Today’s Barely Understood News From Asia
February 12th, 2007
Apparently Ragnarok has been shut down in Vietnam for, as best as I can understand, violating commerce laws.
On February 5, the HCM City Department of Post and Telecommunications instructed VinaGame to stop its Ragnarok services because it failed to apply limits to the sales and exchanges of game products.
They sure seem to be having issues there.
I checked their website and didn’t see anything there about this.
Probably because I can’t read Vietnamese.
Well, I guess that underscores the complete lack of future value of Vietnam as an online gaming market.
Ah, it’s the regulations restricting game “point awards” to 5 hours total per day, applied by at least one city department to in-game item sales, too.
The regulations require the game only award “full xp” for the first three hours of gameplay, “half xp” for the next two, and nothing beyond that per day.
Yeah, they probably thought the Viets were as lax about enforcement as some Chinese provinces.
Oops.
The problem is, the regulation is enforeced by city departments. So one city says limit XP only. Another city says limit XP and “income”. But if one city department thinks you are in violation, the whole game gets shut down.
Actual enforcement to the purpose of the regulation is nonexistent. Players may create as many accounts as they want, or even may play different games, surpassing the 5-hour limit by infinity (or at least by 19 hours a day).
The simpler solution is to do your best to keep up with the regulations, but whenever a city changes the law to something you can’t keep up with, ban all the IPs from that city while you figure out what to do about it.
It’s got to be better than totally shutting down the game in the interim.
Or if IPs aren’t addressed that way there, put all the accounts on hold with CC billing addresses from that city. Whichever.
Or maybe the politicians could stop trying to interfere in peoples leisure activities under the guise of being concerned for their health one minute when the other 23:59 of the day they dont give a crap.
Heh, sure, like that’s ever going to happen.