In the light of the Blizzard/Glider dance, this seems more direct, and would only happen in China: Gold farmers were arrested and charged with “unfair revenue distribution”. More info at PlayNoEvil:
Turn up the Irony Meter to 11. After all, with all of the complaints in the US about gold farming, it takes the Chinese to stand up and do something about it.
Yep, police in China has arrested 2 men for running a World of Warcraft gold farming operation and charged them with “unfair revenue distribution” (CHINESE READER ALERT - what in the world is “unfair revenue distribution”?).
The two men ran the operation for 7 months and earned 1.4 Million RMB (just over US$200,000). They had 20 computers and 20 employees (no shifts, I guess) and were based in Chengdu’s Shuangliu county. The men were targeting The9‘s China-based World of Warcraft operation… I’m not sure if this makes their revenue more impressive or not.
(Chengdu Evening News via Pacific Epoch)
While this is a more straight-forward approach to handling “unwanted” activities, I’m pretty glad that the US have a slightly more complex judicial system…
Communism ftl. While we agree that botting is against the TOS and so is selling of gold it stretches all sense of reason to call gold farming illegal. Barring of course unfair labor practices etc if the farmers are working in sweat shop conditions this is a ridiculous arrest.
Fear the state which uses it’s police powers to take the liberties of one class of citizen for the sake of another.