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China Bans Gold Farming
InformationWeek is reporting that the Chinese government has declared a ban on the sale of virtual goods for real currency. This move is poised to shut down a several billion yuan a year business that has been growing by leaps and bounds every year. "The trading of virtual currency for real cash employs hundreds of thousands of people worldwide and generates between $200 million and $1 billion annually, according to a 2008 survey conducted by Richard Heeks at the University of Manchester. He estimates that between 80% and 85% of gold farmers are based in China. [...] Game companies typically forbid gold farming but committed virtual currency traders find ways around such rules. Some game companies have recognized the futility of trying to ban the practice and have built virtual commerce into their game infrastructure."
So let me get this right, China bans a highly profitable industry from operating in China that no doubt brings in lots of revenue in the Chinese government or at the very least prevents people from having to work directly for the Chinese government. Sound really smart. While your at it why not ban the production of shoes, hard drives and cheap kids toys, it would have about the same effect.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
It would not be a pleasant job, even if you got the same wage you do now. Your bosses will constantly be pushing you to maximize your per hourly gold yield. And most likely you would be running several computers at once and using various hacks, working like a dog. Any semblance of it being a fun game would be completely gone, replaced by simple drudgery.
I'd rather do straight data entry typing than be a gold farmer...
If this is just another instance where the farmers just have to bribe the cops to look the other way, this "ban" will amount to nothing more than a PR stunt.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
And suddenly thousands of Indian techies have opened Warcraft accounts.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
It's not illegal to make Gold.
It's not illegal to Give Gold.
It's not illegal to Give real Money to someone else.
But somewhere along the way, selling Gold online becomes illegal. Wheras stating the transaction as a two-way donation easily bypasses the law.
Also - the big question - why would this become illegal? People do what they want with their money. If Blizzard was smart - they'd offer Gold at a price matching the market and get a cut on this. They've already ruined WoW four times over. Anyone who's played since the beginning can tell you how much more enjoyable it used to be.
Gold farmers also increase the amount of subscriptions that the game has, more money going into the developers... I don't get why they fight it so much.
To me - its the worst business logic I've ever come across, and games that have these microtransactions already involved will be the ones who come out on top.
Personally, I'm quite happy when oppressive people with power tighten their grip. It follows the law of tension: the harder it's wound, the more likely it is to snap.
Normally I would agree with you. But as a kid I watched tanks clear a square in China. As a result of this, the Red Cross would later report twenty five hundred people dead with seven to ten thousand wounded. The same government that dealt with those protests in that way is still in power today, twenty years later.
If that didn't do it, I don't see banning gold farming and regulating the internet doing it. The Chinese government is a new kind of oppression that has survived many attempts to move in the opposite direction. It must be a decision made simultaneously by billions of people to change this. If you're sitting their waiting for that tension to snap, you may be waiting a lot longer than you think.
My work here is dung.
This is still a hundred times better than working on a farm for a living. Life is hard in rural areas, and making any kind of living outside of farming is a huge step up from what your parents likely did. Even if the work is hard and demanding by our standards, people in the 'first world' live decadent soft lives that don't know what a real lifetime of work would look like if it slapped us in the face.
One reason might be that building an industry that is entirely reliant on the whims of a foreign company could leave them holding the bag for thousands of idiots who thought they had a job.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Get with the time. Now there is a massive Chinese middle class that have more than enough food, and are trying to figure out what to spend their money on.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/8113149.stm
Farming gold isn't what most players find fun about MMO's, hence peoples willingness to pay for it.
Your average MMO player has a choice of activities. To use WoW as an example, you can do quests, you can run instances, you can do battle grounds, do some world PVP, level an alt, do silly seasonal quests, etc. As a gold farmer, you do one and only one thing... farm the most valuable items out there. You don't have the opportunity to do anything else, because doing anything else is a waste of time and isn't what you are getting paid for.
I suspect that the article is actually blowing out of proportion the MMO currency trading side of things. A quick googling shows that evidently gambling is illegal in china and the government has gone to lengths to crack down on it:
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/China_steps_up_anti-gambling_campaign
If :
A) MMO currency trading is not a notable contributor to China's GDP
B) Virtual currency makes bypassing gambling restrictions easier
C) China is genuinely interested in curbing gambling
It sounds to me like banning on-line currency trading is a no-brainer as it will criminalize the entry point people would use to get around local gambling restrictions. Any problem with MMO currency trading is purely incidental.
And I doubt China cares about the cost the rest of the world pays for [Titansteel Bar]s on the auction house..
I was having breakfast in Idaho City, Idaho around the time the Chinese government put down the Tianenmen Square protests. I overheard a guy at a nearby table say, "This wouldn't have happened if the Chinese were armed, I tell ya." I nearly laughed out loud, but I took a moment to really think about what he said. For the first time in my life, I understood the Second Amendment to the US Constitution.
The First Amendment is the first line of defense; the Second Amendment is the last.
You do realized that the Chinese government used tanks right? Small arms (the kind of guns allowed in the US) cannot stop a tank.
Guns didnt help Jews, Poles, Gypsies, in WWII. An AK in every home didnt stop Sadaam from oppressing his own people. Its funny how people think a handgun or rifle works against a mechanized division.
When labor is that cheap, it's probably more effective to hire additional workers than it is to squeeze every last drop out of the ones you have.
