"Nick Yee, an M.M.O. scholar based at Stanford, has noted the unsettling parallels (the recurrence of words like "vermin," "rats" and "extermination") between contemporary anti-gold-farmer rhetoric and 19th-century U.S. literature on immigrant Chinese laundry workers."

Malarkey like this is tedious, and invests figurative language with all too much false significance. Use a time-worn metaphor, and you end up the subject of a thinly disguised accusation of racism. It wouldn't matter if the gold farmers are Chinese or Europeans; "on the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." The opprobrium they earn has nothing to do with their race, and everything to do with the effect they have on the play of the game for others.

Obviously, this farmer was farming on a PvP server, where getting ganked by other players is always a possibility. It makes no difference that you got ganked right after a hard fight with a NPC enemy. On PvP servers everyone from the other faction is a legitimate target, everywhere, all the time. You can be killed while AfK. You can be killed while questing. You can be killed while gathering resources. You can be killed anywhere and everywhere.

If gold farmers are congregating in certain places to practice their trade, they're a legitimate target of a raid, just like the folks at Southshore and Tarren Mill. Organizing a raid to hunt and kill them is an act judged legitimate by the rules of the server they're on. They give HK points by the same rules as any other character.

We're asked by this piece to set the rules of those servers aside because these particular targets are poor oppressed people in Red China. If they aren't getting their rates adjusted by virtue of the nature of the server they're on, that's between them, their employers, and the government of the Worker's Paradise. I call shenanigans.

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