Chinese?

[Nixi]

Mikeb was right on with the the translations.

The person messaging you was obviously typing Chinese of the Mandarin variety. You were both using PinYin (??), which is the official romanization of "common" Chinese in the Mainland.

1) Why would a legitimate player that speaks chinese play on American realms? Its a lot more expensive for one, and the language barrier in a game thats supposed to be social seems a bit silly to me.
2) If it was an illigitimate player (gold farmer) why would they make contact with you? They are normally bots with like 1 guy running 20+ PCs. Unless he/she was doing a little R&D or something?

I'm on the other side of this issue. I'm an American playing on Chinese servers. The game is fun in and of itself, and there are quite possibly many gamers playing on US/EU realms that have crap for English. My Chinese is abysmal, yet I can still get by playing the game in Chinese. I don't talk much to other players, but I study the raid encounters on English sites and then play my 'expected' role to the best I can. After discovering multi-boxing the game has been a bit more fun, because now i'm not forced to deal with stupid PUGs when I'm doing 5 mans. It's so hard to be a group leader when you can barely communicate with your groupmates.

Playing WOW in China has a different pay structure than the US. It can actually be MORE expensive depending on how much you play. I pay around 27 RMB ($3.55) for 4000 minutes of gametime. You'd have to play quite a lot in order to spend more than you would in US servers, but it's still very possible for a WOW addict.

I have a strong feeling that most farmers aren't 1 guy running 20 accounts. Don't let your imagination take over when thinking about how the farmers operate. I've never seen a gold farming operation during my time here, but I've asked some co-workers about what they are like. It's probably just a half a dozen people in a rented office/room with 6 to 8 pcs jammed inside with the workers working 12 hour days and sleeping upstairs. Something very common for many industries here. When I first started working in China I worked 12+ hour days and slept at the office after 16 + hour days. I work in a Chinese company.

We have a whole Chinese guild on our server <CHN> @ EU-Boulderfist, they are mostly Chinese students studying in the UK or other EU country, very few of them are actually playing from China or any other Asian country for that matter. They are a top end raiding guild, so they couldnt be further from the "Chinese farmer" category. Lot of them speaks English on a decent level and you can play with them sometimes even better than with other pugs. Only thing is annoying when they start to speak with each other and all you see in the chat is ? instead of any kind of latter or punctuation.

The reason you see the question marks is probably because they installed Chinese fonts into there WOW folder, OR they are using the Chinese game client to play. This forum probably wouldn't tolarate step by step instructions on how to use one game client to play in another country, but it's possible. It's quite possible to be anywhere in the world and play on any server in the world. You just need someone's account.