you stop playing, you can’t take them with you.
Every internet cafe i’ve been in in China (in several cities) has had the same sight of a multitude of players transfixed to their screens, battling and searching. It’s not for me, i prefer to live in the real (albeit often online) world rather than some insane rush for gold, rivaling the historical pan handling in Alaska. Far be it from me to lessen the actual fulfillment and achievement those men (and they are all men) get from their craft. It’s just not for me. There again, the individuals i see groping for recyclables in the local trash fulfill a service which i am (fortunately) not bound to do.
Of course i would rather they had a fulfilling job, constructing and/or building, but it’s probably physically safer to be in a hot, smoky room battling each other. The general rule in China is ‘well, he’s got as job so that’s ok’ which is suitable when the population of 1,3 billion are all needing to be fed. To whine about him spoiling your enjoyment is crass and ignorant, because he’s fighting for his income, whereas you are wasting your employer’s time or neglecting yourself.
Your point is demonstratably false. Because there are millions of legitimate players playing on Chinese servers. WoW is the most sucessful game in China ever by a Western Developer by a huge margin, and somehow you’re falsely induction that because Blizzard is cracking down on Gold Farmers, many of which are Chinese, they are somehow jeopardizing their potential future marketshare. I got news for you, there’s people who provide gold in the U.S. too; many of the services that sell gold also offer to buy your WoW gold (obviously, at a reduced rate), and I’ve known some people who were tempted to sell some extra gold for a few bucks.
As was demonstrated upthread when someone said he’d been considering picking up WoW, but won’t because of this discussion, Gold Farming HURTS the MMORPG market and thus, it could easily be argued that Blizzard would actually damage their “penetration into the most desirable consumer market for the next century” more by allowing it to continue.
IME, Gold Farmers are highly detestable, because I’ve grouped with people who I didn’t know was a farmer at the time, they were often terrible players, and would ninja a good item and quickly leave the group. I’ve seen prices suddenly sky rocket on good items, because the Gold Farmers buy up the cheaper ones to artificially inflate the price. It makes it extremely frustrating for those of us who can’t play endless hours a week to purchase high-level mats.
This is ludicrous. I doubt that many people play World of Warcraft from work, although I’m sure it happens. But acting as though online computer games is any more wasteful than any other non-essential hobby is kind of ridiculous. And making a value-laden judgment and saying people are “neglecting themselves” is likewise, ludicrous.
Whether or not what someone does is “neglecting themselves” is entirely based on their unique circumstances and what they value. If someone has a wife and kids, and is so hooked on an MMORPG that they genuinely start to lack on other things that they find important (like spending time with their family), then yeah, they are neglecting themselves.
Games and the like are recreational activities, and just because someone is playing a computer game doesn’t mean they are neglecting themselves. Obviously you’re not big on online games, but I imagine you do have some recreational activities you engage in. Would it be appropriate for me to say you’re “neglecting yourself” when what you’re actually doing is enjoying yourself? No, that wouldn’t make any sense at all, it’s very arrogant to sit back and judge what others do in their leisure time, not everyone has the same desires as every one else.
Do I feel some bit of sympathy for people in China who are trying to make a living farming gold in an online game for extremely low wages? Maybe. But according to the OP their wage isn’t really that different from what some servers make in China. China has one of the fastest growing economies in the world, I refuse to believe that to make a living, they have to ruin the leisure activities of others.
Letting Chinese people farm for gold does not help their penetration of the Asian market. Legitimate Chinese players exist totally outside the gold-farming industry, something like 3.5m of them in fact.
Blizzard has most definitely been serious about restricting gold farming. They have a “warden program” which some privacy advocates dislike which, whenever WoW is running finds out what programs you have running on your system. Because of this, farmers who used to farm using elaborate robot-programs have been cut back immensely, because if Blizzard detects one of the many such programs running, they permanently close the account.
They routinely catch and ban hundreds of thousands of gold farming accounts. I’ve never bought gold, but I’ve kept track of how much it is going for as there has been a few times I was tempted to buy gold. And Blizzard’s crackdown efforts do bear fruit, as gold prices skyrocket anytime Blizzard does a crack down.
That’s where we’re different, i’d love to play a few rounds with Tiger, just not 4 million other people at the same time.
But he’s there to earn a living, playing a sport. He takes it to the place where he earns a living from it and does it full time, like many other professionals. And in sports there are tactics used to gain an upper hand. Because of the nature of online gaming these tactics cannot be regulated or ‘fair’. Because of the numbers involved it’s impossible to get everyone strictly adhere to rules that can be easily bypassed. A bit like life, but on a computer.
The situations are not at all analogous, though. Golf, as dictated by whatever commission regulates it, can be played for pleasure or for money. An MMO such as World of Warcraft cannot be played for money, as Blizzard has instituted no cash prizes for winning tournaments. If real money exchanges hands between anyone other than a player and Blizzard in exchange for use of WOW resources[sup]1[/sup], that is against Blizzard’s rules and for all intents and purposes is illegal within the context of WOW. It’s Blizzard’s house, therefore their rules.
Further, whatever winnings Tiger Woods may acquire in the game is solely due to his own ability. He’s playing the game and excelling at it. People who purchase gold or characters in an MMO are not playing the game, they’re going to the black market to buy an unearned edge. It’d be like paying Tiger Woods to play a round of golf so you can put your name on his scorecard and brag about your awesome game. It’s unethical if not outright cheating, even more so in situations where abusing that system hurts others playing fairly, such as official rankings in golf or excessive consumption of resources in an MMO.
[sup]1[/sup]I should probably define my use of resources in this discussion. Resources within the context of a game includes not only things like money and items (both crafting and otherwise), but also time, enemies, places to hunt/mine/gather/whatever, and database and server space. There’s other examples of resources within a game such as health, magic power, etc., but those aren’t really relevant to this discussion.
Well there are some items that you can get that will “bind when picked up” Which means that you cant sell or give it to another player. You can sell it to a vendor, but it is so much less of a profit than selling it to other players.
I’m not a WoW player, but are you sure about that? I thought they made all kinds of decisions about their characters - everything from what weapons to equip to what spells to learn, to what kind of character to create in the first place.
In the end, all you’re doing is renting these things from Blizzard. Sure, you can mix and match them any which way you like, but you’re renting database space from Blizzard, and you don’t have ownership to sell it.
Now, perhaps they don’t own the abstract idea you come up with; if you were to use Uthgar the Orc in a story to be published, I don’t think Blizzard could stop you (unless it was a story explicitly using the World of Warcraft setting, anyhow). But the WOW account, and the virtual representation of Uthgar on WOW servers – that, they own.
I agree they own the servers. Are you saying if you sell your own character, that you created - or hell, even just give it away - that you’re committing theft?
You’re conflating two things I tried to make distinct in my last post. The concept of your character is your own. The assets (character model, hair colors, class abilities, equipment, etc.) used to represent that character on Blizzard’s servers are not.
When you sell your account to someone else, you’re not selling the intellectual property of your character. You’re selling the database space on Blizzard’s server which corresponds to the various assets that make up your character that you are, for all intents and purposes, merely renting.
If you cancel your account on WOW, do you believe it’s Blizzard’s right to delete the information pertaining to your personal character(s) if they so choose? Why or why not?
