Monday, June 2

Goldspammers have feelings too

Due to the need the kill some time at work i spended some time viewing funny and shocking Wow chat screenshots on Wowbash until i came across this one:

taken from Wowbash

This made me think of an article i read a while ago, someone actually got to see where a goldfarmer worked and how his life was and this screeny made me remember it. Now i hate goldsellers.. it's the reason i got hacked in the first place, so seeing them spam their advertisements pisses me off. Not just because of the message itsself but because of the spam itsself aswell, i get pretty good at ignoring the general message but it pushes possible usefull info out of my screen.
The most annyoing thing is when they whisper you. For a while i used to whisper a goldseller something nasty, often just a simple GFY as it seemed it was often done while in the middle of a bossfight... as if they know. Nowadays i don't even bother with that, perhaps i am more relaxed myself but it's more that i don't expect a reaction anyway.
Ever noticed that level 1 toon in IF/Orgi standing always standing at the EXACT same spot? I didn't realise until i saw two of them spamming the same message and standing exactly on top of each other. Without a doubt they use a botprogram to spawn level 1 toons which get run to their final destination and then spam their gold selling ads for a while.

The above chat however showed that not all spammers are simply bots. By what the poster said the goldseller, lets call him Woo Ping for now, is seemingly hurt. And who wouldn't get a blow when everytime you do your job, as that is what it is for them, you get hatefull messages back in response.
I felt sorry all again for them all of the sudden. The guys we see grinding and spamming are just doing their jobs, not one i agree with but too be honest.. people like Woo don't have many alternatives.
In a way Woo is simply a slave, if he doesn't make his quota for the week he loses his job which will make sure he will not get anything to eat and neither will his 3 point 2 children or his wife. Perhaps he doesn't get beaten, perhaps he does.. but his life makes sure he got nowhere to go and has no other option then doing what his boss is telling him. A boss sitting behind a desk while in the next cramped, dark room is filled with computers and people trying to stay mental while sitting behind screens endlessly for days and days... doing what we most hate: grinding. Killing the same mob over and over and over and over again, at the end of the day trying to sell what he has gathered just so he can show his boss at the end of the shift he has made his quota and is worth to come back the next day.
Most of them luckily don't talk a word English or any other Western language but the rare one who does understands most of the insults aswell, make his live a little bit more hell then it already is.

I won't ever buy gold for sure, but i'll try to refrain myself from being rude to them from now on. In the end they are just people forced to do something we see as "bad", but they might not even be aware of our point of view on that. Either way they wouldn't be able to walk away from it like we can.

1 comment:

Carrie said...

I'll never forget the pet gold seller I had for a while.. I had started a troll warrior on a different server from my main, and I was questing in Durotar when I saw a level 1 orc go running by on the road with a name similar to the one in your screenshot.

I said to myself hm.. I bet I know where he's going! So I followed him, and sure enough, he stopped right outside the bank in Orgrimmar and started putting a message in /say about selling gold. It just tickled me that I actually caught him on the way there, instead of just seeing him sitting there as I passed by.