Have you heard? Blizzard just got into the gold-farming business.

Oh, that wasn't the intent, but it might just be the effect. Word broke yesterday on plans to add auction houses to Diablo 3 via Battle.net. Players can use real-world money to buy gold, items, and possibly even characters from other players, with Blizzard taking a cut for listings and purchases and remaining otherwise uninvolved. Put another way, every gold-farming-sweatshop boss on the planet just jumped for joy.

Stop! I have a great deal on prayer beads...today only!

Amazingly, this comes right on the heels of an article in the UK's Guardian that details how Chinese political prisoners are forced to play World of Warcraft after a hard day's hard labor -- and they're beaten if they miss gold-farming quotas. Turns out they make a lot more money for their captors by grinding online than they do breaking rocks in the real world.

To be fair, Diablo's a very different game from WoW, but Blizzard's making a lot of assumptions about its participants all playing nice. Few things can spin out of control faster than an unregulated economy. I don't doubt fans asked for these services. I bet it'll see a great deal of legitimate use and maybe even make a few people some honest money. I bet it'll also make a lot of dishonest people money as well.

This comes after years of lip-service bans on gold farming and game-account sales on eBay. Just as that policy started to grow teeth, Blizzard changed the rules. Now gold farmers don't have to hide, pretend, dissemble on eBay, or retreat to smaller auction sites. They can operate out in the open, right where their customers hang out, safe in the knowledge that Blizzard prefers a head-in-sand approach to a hands-on policy.

Blizzard's non-intervention strategy opens the door wide. The company even plans to offer several free listings every week to draw sellers -- reputable or not -- from other auction sites, but they won't validate a single one of them. No good-faith checks to see if the work's done in sweatshop or outright slave-labor conditions. No, they'll just take the money (on transactions for items and characters, I feel obligated to point out, that Blizzard claims full ownership of) and remain blissfully, purposely ignorant.

It costs ten bucks' worth of crossbow bolts to kill you. Can I get a receipt?

What could they do? Well, Diablo 3 requires a persistent connection to Battle.net and won't offer an offline mode. It wouldn't be tough to monitor for suspicious, easily identifiable patterns and automatically flag those accounts.     

Ah, but Blizzard's not in the regulatory business. They're in the video-game business. So let's talk about the game for a moment.

The real fault in gold farming lies with the players. People who buy gold and pre-leveled characters in WoW allow the entire trade to exist and, in a lot of ways, break the game. They're only in it to win it, minus the tedious character building that's actually the entire point of playing. These cheats only make the game less fun for real, dedicated players.

Blizzard wants to de-emphasize player vs. player in Diablo 3, but that's really something gamers themselves will determine. Regardless, Diablo 3 promises a matchmaking system to prevent over-powered characters from ransacking through lower-powered parties. But be honest...are you looking forward to playing with these clowns in any capacity? Because if Blizzard does allow character purchases -- which they're interested in but haven't committed to quite yet -- Diablo 3 will be full of them. Hundreds, if not thousands will jump into the game at max level, with little real understanding of how to play their class.

And while Blizzard demurs on the subject now, when that auction model proves out as a successful generator of free money, I fully expect it to migrate over to World of Warcraft in one form or another.

For justice! For peace! For the loot drop!

To be clear, trading items for items makes perfect sense to me, but I think it's a grave mistake to let players simply buy gold or a pre-leveled character. And any time you bring real money into a virtual economy, things tend to get progressively dirtier. Rather than clean it up, Blizzard's cashing in on an underground economy they've spent a long time trying (and failing) to quash. Sound idea, but it also unintentionally encourages and enables a certain category of opportunists who show up to abuse the system...and very possibly abuse real people in the pursuit of fake gold. It already happens on the fringes of WoW. Diablo 3 might just bring it home, aided and abetted by Blizzard's own neglect. That possibility disgusts me.

A responsible company would at least perform due diligence before they started cashing those checks. A great company would fix that corrupt system rather than become a part of it. So far, I'm not seeing Blizzard demonstrate greatness or responsibility here. I'm hoping that changes before any consequences come to rest at their door.