Slowly ruining your gaming experience, one click at a time.

Figured that title would get your attention.

As an avid gamer, there is a pretty good chance you’ve at least spent a day or two with the online gaming sensation that is World of Warcraft.  There were some major announcements over the last few days in the World of Warcraft universe that will impact not only your life, but the entire Chinese economy!

Not sure where I’m going with this?  Raid with me into the jump!

In what originally began as a cracking down on internet pornography by the Chinese government, the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Chinese Ministry of Commerce released a press statement Friday claiming they were declaring war on the unregulated and underground virtual currency industry.  This declaration is cited to affect almost 300 million Chinese internet users, as well as those countries involved in gold selling.  While this was considered back in 2006-2007 by Korea, it proved itself an impossible task to actually enforce.

What is virtual currency? For those of you who have played the game, or any MMORPG for that matter, you may have heard that of individuals taking advantage of the selling of “virtual real estate”, where players would take characters or items from in game and then sell them on eBay for ludicrous amounts of money.  This virtual market has exploded onto the scene in Warcraft, where players would grind out kills then turn around and sell the gold in bulk.

According to a Univeristy of Manchester survey, 80-85% of these individuals selling Warcraft gold are based in China, hence the unflattering-but-well-known term “Chinese Gold Farmer”.  Laugh if you want, but these leeches are pulling down between 200 million and one billion dollars a year (that’s right, dollars).  That’s no chump change.

Of course, the real question is how can the Chinese Government effectively police and enforce such a ‘ban’ on an industry that is almost totally underground?  Western journalists were concerned about the Chinese governments bending of civil liberties during the Olympics last year when certain anti-Chinese sites mysteriously were blocked to Western journalists while they were in Beijing.  So what kind of hoops will the government have to jump through to go after these people?

Personally, I’m all for it.  Well, not the human rights abuse, torture and imprisonment, but I understand the arguments on both sides:

Pro gold farming: Gold farming helps those people who don’t have the time or energy to grind out hours of time to keep players caught up with their fellow guildmates.  Take a hypothetical jet setting business executive who travels around the world during the week, and likes to do nothing but kick back and play World of Warcraft on the weekend.  While his 23 year old unemployed guild leader who lives in his mother’s house may have 60 hours to devote “for the Horde”, he does not.  If an individual spends the time and energy doing something in game and wants to “trade” it to another person, it’s their prerogative.  Numbers indicate that almost 25% of all accounts are involved in this kind of activity, and Mythic’s Warhammer Online anti-gold farming measures are hurting its subscription base.

Anti gold farming: They’re driving up the prices of everything in game by dumping tons of purchased gold into the virtual economy, forcing honest players to work double time to keep up.  Blizzard passively frowns against the practice, and this is a violation of their terms of agreement.  Their god damn spam in my chat box is annoying.

China’s got the right of it, but without committing major civil rights abuses (which they have shown they are willing to do), they are going to find it very difficult to enforce.

It just goes back to the “everything in moderation” argument.  Back when email was still new and cute, every once and awhile, you would get an unsolicited email trying to sell you on a new porn site or a time share in the Bahamas.  Now a days, email is nearly unusable without heavy spam filtering…unless of course you’re into getting dozens of messages an hour talking about Viagra and Nigerian bank scams.  Gold farming is the same way, and we’re seeing this market grow nearly 20% every year if the report numbers are accurate.  Without some form of regulation, gold farming is the next major “spam” and without some kind of in-game filter, online MMORPGs are going to be in serious trouble.

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