Spoken like a man who's never had a truly crappy job. Squeezing every last drop out of your workers is its own reward. I knew a restaurant manager once who stole tips off the servers' tables "just to remind everyone who the big dog is." I knew a lawyer who refused to pay his staff a living wage or work them less than 60 hours a week "so they won't have time to go find another job." Hell, even John McCain refused to honor our commitment to pay for our soldier's college expenses because, and I'm paraphrasing correctly, if our soldiers knew they could come home and go to college, no one would want to stay in Iraq.
Sometimes treating your employees like crap is more about shoring up your own inferiority complex than it is smart business decision. If you haven't experienced it directly, go reread Thomas More and George Orwell to get the gist of it.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
We pay the Chinese to do the grunt work so that we can focus on having fun.
Which just illustrates why these games are b0rked. If people are willing to pay to avoid an integral part of the game, maybe you've done something wrong.
Hitler's first move was to confiscate firearms from the Jews. Here is something I just googled up on the subject: http://www.stephenhalbrook.com/article-nazilaw.pdf
The first step of every modern tyrant is to confiscate firearms. (Note, this is not to say that everyone who wants to confiscate weapons is a tyrant). Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Castro, etc.
The point is not that a guy with a handgun is going to stop a tank. There are 2 points to make:
1) A crowd the size of the protests currently happening in Iran actually is something to be feared if they are armed.
2) A complete reliance on the state for one's protection creates a complacency and an orwellian love for "big brother". This point is more subtle than the first, but the more I study the issue, the more I realize how important it is. If a person is forced to rely entirely on the state (usually a police force) for his/her protection, this is not a good thing. Responsible gun ownership reminds one that even though good police protection is a wonderful thing, if there were no police, one would still be able to get along with one's life. This autonomy from the state is a good thing.
I already mention the reluctance of the soldiers as one of the main factors keeping us safe. We're assuming that went away somehow in the "military kills protesters" scenario.
You're going to get all those 200+ million armed civilians in one place supporting the protest? How are they all armed?
Yes, if the military turned against us and EVERY SINGLE CITIZEN who is not otherwise a soldier took up arms in the defense of liberty and ALL of them could competently use their weapons (which you're assuming all of them have, in fact most people I know don't own a gun) they could certainly have a good chance against even our military. You'd have the support of at best a small percentage of the population (many would support the government even in the face of Draconian policies, hoping to be in the elite; more would be too scared; more still would be apathetic as long as American Idol continued to play; etc). Of those a fraction (maybe a large fraction, given the type of people you're talking about, but still a fraction) would actually HAVE guns, and a much smaller fraction would have any training in using them. Of the guns available to you most would be hand guns or hunting rifles, the first are all but useless against even body armor, let alone vehicles, the second only useful in the hands of real marksmen.
Then there's the lack of training and fire discipline. Unless your 'troops' are former police or military themselves, they've never fired guns as part of a formation. This means that they are quite as likely to shoot each other as they are to shoot the soldiers that they are supposed to be aiming at. Cops and soldiers spend all that time training for a reason. It's because it is really hard to shoot, move and communicate in a group without lots and lots of practice.
I said it above and I'll say it again, what keeps us safe is the rule of law and respect the military has for the rule of law; not the second amendment. That, at best, keeps you safe from muggers and home invaders.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
It's depressing to me to see how many people have so little faith in our Armed Forces. Most don't seem to realized our oaths of service have us swear to the Constitution first and foremost. If some how some units of the military did carry out unlawful orders to suppress civilian unrest, they will face resistance from other parts of the military, probably resulting in civil war but it is my firm belief that any military vs civilian will very rapidly become a military vs military & civilian conflict.
Officers: I, [name], do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.
Enlisted: I, (name), do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.
I'm sorry but all your talk of military formations and heavy weaponry suggest a level of open war that does not sit well with your talk of civilian apathy.
As for the distribution of civilian weaponry. The fact that not everyone is armed is made irrelevant by the fact that anyone could be. Hunting riffles are, with the right ammunition, capable of piercing body armor. Further, hunting riffles are often owned by people that hunt and can hit a moving target from a respectable distance. The civilian snipers will be defending and therefore have the terrain advantage. Given the wide variety of terrain types in this country, (compare Montana, Oregon, Nebraska, Florida, Virginia) local terrain knowledge will be enough of an advantage to nearly offset the disadvantage in training and equipment.
I have no doubt that civilian casualties will be higher than military casualties. But if the US military ever turned on the general population, the result would make the Vietnam War seem like a grade school shouting match.
My God! It's full of eval()'s.
"You do realized that the Chinese government used tanks right? Small arms (the kind of guns allowed in the US) cannot stop a tank."
They can force it to button up so it can be killed with incendiaries, have a track disabled by inserted objects for a mobility kill etc.
Small arms dispersed among the people facilitate revolutionary capability, and NO country has enough tanks for them to be everywhere at once. No country, possibly excepting North Korea,has enough domestic military power to destroy widespread armed revolt, though it may contain outbreaks. Tanks can't be everywhere, and can be killed by infantry with expedient weapons. Widespread ownership of weapons means that if enough people choose to unite,they will outnumber any force their government can field. Partisan warfare with a determined base can be very hard to put down,and can turn into civil war where the government forces are divided.
The amount of asspain a few thousand lightly armed Iraqis and Afghans have been inflicting on Coalition forces is an example of what can happen with small arms as basic weapons.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."