NEWS: Chinese Government: No Online Gaming For You!

CULTURE: Chinese Government: No Online Gaming For You!

So you like playing World of Warcraft? EverQuest? The Matrix Online? Think of yourself as an uber power-gamer? Do you boast that you spend more time online than you do sleeping and working combined? Well, you better not live in China because the Chinese government is imposing a 3-hours-per-day limit on MMO games.

Gaming in excess of the legal 3 hours per day will result in a degradation of your character's stats, which will not reset until you've been offline for a set amount of time.

This bit of legislation comes at a time after a number of notable MMO-related events, such as Korean couple whose child died while they gamed, a gamer who died after a 50 hour gaming marathon and the recent opening of a game-addiction clinic in China.

3 hours per day? I used to play the matrix online and that was a lot for me...then again, I hardly fit into the category of ubergamer.

Glad I don't live in china, that's insane.

I just hope for the Chinese gamers' sake that Chinese servers are separate. (One tends to suspect so). As if other, non-limited gamers are playing on the servers the Chinese folks will be shafted.

Otherwise...well, this is just one of many reasons why totalitarian governments are bad.

on the bright side mabey this will curb chinese gold farming?

god I hope so. For about five minutes, at least. They'll just get multiple accounts and game for 3 hours, switch accounts, rinse, repeat.

[Edited on Aug 25, 2005 by Keith]

All I have to say is if they did this in America, my boyfriend would die. 3 hours of WoW is just warming up for him.

I don't think it can, those Chinese gamers are playing on American servers; unless Chinese reach has extended that far they should fly under the radar. I don't think this proposed system would work without server complicity.

China, love the food, hate the laws!

ah haa haaaaaa

that's ridiculous

Read the article.

Communism at its finest, ladies and gents.

I honestly think it would be a good idea for all games to have a daily, weekly, or monthly game time limit for each player or account.

(Yeah, yeah, I'm probably some sort of communist or something.)

by saying that, it shows quite clearly that you are not in any way shape or form a gamer. i don't consider myself an "uber-gamer", but 3 hours of Call of Duty is about an average night's playtime. On a good night when i don't have work, i have been known to play 5-6 hours without more than a couple food/pee/shit breaks. this would totally blow monkey-sack. sorry to burst your bubble there, but you would be hard-pressed to find any gamer who agreed with you, no matter how advanced they are.

I did. You're much cleverer than I am so you'll have to quote the part that describes a mechanism for this that would work without the server side changes. Maybe this is entirely possible, but it doesn't say so in the article itself, not the gamespot one nor in the original one I read yesterday or the day before, which gave somewhat more information.

I saw that some companies were involved in the trials, but Blizzard wasn't one of them. Again, their Chinese servers would have to be affected to keep running, but their American ones wouldn't, thus gold farming would stay alive.

Read my post.

[Edited on Aug 25, 2005 9:24PM]

I suck yoooo dick fo' sum evercrack and sum noooodles!!!

Well, I skimmed the article, but I've read in many places that the PRC government has explicit control over *most* of the traffic in/out of the country (and I don't mean legally, I mean physically.)

We usually hear about this in the news when they've blocked out things like "human rights" and "tianenman"(sp?).

Depending on how established this control really is, they could monitor the traffic transparently - even killing the socket if they felt someone had been on too long.

This is hilarious. I wouldn't be surprised if they'd tried fines, jail time, and shooting people in the kneecaps previously, only to find that none of it worked. They've finally wised up and started hitting the gamers where it hurts.

Seriously though, if the US government showed this kind of insight into things like drugs and file sharing, the country would be a very different place for better or for worse. As it is, I'm not sure why they even bother.

Oh, there's a better part to all of this (in the ridiculously stupid way.).

I didn't actually decipher this myself, but I work for a game company... that makes MMOs, so we were pretty interested.

Apparently, the law is written in a way that requires developers to actually build this functionality into their game if they want to sell in China.

AND!!!

Apparently, the law also states that the version of the game sold in China must be the same as all other versions of the game (I guess either to make sure they can't get a copy from another country??), MEANING that in order to sell to China, a developer would have to impose these limits on EVERYONE.

I haven't taken the time to read much more about it, but I got this all from people with a lot of industry knowledge and a keen interest in the subject.

Isn't it heartwarming that they care for their citizens so much they're even willing to protect them from themselves?

I don't think it's meant to be that way, but, either way, I don't think it'll ever happen.

[Edited on Aug 26, 2005 4:19AM]

[Edited on Aug 26, 2005 4:21AM]

That's not how this is working though, if they were just killing connections then yeah, gold farming might go away, but their plan is actually fairly elaborate and (I think anyway) kind of imaginative. It works with ingame mechanics to stop the person from playing, or perhaps more correctly, to stop the person from wanting to play.

i can't imagine he'd be your boyfriend for very long....

fuck the chinese. i dont' even play online a whole lot, but fuck that.

See, the problem with this system is that due to the (sigh, yes...) inherently addictive nature of a proper MMO, three hours can indeed seem like no time at all. I mean, look at me. I've been on the computer for an hour and a half and just remembered that the trash is due to the curb... uh... rightfuckingnow. And this is just listening to some music and checking some websites. Nothing requiring the sort of focus as, say, WoW or EverCrack.