SPOnG's all in favour of the little guy delivering a punch in the chops to big business, but the case of Zhou Xujun winning a case to have his World of Warcraft characters returned is a little... beguiling.

Xujun will have his characters and tools returned (and his litigation costs paid) after his WoW account was blocked back on March 7th for gold farming. The Shanghai Pudong New District People's Court ruled in favour of Xujun when he sued The9, which operates WoW in China. The court found that pre-existing system bugs were used by Xujun to acquire in-game wealth, rather than prohibited means such as plug-ins.

Gold farming is something of a grey area. It involves players of MMOs acquiring in-game wealth by repeating certain tasks, sometimes using programs such as bots to play the game automatically. There's now a huge market for trading in virtual gold or characters that have already been levelled up. Operators of MMOs don't like it, but are struggling to control it.

The9 said in May that it had closed 5,772 game accounts for illegal gold farming. The last thing it needs is scores of disaffected gamers coming out of the woodwork to challenge its actions.

While SPOnG appreciates that WoW can bring out obsessive behaviour in people, however, isn't taking account closure to court going a bit far? Opinions in the Forum, please.

^{Source: JLM Pacific Epoch}