Talk:Gold farming

message: This article used to say that the gold farming industry had been estimated at $3B in 2009. This figure is from Table 7 on page 15, which includes a row that claims that 30 * .22 * $369 = $578. It actually = $2435.4. Accounting for this makes the final sum $4.88B, and I've updated the article to reflect that. Personman (talk) 04:01, 2 November 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: multiplication error

message: any mention of computerized gold farmers?Yincrash 10:31, 24 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Seeing as this is framed as a question.  I'm not sure, did you notice any computerised gold farming mentions203.35.135.136 (talk) 01:20, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: computerization

message: 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)
replies: text: 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)
replies: text: 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)

text: 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)
thread_title: NPOV issue

message: Similar content with Chinese farmer and perhaps renaming the article to Farming (gaming) or similar title. čĥàñľōŕď 03:23, 25 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Proposed merge 

message: I agree that there are several articles here dealing with the same issue (real-money trading of MMORPG virtual property) that need to be merged into one.  The other terms should point to the merged article.
Ubikk (talk) 15:56, 8 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  One merged article needed to address the issue 

message: 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.
: While you have a point that the Real-money trading article is cluttered, and some sources are either out of date or unreliable, Farmer (gaming) has similar problems in it's discussions on the effect upon 'virtual economies' when it crosses over into 'real economics'.
: The problem is that a case is being argued for legal trade in 'virtual property' where in most cases none is currently recognised by governments or the commercial entities (MMOs) who sustain the very elements that make up these 'virtual worlds'.
: This means both articles run the risk of discussing what is a speculative but unauthorised trade in an asset, which has no legal status in real economies. If instead the logical separation between those few examples of 'virtual worlds' which do support legal trade were discussed, and the rest who do not support such trade, the articles would make much more sense.
: These problems are highlighted by the fact that what reliable reference material is available is limited in it's scope, and a lot of the rest is opinion based articles (blogs, etc.) which offer up little in the way of researched & peer reviewed articles. While the speculative aspect of both articles is 'fun' ignoring the legal, regulatory, and illegitimate aspects of the majority of trade in MMO gaming companies virtual property, runs the risk of Wikipedia references supporting speculative and worse illegal trade in what is not recognised otherwise as 'real', else in reality it would attract tax.
: So what is being discussed in both articles (separating out the limited examples of games where 'virtual' to 'real' exchange is supported in legal & real world sense) are only 'virtual assets' upon sale of which most is not legal tender.
: An essential point that has failed to be raised previously in both articles is the majority of these unauthorised virtual exchanges are accompanied by a disclaimers that state it's not legal tender or is guaranteed as such, since if it were that would open such companies up to litigation. Even authorised exchanges of popular virtual currencies such as Tercents QQ Coin are careful to state their exchange is not legal tender, so treating 'virtual currency' as having a legitimate economic value in any discussions here should be avoided unless it can be referenced as such, a might be the case with Second Life or Sony's EverQuest_II (via Station_Exchange).
: Witchita au 02:29, 17 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  RMT 

message: 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)
replies: text: This page made no such comparisons.  It simply stated a verifiable fact, that China is the country from which many gold farmers work.  It isn't up to Wikipedia to censor itself, simply stating facts isn't what drives racists.  Bigotry and prejudice do just fine.  207.154.101.37 (talk) 08:33, 5 August 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Chineese association 

message: I agree.  Even though many of the distribution companies are Chinese almost all of these companies buy gold over the internet from anyone and they pay for it using paypal.  I've encountered obviously Western players who brag about how they level characters and sell accounts and gold.  Therefore, entries which perpetuate these stereotypes need to be modified or marked for additional citation.
Ubikk (talk) 15:54, 8 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Response 1 

message: 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  tags, and the  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)
thread_title:  Please [[WP:CITE|cite your sources]] 

message: 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)
replies: text: 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)
thread_title:  wenshen 

message: 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.
-I agree, I don't play MMO games and it took me a bit to wrap my head around this article. --75.54.121.241 19:47, 9 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: er, what?

