Chinese Government to ban gold farming

[Lbelle]

While this may belong in the gaming section, I think that it can relate to general news as well. I also looked in the gaming and wow sections to see if there was already a thread, so sorry if this has already been brought up. I took a lot of info in this post from wow.com, so any info is being pulled from there.

I think that this is going to be a serious issue in China if the law goes as intended. Basically, this ruling reaches farther than just gold farming, though...it also bans the sale of prepaid time cards for MMOs or other online games, as well as numerous technicalities we're sure to hear about in the weeks to come.

Development Informatics Working Paper No. 32 - Current Analysis and Future Research Agenda on "Gold Farming": Real-World Production in Developing Countries for the Virtual Economies of Online Games (School of Environment and Development - The Univers

This site says that in China,

gold farming alone generates nearly one billion dollars a year worldwide, with China's specific numbers growing at a reported rate of 20% per year. It's estimated that 80 to 85 percent of gold farmers reside in China, so this ruling is massive and, to be frank, pretty troubling.

What do you all think? I know many of you are FFXI players as well as WoW players and I know that sites like this sell gil as well. This could have a relatively extreme impact on our games, don't you think?

[Correction]

Piracy of intellectual property is also illegal in China.

Don't mean shit.

[Pirian]

Was posted in advanced a while ago

edit: http://www.bluegartr.com/forum/77457...-bans-rmt.html here

[Souj]

blah ignore this. to that othjer thread I go!

[Lbelle]

Ah, I don't venture into that section. Thanks