Cheating is just another way to fund a country

I've dabbled in massively multiplayer online games.  Yes, dabbled.  As in, only played for a little while.

Why are you staring like that at me again?

Alright, alright, I spent way more than my fair share of time playing several mmorpgs.  I put in obscene amounts of time into Final Fantasy 11, I played way to much World of Warcraft, I played a jedi in Star Wars Galaxies when that actually meant something and yes, I've even grinded up a character in Maple Story.

Don't judge me.

However, my mmo days are pretty much over.  It became very apparent to me that I could either pass school and have a life, or get an epic mount.  I couldn't have both.  I won't lie to you, I did a whole excel spreadsheet to the pros and cons of having a job at McDonalds vs an epic character that could shatter the servers themselves.  It was a pretty close call.

Most said phrase of Zul'garak, the Arbiter of Darkness: "Would you like fries with that?"

As any past or current mmo player can attest to, one of the most annoying aspects of the game comes from gold farming (or RMTing depending on how old school you are).  For those of you not acquainted with the term, its basically shorthand for a cycle of suck, failure, misbegotten profit and shortcuts.

The idea works as follows: in almost all mmorpgs, there is a form of currency.  Most of the time, you need to actually do things in game in order to earn said currency, something like selling items your character has made, doing tasks for others or whoring out your skills at teleporting people around the world, like some kind of monorail-prostitute combo.

Soulless destroyers of fun, smelling an opportunity, realized they could probably get some people to pay real money for fake in game money, because people are really lazy, really retarded and have no friends.

If you want to waste your parents cash on something that has no actual value, go right ahead.  I'm sure you're in the basement for a reason.  But please don't also ruin the game for someone who has been having fun actually playing it.

You know what game play does? Builds a skill set.  The game compensates for that- it gets harder to play.  So if you buy your way to the top, you're dead weight because you haven't put in the time to actually get good.  But then other retards see you with your cool shit, want your cool shit and buy their way to the top and the cycle of stupid continues.

The moral of the story is that you can't buy happiness or self worth.  But you can be annoying as fuck.

Anyway, because this makes the game less fun for everyone involved, most game companies go way out of their way to put a stop to it.  However, they're basically outclassed before they ever get off the launch pad because China uses gold farming as a way to put prisoners to work.  Yes, you read that right- we make prison gangs mow the medians of highways or something, but China makes them get as much fake currency as possible to it can be sold to stupid people.

That's fucking brilliant.  You can get your dangerous margin of society to hate every other country by having to deal with constant dumb meme references in the trade chat and make money at the same time.  Well, it could be worse, I guess.  Its not like China is using that money to fund a nuclear weapons development program-- but North Korea totally is.

Every time you reply to a person who has no vowels in their name offering you gold, North Korea gets a little closer to having the bomb