Gold Farming from Prison?

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**Doomthumbs**

http://www.boingboing.net/2011/05/26/gold-farming-in-a-ch.html

"Prison bosses made more money forcing inmates to play games than they do forcing people to do manual labour," Liu told the Guardian. "There were 300 prisoners forced to play games. We worked 12-hour shifts in the camp. I heard them say they could earn 5,000-6,000rmb [£470-570] a day. We didn't see any of the money. The computers were never turned off."
Memories from his detention at Jixi re-education-through-labour camp in Heilongjiang province from 2004 still haunt Liu. As well as backbreaking mining toil, he carved chopsticks and toothpicks out of planks of wood until his hands were raw and assembled car seat covers that the prison exported to South Korea and Japan. He was also made to memorise communist literature to pay off his debt to society.

But it was the forced online gaming that was the most surreal part of his imprisonment. The hard slog may have been virtual, but the punishment for falling behind was real.

"If I couldn't complete my work quota, they would punish me physically. 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," he said.

Ok, this just gives me all kinds of warm fuzzies. Lets do some math before I say why.
300 prisoners, pulling in £470 a day. Thats $774. So thats $2.58 worth of Warcraft gold per prisoner, per 12 hour day.
Warcraft gold is sold at the rate of $1 to 1000 gold. So each prisoner was making 2580 gold every 12 hour shift.

Hell yeah! Screw the civil rights/basic human decency! I was pulling almost double that!
And thats just on the steam of Mountain Dew! Not "Beaten with plastic pipes"! Yeah!

Oh, those are also deplorable conditions even with the fact that they are playing games, blah blah blah.
YEAH! Almost double the rate of torture victims!

**purplefood**

People are weird...

**Swordwind**

That's so... Chinese-y.

(I'm Chinese, I'm allowed to say that.

)

**Avatar 720**

Swordwind wrote:That's so... Chinese-y.

(I'm Chinese, I'm allowed to say that. )

At least, until they find you.

**KingCracker**

Does this mean the end of WoW is finally here?

**Doomthumbs**

I sure hope so. I've got friends still stuck in there...

**KingCracker**

I could only last about 6 months. After that it was like washing dishes or witting on the chalk board Bart Simpson style

**Chrysaor686**

While it seems wrong on some level, I'd rather be playing an MMO for 12 hours a day in prison (even if it's not a very good one) than be subject to the complete sensory deprivation that prison usually entails.

Beating the prisoners for not meeting their gold quota is especially harsh, though. If that weren't the case, I'd actually be a strong supporter of this.

**Doomthumbs**

You mean American prison chrys. In china, your ass is owned by the state. Here we don't have to work, but get paid like .41 an hour.

**Chrysaor686**

I understand that.

Most of the 'jobs' in American prisons have something to do with running the facility itself, and prisoners are not generally used to make profit. Though this can sometimes be the case, the prisoner has the right to choose whether or not to work.

If the situation at hand wasn't so strenuous or synonymous with torture, this would be an excellent way to generate revenue and cover the cost of the inmates (though it is against the EULA present in most MMOs), and it would keep prisoners from being driven insane via lack of sensory stimulus. Trust me, you don't get to do anything that remotely resembles fun in most similar environments, and the only thing you have to do is to sit around and refine your criminality.

I got to play Diablo II over a lan connection (under the ruse of 'learning to network') while in school at a juvenile correctional facility, and this was the only thing that I had to look forward to the entire time I was there.

**Swordwind**

Avatar 720 wrote:
Swordwind wrote:That's so... Chinese-y.

(I'm Chinese, I'm allowed to say that. )

At least, until they find you.

What they don't know is that I'm not even in the country.

Run awaaaayy

**AvatarForm**

Swordwind wrote:That's so... Chinese-y.

(I'm Chinese, I'm allowed to say that. )

The "Chris Rock" defence...

However, these prisoners seem to be under-achievers.

According to my old guildies (Hi, my name is... and I havent played WoW in 3 years) they can make this in 6 hours doing WotLK dailies and dungeon crawls.