I agree that the practice needs to stop-- it destroys the games for legit players via griefing, inflation, etc.-- but I'm rather offended at the sweeping generalizations about gamers.

Xzero, the generalization is not towards gamers. It's towards Gold farmers. And he IS right though. Those people do need to get a life. And I'm not talking about the ones who only do it sometimes, I'm talking about the hardcore gold farmers.

@JB

And on his way to and from the mill, he had to walk uphill in both directions.

Koichan:

"I cannot work out why the recent political trend is to attempt to legalise things that allready exist :/"

Perception. Purely for political recognition or fame, with which it brings greater power or money respectively. Why do you think Jack is in all of this? Because he cares so much about the child gamers he affectionately compares to nazis? Nope, it is all about getting money to feed his own chest-bursters. This guy just wants a nice soundbite however, which, whether or not people agree, they will get to hear his name and associate it with something.

Now, now. Remember, this is the same country that is trying to regulate reincarnation.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20227400/site/newsweek/

One of these days you're going to hear some idiot come up with a law he wants to have put in place where if you kill another person, in a video game, you get a life sentence in jail or the death penalty.

People may not like my response here however I feel that something needs to be pointed out.

Gold farming would not be at all successfull if there wasn't a market for it. I play WoW however I have never once purchased gold or anything at all for my character - my character really does suck - but I still enjoy playing the game. I willingly choose not to purchase any virtual gold and earn gold/items on my own.

However this is not the case for everyone - there are 10000's of players on servers who want to have the best/be the best without actually earning it. For this reason the gold farming market exists. Lazy people who want the best without earning it.

Banning this will not change anything because we all know that a ban already exists in WoW terms of service. Anyone that sells virtual gold/levels an account with a bot can have their account revoked - however the process still happens. For every single person caught by Blizzard - 10 more start up. The reason the market is huge. The people who want gold will buy it and nothing - no legislation/bans from the people making the game will change that market. For all that want it changed - stop buying the gold and items in the auction house. Earn what you have for your character - farm it yourself - dont want to farm it yourself - then the market will exist.

All this hate towards gold farmers when its a legitimate trade equivalent to information gathering for money with the small exception the gathered info is game data/gold.I myself occasionally sell off excess gold to put a few pennies in my paypal account to pay for my army of robot ducks(not really but you have to admit that would be cool)and it seems the Chinese government wants these gold farmers out of the way not for some fact that it maybe be unmoral but the fact that some of these gold farmers have income that rivals that of the countries leaders.

example:
A person by the name of sunfire(can't remember the real name)reportedly made over 6 million dollars in 1 year selling Final Fantasy 11 gil now take in the fact that she lived in the rural parts of china where the average income barely spikes at 1-2k USD,now take the fact that 1 us dollar is the equivalent of 4-8 china dollars and you have a woman walking around 36 million to 48 million in cash,quite a bit of lobbying power if she plays her bribes correctly.

This is what the Chinese government fears ordinary folks with nearly the resources to buy a army or bribe many high ranking official.The money is mostly untraceable and when they make that much they can force change in a corrupt governmental system or move and screw over their local economy of their hard earned cash.

Hate goldfarmers all you want but its a decent living for them when compared with the typical real farming/be the states bitch so prevalent in Chinese society.

I really think other posters here should get over the crappy misconceptions about why they do what they do and actually stop playing the stereotype card on them all the time.

ps:some people are casual and don't have alot of time to play:thats where the true market lies
ps2:this is the Chinese government we are talking about,when don't they try and squash human rights/free enterprise?

"Youths addicted to online games have found ways to earn their living, by slaving away - often literally - quarrying, scalping and even stealing the virtual equipment of the games. These are precious and costly - in real or virtual terms - weapons, rank, robes and accessories…"
and yet tis "ok" for industry to do it....

"Being indignant at such crimes, I also feel sorry for those criminals. Many of them are even more wretched victims, of the unconstrained online game business, than legitimate users and players…"

See above LOL

"Numb and dull in real life, over-excited in virtual fights, who could make better slaves for this postmodern industry, whose motto is to turn persons into batteries for the matrix, to squeeze the real world for the sake of the virtual one?"
more underground than china? more numb and dull than the government wants it sheeple to be?

Ya ever think that maybe you can't control every facet of their lives.....besides if famrers pay taxes then why is the goverment complaining?

Ok, slow down there guys. Just because they're chinese, I don't think they're talking about gold farming for RMT in the standard pay-to-play mmo environment in that article, like many of you are assuming. If I recall correctly, the largest online games in China are F2P (Free to Play) mmogs, where the user has the option to purchase online 'vanity' items using real world cash in a virtual game store.

This system of payment is gaining in popularity over here in the west only recently (a few games just switched over to this method. See 'Sword of the New World' for example), but has been going HUGE in asia for many years, and the companies who run these games are making vast amounts of money.

Not only is this a clear cut case of generational divide, where the older generation doesn't (or refuses to) understand the younger. But, the Chinese government seems to have caught on to this and has made a point of "investigating" these companies (I assume they want a cut of the income), and as many of the media outlets in China are controlled directly by the Chinese government, these companies are often under constant media scrutiny and anti-gaming propaganda. The Tencent QQ being one of the first that they cracked down on. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QQ ) I'm pretty sure that the article linked is a perfect example of that.

The moment virtual items have real monetary value, all sorts of Bad Things happen - most of which prevent the game from being a game. If I kill you in game and steal your stuff, it's a game. Unless you paid $1000 for the gold to buy those items, then lawyers would love to get involved and argue you actually stole. While it's quite a stretch, jailtime is possible. Don't think it can happen? Look at second life (although I'm not sure I'd call that a 'game' anyway). The last thing I saw posted was some "banks" failed ingame because they were scams... people supposedly lost $10,000+. That's illegal in the real world.. it may be there too, since the currency has real value.

