The Guardian ran a heartrending story yesterday about prisoners in China forced to farm gold on behalf of their prison bosses. After spending their day doing backbreaking labor, they would spend the evenings farming gold in games like World of Warcraft.
According to the report, it’s likely that the prison bosses made more money from the sales of these online currencies than they did even from prisoners’ manual labor. If prisoners were unable to produce enough gold during their shift, they would be physically punished.
“They would make me stand with my hands raised in the air and after I returned to my dormitory they would beat me with plastic pipes. We kept playing until we could barely see things,” said one prisoner in the report.
Blizzard’s been fighting gold farming practices for a long time; we’ll likely never see “legal” gold selling if Blizzard can doing anything about it. This story illustrates one more reason you should not support these services.
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Chinese prisoners forced to farm gold originally appeared on WoW Insider on Thu, 26 May 2011 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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