Coming to an AH Near You...

Ormus' Robes going once! Going twice ...!

Monday, August 1, Blizzard took the opportunity to announce that Diablo III will have an Auction House

Instead of selling off all the stuff you accumulate while Diablo-ing, you'll be able to put it on the Battle.net AH and let somebody, somewhere else buy it off you. Woot

But the freaky thang is that there will be two variants of this thing, one of which will use ACTUAL REAL LIVE MONEY from your Battle.net account.   I'm going to say that again:  ACTUAL REAL LIVE MONEY. I think the business model here is that your barbarian may find a helmet or something deep in the bowels of the earth and instead of sticking it on your head, you can put it in the Auction House. And instead of asking 500 gold for the thing, you could ask for $5. And then some guy will see that, and use funds he has transferred into his Battle.net account to pay for it.  That guy could then use the $5 he has just earned (minus a percentage taken by Blizzard) to pay for subscription fees to one Blizzard game or another. or to buy a Sparkle Pony from the Blizzard Pet Store.

And now, we pause, to offer a link to all this info. There's a buttload of it and I don't feel like I need to repost it here. Go ahead and read and come back to some highlights and analysis.

The Sins of Buying Gold

I've got ninety thousand pounds in my pajamas. I've got forty thousand French francs in
my fridge. I've got lots of lovely lira, now the Deutschmark's getting dearer. And my dollar
bills could buy the Brooklyn Bridge.

There was a news item printed recently that guards at Chinese work camps forced prisoners to farm gold in World of Warcraft which were then sold to players all over the world.

Here, I attempt to be as objective as I possibly can in pointing out a few things:

The Guardian newspaper of Britain reported on the story told by exactly one former prisoner in China.  Let's be honest and acknowledge lousy journalism when we see it. There is a cardinal rule in journalism, that it's not news until you have two sources confirming the same story. This doesn't mean that the events did not take place, it just means that the Guardian sloppily ran out an unconfirmed story because it's "astonishing."

There are human rights violations alleged by the name-changed subject of the Guardian article. I don't mean to lessen the importance of these things, but, they do not influence the conditions of gold-selling in WoW. Human Rights' abuse is to be deplored, but they should not cloud our view of how this relates to our game. Better organizations than the Guardian (or this blog) are already hard at work on this.

The story states that the "forced gold farming" took place between 2004-2007. In game terms, this is a lifetime ago. Blizzard has changed the dynamics of gold acquisition to such an extent that the majority of purchased gold now comes from hacked accounts.  Gold-farming, while probably still existent, is largely defunct. Old stories like the Guardian's report have little sway on the current dynamics of the problem.

Finally, it should be pointed out that labor camps, the making of products, and the exporting of said products are all quite legal in China, so ostensibly, I don't see that putting prisoners to work in this manner is all that surprising or unusual. (And it might make us stop to consider who exactly made all that other "made in China" crap we already have.)  Many states in the U.S. have variations on this same policy as well. So, let's not cast stones about that.