And the flip side - if you get some super-rare item that's worth alot, would you need to report it on your taxes? The gov't already taxes you on potential earnings so it wouldn't matter if you "cashed out" into the real world or not. Look what happened to the guy who caught Bonds' baseball!

Games need to remain games, its what makes them fun. It's NOT real. The moment you tie it to something real, the lawyers will be all over it. I'd make a Jack Thompson comment, but I bet he'd agree - the last thing his ego wants is competition in his area of.. *cough*.. expertise, and we already know real lawyers shred his cases.

China, the place that so many politions here want the US to become.

Where safty controls no longer are in place (apperently) and anything they can, they will ban.

(can = dont like)

So this is talking about selling or buying virtual stuff with real-world money?

In a few MMORPGs, its already against the rules, and you'll get banned rather fast...(i'm not sure if any of you play RuneScape)

but what about Second Life?

@chadachada

Refer to my earlier post, heh.

depending on game gold farmers don't really inflate the market as much as people would think world of warcraft has million of players yet its economic index jumps from 7-11 randomly depending on how well guilds do in terms of epics drops from arcimonde,illidan and keal'theas.Even then most of the good items int he game are bind on pickup so gold is only useful if you want to twink out early on,later its just there for alts.

Think about it gold farmers are only moving money around in a economy and not generating it themselves(unless you count quests and vendor trash but those are really low value and normal players bring in just as much anyhow).

on the other side you have MMOs like FFXI where the inflation is because the goldfarmers have 30+ taru army bot camping behemoth/despot/other nms 24/7 and monopolize certain items to drive the price through the roof.
SE has recently started banning for monster monopolization which is bs seeing as the games meant to be teamwork and legitimate non-RMT guilds are getting the axe because they are good and not because they are RMT.

Depending on game goldfarming can be suck hardcore or just be the most minor of annoyances,then again I farm gold myself so I guess that makes me evil and who listens to us morally corrupt people anyways :p.

Frankly the underground sale of virtual goods destroyes MMOs. These generalizations were made about gold farmers, not gamers. Keep in mind that a gold farmer (a person who hunts for the virtual goods to be sold) is not a gamer. They aren't playing to enjoy the game, but to profit from it.

Gamers are people who play games for their entertainment value, not financial value.

Well....that's the current government of China for you.

There has been a long-running state sponsored villainization of gamers in China. More than anything we've seen here in the west.

Life is pretty hard in the more populous places around southeast Asia. Crowded...it's hard to own a house big enough to really have a gaming rig of your own. One result is that Internet Cafe's are a lot more popular there than here...and taken to a different extreme (you can get a room, a comforter, and a shower...) ostensibly for the 'business worker who missed his train'.

In most Asian countries, I don't get the feeling that we hear a lot of that kind of villainization from the government (although Japan's government is doing a study on the cafe's for health reasons, it's a very neutral position; they're concerned about people who live out of cafe's, not out to shut them down).

But there's something dangerous happening in China. People, adults even, are visiting the Internet Cafe's. They're spending their evenings there playing games...RTS, FPS, whatever. And inbetween matches?

They're sitting and drinking a coffee...and noticing other folks who are there often...and they're talking to each other.

Eventually, they talk about politics.

And they don't always tell each other that they're happy with everything the party has done.

So every story about a couple that left their child at home (pretty dumb) to go to a cafe' gets blown out of proportion in the news, painting them as a pair of outright villains and social enemies, then extending the paintbrush to anyone else at the cafe'. Every single story gets stretched to its seams. Some guy was doing an all nighter on the counterstrike and had a heart attack after drinking too much red bull. National headline news.

So no, that's not really how gamers are seen in China, GP. That's how the party sees them, and therefore how they are supposed to be seen, but not in fact how they are seen.

Here's some food for thought.
I recently had my credit card number stolen and used by some S**T head people playing WoW. It probably got caught in one of those data breaches that happened during the last year or two.
I now have to worry for god knows how long about Identity theft and a whole host of other problems that go along with it.
All because some F**K wanted to do some gold farming in that game.
That is why any kind of gold farming or selling of virtual items in games like WoW needs to be made illegal.
It fosters criminal activity. You would have to be an idiot to think that no one is getting hurt by it.

I still think this is good news. Never liked those gold farmers...

Considering that nearly every online multiplayer game in existence (notable exception of Second Life) explicitly bans gold farming, I can't say I'd be too sad if the Chinese government cracked down on it. I don't think that government should be legislating things like that at all, but hey, Beijing's done worse than this.

A perfectly legitimate law. MMORPGs must be regulated and this is a good beginning. If you think about it, an MMORPG is a separate world in itself. A small one but a world still. How come one entity, the company is to be the lawmaker, prosecutor, judge and executioner all in one? Ever considered it unfair that there is no trial, no way to defend yourself? Nobody you may turn to, appeal to a higher instance?

Let's face it, the game developers make it clear - We are not only the Law, We Are God. We may do whatever we like, whenever we like. You print and agree to the ToS and can wipe your ass with it afterwards as, unlike you, we don't give sh|t about that paper and can change it without asking or even informing -anyone-.

As for the Gov't helping catch gold farmers - yes. The virtual world of MMORPGs is rapidly leaving it's old definition behind - today virtual money can be exchanged for real quite legitimately, and the MMO game world becomes no less virtual than the stock market or cyber-terrorism.

[...] [Via GamePolitics] [...]