In other news, WoW gold prices drop due to oversupply from gold farmers.

I don't know which is worse! I guess it depends on the rate per month and the rate per hour. For me, I might actually benefit paying the rate by hour!!!

*shudders*

Wonder what the rate is anyways...

...preying on the addictive nature of many Asians. Very cunning.

From what I saw in the URL below, it's about $.04 (four cents) an hour for them. I wish, but doubt, we'll see that kind of pricing here.

http://gigaom.com/2006/08/29/world-of-warcraft-2/

It looks to be 6 cents an hour. Which depending on your level of addiction may be a better option. Three hours a day, 30 days a month turned out to be $5.40. Not sure what the monthly rate is, but that doesn't seem to bad.

to hear the next lost soul that kills himself over this game. It's been awhile

From previus experiance I have with MMOs and CHinese addicts, they never play 3 hours a day. They are farming 24/7 often taking turns so as to make money by selling gold and items to others.I read an article somewhere about chinese farmers that actually make a living from WOW, And this pay by the hour thing is actually more expensive for them than a monthly fee

I think what they do is, they buy a card that has a number of amount of hour on it. So more like a phone card and when the minutes are used up, the people can buy a new one. And I agree with Malcolm, it will control more that how much hours the people sit front of the computer, but I think its still too cheap, for most Chinese users to make any affect. As for 3 hours in the netcafe costs only 10RMB, plus around 15RMB for the 3 hours gaming. So a totall of less than $3, which is still affordable for most people there.

I don't know what you call affordable but in my country 1$/hour is pretty average for an net-cafe.

Of course people most can afford 3 hours... but most people CANNOT afford 30 hours a month. 30 hours = 90$ = 1/3 of minimum wage here (venezuela).

The people that spend a lot of time playing, spend between 15-20 hours during the weekends (I used to spend more than), but I only had time to play about 5 hours TOTAL during weekdays. It easly adds up to 300$.

Anyways, i´m just saying that you must put it into perspective, and take into account what chunk of their income would go into WoW.

On a side note. When i was devoting a lot of time to WoW I put more than 80 hours in 1 week (I was on vacation). Right now I put between 5 to 15 hours a week... it varies a LOT. This week so far I have it on cero.