A. Precisely the same people that were doing it before!
I just noticed this article on TechDirt, to me it doesn’t make any sense, perhaps they misunderstand how gold farming works.
Here is there article: But Who’s Doing All That World Of Warcraft Gold Farming While WoW Is Down In China?
The topic basically says it all, but the fact is that chinese gold farmers aren’t making their money from farming gold on chinese servers. The reason that gold farming is profitable for them is not due to it making a lot of money, but just due to it making more money than some of the average jobs around there. By selling the gold to Europeans and Americans for prices they are prepared to pay (a quick google suggests around $10/1000gold) it gives these gold selling businesses a cut and passes some of this on to the farmers. They will only make a few dollars an hour, but citing this 2006 article which points to “An average Chinese wage of $0.57 per hour” this doesn’t hold up that badly.
Obviously this means that these gold selling companies exist to sell to WoW players in other regions, people in China don’t earn enough to pay these prices and domestic gold farming would not be profitable due to the much lower wages.
So in summary, the Chinese WoW servers being down makes zero difference to the gold farmers, they aren’t farming on Chinese servers anyway!
this article makes no sense.
First you say it makes sense for the Chinese to gold farm as they would be better paid then if they went for an “average wage job”.
Then you say “they aren’t farming in China anyway”.
Remember, this is the internet, borders don’t make a difference who you sell to, I can “farm” in china, then sell to some Americans over the web.
Perhaps you misunderstood how eCommerce works.
I’ll make a minor edit to this as perhaps it wasn’t clear, the final line meant “they aren’t farming on chinese servers” as opposed to “they aren’t farming in China anyway” which is what my whole article was geared to, hence the Chinese servers being down making no difference. I know these people are based in China, but they are farming on European and US servers.
I absolutely understand how eCommerce works, it’s my day job
I thought it was clear, but still missed the point just a skosh. If the Chinese government has blocked access to the World of Warcraft game then it doesn’t matter what server they’re on. If the people doing the blocking are worth keeping on the job, then they blocked all of the IPs that WoW uses, especially the game servers all over the world. Otherwise, why block any of it because it’ll just keep right on going and no one would even notice.
If the only thing that is blocked from China is the main website, then I LOL at the Chinese network people, but I rather doubt that is the case.
The issue is not the Chinese Government blocking it via their national firewall like they have done with Twitter et al., it’s simply a Chinese licensing issue, the Government are not allowing the company to run it, there are no technical limitations in playing it.
You can read this article here which explains it, it’s a business law issue.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/14/world-of-warcraft-still-suspended-in-china-indefinitely/