Discrimination Surfaces in World of Warcraft
One of the largest online computer games in the world seems to have its own real world problems.
Halifax, NS (PRWEB) January 14, 2006 -- Non English speaking gamers are claiming racial discrimination in the hugely popular World of Warcraft video game. World of Warcraft is classified as a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game and is an online computer role-playing game in which a large number of players from around the world can interact together or against one another in the same game at the same time. At last count Blizzard the developers of World of Warcraft stated they had 5 million active monthly subscribers.
The complaints are being posted to forums on the popular Tales of Warcraft website. This is a chinese language World of Warcraft fan web site set up for chinese players. They state they have over one hundred thousand registered users. The post involving the claim of discrimination has grown to over 7,000 replies claiming similar experiences.
As part of the game play for World of Warcraft players are required to form groups of 5 or more to be able to finish certain levels of the game. Now if you have a number of friends who also play World of Warcraft you can make arrangements to meet up in the game to complete these required group tasks. For all others players they will need to build groups by using the games message system where they can send a request out to fellow players to form or join a group of players for a certain task.
There is a common belief among English speaking players in World of Warcraft that most non English speaking players are gold farmers. This is a type of player who is only playing the game to profit, not for the “love of the game.” Gold Farmers are largely despised by players who feel they take away a certain purity of the game.
To combat gold farmers, players are requesting anybody who wants to join a group to type one or two lines of English. If the sentences or grammar are not proper English these players are rejected from joining this group. This is what is creating the backlash among non-English speaking players with feel they are being discriminated against based on their language.
Mark MacKay an avid World of Warcraft player and owner of World of Warcraft Gold Price List Guide web site said this language bias makes no sense when you look at the statistics. He refers to Blizzards statistic that over 1.5 million World of Warcraft players are from China alone, with the majority of these players being non-English. While their has been recent publicity about the gold farm factories in China, it by no means justifies thinking that every Chinese or non-English speaking player is a gold farmer.
Mark states that he does not know how to stop this racial discrimination, but believes if people could just try to keep a more open mind and trust people a little more; this would go along way to bring some racial harmony to World of Warcraft and the World in general.
Your can read more about the latest developments on this story and other issues related to World of Warcraft at Mark's web site http://www.world-of-warcraft-gold.com
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