message: 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)
thread_title:  The difference between repetition and duping 

message: In the "Gold farming in China" section, I see three numbers that don't work out. It says that there are 100,000 gold farmers in China, which accounts for 0.4% of all online gamers in China. 100,000 / 0.004 = 25,000,000. So those two numbers indicate that there are 25 million online gamers in China. Further down in the same section, it states that there are about 30 million online gamers worldwide. So if we take those three numbers as accurate, 5/6 of the online gamers in the world are in China, and the remainder of the world has only a total of 5 million. Doesn't sound right. If we take the population of China to be 1.3 billion, then 25 million would be one in 52, or just under 2%. If we assume that that the proportions in the U.S. are the same as in China, then the U.S., with a population of 300 million, would have about 6 million online gamers. So that would mean that the U.S. must have a lower percentage of online gamers than China. I realize that these are all estimates, but there must be something wildly inaccurate about those figures. I would be much more inclined to believe that 100,000 is 4% of China's online gamers, or that there are 10,000 gold farmers accounting for 0.4%. Either way gives a figure of about 2.5 million online gamers in China, which is much more believable than 25 million. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 70.98.56.75 (talk • contribs) 16:45, 23 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Numbers for estimates of Chinese gamers/farmers do not work 

message: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/17/magazine/17lootfarmers-t.html?pagewanted=1
A useful resource.  --C S (Talk) 05:33, 17 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  NYT Magazine article "Life of a Chinese gold farmer" 

message: Pretty sure they just implemented them as other MMORPG's had them already, not because of some exclusive effect on gold farming. Although it may have an impact, it's not exactly exclusive. The more prominent and direct thing Blizzard did was take out a lawsuit against a gold farming website.Zelphi (talk) 11:27, 14 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  WoW guild banks 

message: The Game Economy Impact section is full of misinformation, misapplied economics terms, and shows very little understanding of economics in general. The use of quotes around bits of jargon and reference to "economic circles" are patronizing. The section should be deleted. Kevrhodes (talk) 18:47, 25 August 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Game economy impact section should be deleted 

message: Farming and gold farming is where a player of a game plays to generate virtual items / virtual currency.  Chinese Gold Farming (CGF), sometimes just "gold farmers", when refering to a specific player, is where farming is done for the sole purpose of real world profit and deserves recognition here and also on it's own page with a definition of its own.  It seems that a majority of this page is actual describing CGF and not the defined term in the opening section "gold farming," so maybe the latter section of this page should be cut and pasted into the CGF page.  I'll start that page and leave this opinion here incase it's not the majority.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Xetxo (talk • contribs) 21:07, 13 December 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  two terms, farming and Chinese farming 

message: Deleted advertising spam.SunSw0rd (talk) 15:44, 5 February 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Spam dot com 

message: I thought the stereotype was Korea?  Anyway, isn't this an encyclopedia?  I think this article would look more professional if it said, "in some Asian countries gold farming..."
Stereotypes don't belong in an encyclopedia, unless those stereotypes are examples in an article about stereotypes.
(Yeah I know you're not supposed to use the same word in a sentence; I don't know how to rephrase it).  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.204.193.48 (talk) 20:17, 11 July 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  In China? 

message: The phrase "Rich, developed countries....etc etc....developing Countries." Is 1) unneeded and 2) Politically incorrect. One cannot make a generalized stereotype like that, even though it may be true.   — Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.32.55.27 (talk) 16:59, 3 July 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Bias in the opening 

message: Game companies have changed their stance on gold farming; recent example includes Blizzard, which has included a real money trade system in their new game Diablo 3. You guys might want to research this and incorporate it into the article. http://www.gamesradar.com/diablo-iii-real-money-auction-house-announced-gold-farmers-stunned/
Tim  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.194.70.57 (talk) 14:09, 19 January 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  New Changes 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: As of two days ago or so, World of Warcraft can't be played in China. We should add some sort of info on how this has affected the gold farming industry, since Chinese gold farming constitutes a large portion of the gold farming market. Zeck (talk) 20:15, 24 January 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  WoW banned in China