Chinese couple sells kids for online gaming

if you didnt think prison gold farms were bad, heres a couple that sells their children to fund their online gaming, they sold a girl for approx $500 and 2 boys for approx $4600 each (original article here).

ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: Spawn Point Pawner

Couple of things (seriousness need not apply):

* What a horrible article simply for the fact that there is no reporting on how the children are doing now. Almost doesn't seem "real".

* Gaming sites / services should take responsibility and limit how much time their patrons can use their services >.>

* People who are that into gaming never had time, nor the skillz needed, to perform the certain duties necessary to produce a child. Much less 3 of them.

* Equal rights supporters are up in arms over this; their motto "if you are going to sell your children, sell them for the same damn price!"

* This is a prime example of why pay-to-play is a bad idea <.<

I've already forgotten about most of you

Yeah, this is funny. Until you realize that most likely, those kids were sold into sex slavery. Then the tragedy sets in.

Human beings, feh. Be better if we just ate our young like civilized animals do.

On a serious note... This is likely a spin used to make gaming look bad and not true. There is limit to how many children you're allowed to have in China and there is a high demand for males in china as well.

In china this can be looked as capitalism's find a need, fill a need... This type of stuff goes on all the time in china so its fairly obvious that it's the link to gaming is whuy we're haring about it rather than the general immorality of it or the act itself. We're left to draw the conclusion... look at what these bad people did and they're gamers. If you're a gamer you're bad too. And that type of reporting sickens me.

I will also point out that they weren't actually sold in purely for Online gaming.

On another forum it's pointed out (when someone translated the original chinese article) they wracked up and then blew the equivilent of $9000 in the space of about 2 months, most suspect most likely online GAMBLING not MMO play and the Chinese goverment (who are a strange one in that they both hate online gaming AND have it as a large income for their country) are using this to demonize MMOs further against the population.

Actually the little girl may have ended up for adoption in the US.

Also there are many Asian MMOs where you are encouraged to spend real money to buy chances of getting a good or rare item. There was a story on such a MMO a year or two ago about them playing with the odds to increase profits and forcing excessive PvP to encourage players to take the shortcut of buying a chance for better gear.

If this article is even true - and bear in mind that, ultimately, we have only the word of one of mainland China's, erm, legendary newspapers for any of it - these folks have problems that exist on a whole different continuum than online gaming. In journalism we called that "burying the lede".

There's something about this article that just screams the word 'fake' to me. I can't put my finger on what that is, probably because I am too tired and should be in bed at 2:11AM BST rather than reading this potentially sensationalist crap.