encounters of the borg kind.

edit: my oh my oh my. i just came across this post about chinese gold farmers, courtesy of vaskor (thank you so much. that's an amazing resource) and it does lend a whole deeper dimension to things. what i talked about further down is nothing compared to what those people in that post face. they've got so much more reason to macro, to real world trade than i would have, at home.

hmm. got two of them, really, if you'd like to put it that way.

a definition might be a good way to start off, even though i'm not quite competent as far as defining things go. a borg is for the most part a macro, but supervised by human beings. so it will respond sometimes to randoms or whatever comes its way, and will, as it follows, talk.

which it did. finally, i hear.

mind you, they really have a dirty mouth on them.

another definition, but not so much definition as putting things in context. in chinese culture, which i see enough of in the local chinese community, some things are particularly important. or more so than in, say, western culture, for example. what matters most, i guess, would be face. not losing face, and allowing another not to is what governs more actions that it should. then there's respect for your elders.

incorporate those two, first, into the big wide world of insults, and it'll stand to reason that insults aimed at your mother have a considerably wider scope, they'd even insult your ancestors. of course, there's never a shortage of lewd comments, either.

so to cut straight to the point. received insults from a borg the other day. i refrain from saying macro since no macro programmer's stupid enough to have a macro spouting this kind of language. there'd be a minor war in the way of foreign language insults over at the yews, and a gigantic backlash against, well, whoever falls into the right category. racial discrimination isn't dead. a fair share of it's directed at the chinese. (thanks alot jagex, for stating actual countries on your news update. next time remember not to mention that 'all macros are east asian, for example chinese and korean' = 'all east asian, for example, chinese and korean players are macros'.)

not that it's not unheard of, i've heard about things like this often enough that i've actually been wanting to come across a macro that was actually a borg, instead. let's just say there were things about female anatomy and fornication with respect to my ancestors.

besides tossing you a medley that would have itself called emotions (namely, urge to laugh at an inanimate object, suitable outrage, confusion resulting from too-quick elimation of what to say in response...), it does remind you - macros aren't just macros. they're run by human beings.

which brings me to my second encounter.

it's just a matter of time before the keywords "macro", "bot" and/or "autoer" come up in talk by any major body of water. willows and fish, after all, are about the most sought-after commodities, whether it's in the the bot or legitimate trade.

what's rare though, at least on f2p servers, is to find someone actually defending them. or rather, the people behind the bots. i've heard stories about failed green dragon bot pking trips because of mage pures or other players standing there guarding the borgs.

why, i realised at the back of my mind. it's like how to say the capital of indonesia in chinese. you don't consciously think about it, but when you need to dig it up, it's there. thing was, i never did need to dig that up. until that particular conversation.

that bots, real world trading, macroing, autoers - that all of that's baaad is common knowledge. it's like one a fundamental truth of the rs universe. you don't think about it because you don't need to.

what you don't think about is why. what you don't think about is the people.

i wonder what they think of us?

the argument goes like this. for all intents and purposes, the real world traders are just doing their jobs. they're just trying to make a living in some backwater of a less-developed country, and they're just making the most of opportunities they have. it's their livelihood. why is jagex taking it away from them?

that, in less words, was what was parroted off to me.

oh, and to clear things up. i am not trying to say that this is true. i am not saying that all macros are chinese, a large enough proportion are and i'm dealing with that fact. it's a fact, yes. i am not being racist. i am chinese. or i'm more than half chinese, anyway, and on my birth cert my race is chinese.

we rant on about them, we say we hate macros. we go around all self-righteous, criticising people we've never met and probably never will have cause to. it's rather pathetic, really. if you think about it, there are more important things to rant on about. what's going on in the rest of the world, for example. what's going on that could've led to the people who do macro do what they do. live doing what they do.

they have good cause to hate us, and i do suppose they do. mods, most of all.

ah suck.

perhaps they think, when they see the average player, going about their chosen tasks ignoring the macros, or standing there obviously reporting them, or prancing about showing off rares and equipment they know is worthless because they have plenty of - perhaps they despise us for trying to destroy their jobs. perhaps it goes deeper than that.

when they look at the average player, do they see only a rich white kid, a kid who funds them?

is it the way you feel when you give tuition, and get to see how other people live? is it the way you feel when you bus tables at a restauraunt and see, really, what kind of people keep you in school?

it's not so much hatred. you can't bring yourself to hate them. and you hate that feeling, too.

i'm not saying this is true, i'm just speculating. we were a colony once, and the white man's superiority thing still persists slightly. it manifests in cussing more than you normally would at caucasian drivers who cut into your lane. things like that. stereotypes persist. a caucasian will get a taxi faster than a local, because the driver assumes he tips more.

it's not tangible, but it doesn't make it any less real.

strangely enough though, you still can't hate people for things like that. you admire them, in a way you don't want to. you tell yourself you resent them, but you don't, really, and these things just never come to mind.

that's what it's like here. i don't think about all that when i talk to the random person on rs for the simple reason that it's not imaginable. i don't want to try either, and when i do, well, it's just another person. it's not that i can't be friends with any person i meet, i do and i can. when you get to know a person, you also know that person's human. no different from anyone else.

in real life it's not so easy, the first time you see the person you do see things you shouldn't. you assume things you shouldn't. the great thing about rs is that what you see is the person's character. the face doesn't matter, and when you do think about what you would have said had you met the person in real life instead, you'll realise it doesn't make a difference. you don't need to consciously stow away your stereotypes, which are terrible things. putting people on a pedestal never works very well, and with all the begging, scamming, cybering, and general nastiness that goes on in rs... give me macroing any day.

that's just my opinion, by the way. feel free to disagree. and again, bearing in mind how sensitive people are, i am not being racist.

seeing as this is how enough of us think here, i wonder if the people behind the macros think the same thing. whether that's at the back of their minds, the same way it is at the back of ours as you go about your life.

i sincerely hope not.

then again, the chinese are highly pragmatic. perhaps all the hate is about mods and maybe players, is purely economic.

it's a sad, sad day when money's the cause for hating.

but it's an even sadder day when it's about race, and perceived image most of all.

so let's not think anymore, and just hope.

edit: can't believe i forgot this. before you go all outraged on me, i'm not saying macroing is right. go on youtube and you'll see the number of videos uploaded about jmods. people stand there for hours playing and editing videos just so they can catch a glimpse of a golden crown.

i don't know whether to feel sorry for them or feel guilty.

whenever jmods come ingame, it's MOD hulme. MOD hohbien. MOD conor. MOD emilee. MOD simon c. MOD tobias. MOD tobes... i've seen conor and mat the most, and even then i can't just ignore that fact. even when they're joking around, that MOD doesn't go away. sometimes it's hard to imagine they could actually be real people.

real people with real jobs with real families and real lives.

you could say, jagex is their livelihood.

and macros are destroying that. macroing and real world trading is stealing. after all, it's jagex's resouces.

just because you choose to steal rather than to work a proper job doesn't make stealing right.

people who macro have a choice.

i cannot respect them for the simple fact that they cannot respect others enough to think about them. the jmods have homes to go to and whose upkeep their jobs pay for. real world traders are merely riding on what they did create.

i could be macroing now, y'know. i could have chosen to do that, or fall in with people who do that, rather than play the game.

there's always a choice.

when you choose to steal from people and take away what's rightfully theirs', as those who macro do... you can't try to shy away from the consequences.