Gold Farming Not Banned
An article was passed to me yesterday about gold farming being banned in China and being that I work in this industry it would be a very bad thing to happen. Most of the farming in the world for gold sellers is done by China, so if it becomes illegal and there is no supply we are going to have issues until the farming offices are moved elsewhere. You can see the article in question over at InformationWeek authored by some fellow named Thomas Claburn that seems to want to bring attention to himself. If you check his source over at the China Ministry of Commerce website there is no actual reference to gold farmers and/or sellers.
This law is actually related to how QQ coins were used to gamble and purchase real world goods, not how they are farming gold on Online games and selling it for real world currency. The writer of this article seems to have taken the version from China and modified it for appeal instead of accuracy. While some companies have heard about this addition to China law and feared how it might affect their business, there really seems to be nothing to worry about at the moment. Not to mention the concept seems kind of silly considering the large amount of people in China that are employed to farm and how they would rather tax it heavily instead of killing the industry.
In any case the comments for the post were pretty amusing and one involved calling gold sellers scum, then suggested that buyer’s should be shunned. I think the large amount of military employees that play MMO’s and buy gold would disagree. If anything they could be the postermen & women of why gold selling works and how the game designs are flawed. Those who shun buyers need to understand that if you had 4 hours to play a week and you needed 5k gold for a mount, how are you going to enjoy the “GAME” when all you do is farm for weeks? Of course that’s a completely different topic and I won’t go into it now…