The End of The Chinese Gold-Selling Party

The Escapist, among other sources yesterday, reported that China has banned the practice of gold-selling or Real Money Transfer services from the country.

For those not in the know, the businesses in question employ workers who play MMOs all day, farming in-game cash, and then turn around and have that cash delivered to players who pay real money via a website or other method. Players get saved the excruciating effort of farming gold for all their MMO related purchasing and the gold farming businesses make actual money. Sounds good, right? Well it was so good that 80-85 percent of gold farming business was located in China and that last year, the businesses drummed up a cool $146 million in American cashola.

But now, the party seems to be over for RMT services. Because of its blatantly illegal violation of many MMOs’ Terms of Service, which prohibit selling virtual items for real cash, the government is looking to “nip illegal online activities” while it’s still practical to create legislation to do so, according to a Chinese online industry expert.

Lots of people can rejoice over this, despite some folks losing a service that they’ve certainly come to take advantage of over the years. For one thing the constant aggressive marketing of gold-selling spam, taking the insidious form of advertising banners, in-game tells, and even in-game mail, will probably cease to exist. Players will now no longer have to clean out inboxes full of spam or fill ignore lists with gold sellers intent or bartering their illegal wares. In addition to that, areas normally frequented by gold farmers will clear up, allowing players to hunt their mobs in peace once more. Annoyance levels will be down, freeing up players to once again focus their nerd rage on something proper, like how they can’t kill that one raid boss, or that they’re getting screwed on gear because the officers in their guild who regularly cyber with each other are being biased. It’s all good.

From the developers’ side, things are looking up as well, from a variety of perspectives. For one thing, they no longer have to spend as much resources aggressively finding and banning gold sellers from their games. Players who would normally login for 5 minutes to get their 1000 or so gold will now have to earn their cash “the hard way”, leading to greater login sessions and higher traffic. Last but not least, the market now opens for developers to create legitimate versions of real-money transfer services if they so chose. The resources used to focus on purging the gold-selling disease can now be freely spent reading their forums about how this one class is “totally OP” and “needs to be nerfed” else “the game is going to die”. I bet they’re looking forward to that!

So pour your Red Bulls on the floor to recognize the death of gold-selling, folks, because as much as you might have loved to kill the Chinese gold farmers, their mismatched gear and terrible tactics did, after all, serve to make you think you were decent in PvP. Respect, yo.

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