Project Entropia meets Tax Authorities and Terror Fighters, Blizzard bans more bots

This week, we start from an interesting comment from RCE universe in the Terranova thread on tax issue suggested some initiatives to regulate the virtual world.

According to the discussion, people from MindArk (Entropia) had a meeting with Joint Economic Committee (JEC), IRS, CIA and US Treasury and hinted at least 2-5 years time frame for the change. The regulation will somehow try to put some transparency to the virtual world transaction for both tax and security purposes. Money laundering and terrorist financing are potential criminal activities. Find out more about fraud in virtual world in the interview with David Grundy.

Terranova is looking for comments, ideas or suggestions from anyone who would like to voice their thoughts on virtual income tax issue. So, feel free to drop them a message.

Back to one of the biggest virtual worlds, the World of Warcraft has some news update.

The next expansion, Wrath of the Lich King was announced in the company's BlizzCon. The new expansion will include a new "hero" class, Death Knight, increased level cap and other additions like new hairstyles and dances.

New voice chat feature is currently being tested in the PTRs (Public Test Realms). Voice chat will be integrated into the main UI. General chatting is not possible at this point so it is limited to people in a group, raid or custom channel only. More details here.

Players have already expressed concerns for the voice chat. One of the main concerns is a potential medium of gold farmers spam as the feature is widely available to everyone. Blizzard has already claimed no control over voice chat content although it is possible for players to ignore it from the game's interface.

Finally, a reminder to botters that Blizzard has a strong stance and will ban your accounts. Thousands have already been banned in both US and EU servers.