The BBC On RMT

Real Money Transfer (RMT) is a contentious subject among MMOG players, but not something usually addressed by major news organizations. Joystiq has up a post on the BBC's coverage of gold farming in World of Warcraft , with a reporter 'live from Ironforge' addressing the issue. "The BBC has taken a straight look at Chinese gold farmers in the World of Warcraft. We'd fear for our own jobs when MSM begin competently portraying game news — thankfully, gold farming is old news and has already been well documented in the last two years, so we feel relatively safe. The piece takes a look at your typical Chinese gold farming operation, with some nifty use of green-screen by the reporter being magically teleported into the game. At least it wasn't another WoW game addiction piece."

Comments

Re:Notice: Video Link

[dougmc]

Personally I'd like to see only videos with transcripts posted on slashdot, but probably that's just me.

That would be nice. Though in this case, what set this story apart was not really the story itself (it's nothing we didn't already know) but the green screen work that Zonk mentioned. It's kinda cute seeing the reporter walking around in the WoW world -- clever. I'm surprised I haven't seem more reporters doing that.

On the plus side, at least it's a video type that plays easily under Linux (x86, granted. And only with a 32 bit browser, blech.) The flash video players really have taken the world by storm -- even msnbc.com uses them now, and now I can even see their movies without switching computers.