An Office Lunch Adventure

My company asked me today to join them for lunch, they were having a potential customer over and needed to have employees available to have a meet and greet kind of thing. As I shook hands with the first two guys I realized that my gamer senses were tingling. I detected a gamer presence in the second one, don't know why, but I did.

As the lunch progressed, I listened to him talk and he mentioned he was a World of Warcraft player. Realizing that I could make significant advances in the relations with our potential customer at this point, I waited for my turn to show my Gamer badge and engage in a conversation. Sadly things took a turn south:

"I make a lot of money on that game, you can sell your accounts, and even the gold on there that you earn by playing. I make a fortune playing World of Warcraft." ~ Guy at Jimbob's lunch named Jason

As the words left his lips I realized that my Gamer badge would not be presented. Sadly, the promise of a customer gamer was thwarted by the fact that he was a fucking Gold Farmer.

Gamers come in all forms. All races, creeds, ages, definately shapes and sizes. But all gamers generally have a nemisis player type for the games they play. In D&D it's the power gamer. In Magic it's the one trick pony card player. In Baseball it's the steroid user. Every game has it's devil. In World of Warcraft, it is the gold farmer.

Gold Farmers are the ones playing to earn real world money from the game. Things like this result in the cost of Blue items going to riduclously high values on the auction house, getting spam in your game mail and general chat, having to deal with players that while playing a level 60 Warlock, keep asking, "Why 'curse of recklessness', what does that do?" Gold Farmers are to WoW players as Crack Dealers are to folks in Drug Rehab. You know you have to say no, you want to say no, but the need seems too great to overcome. Like clean folks to Crack Dealers, straight up gamers view the Gold farmers as assholes, and seek to wipe them from the earth.

There I sat, across the table from an in the flesh gold farmer, powerless to pwn him like the noob that he was. I went directly back to my desk and began writing this. The events of the past hour still in my mind. The farmer still down the hall, and I can do nothing.