Players of the Chinese MMORPG, King of the World, may have found themselves unable to log into their accounts this past weekend. The game’s publisher, Aurora Technology, has apparently frozen the accounts of all male players choosing to play as a female characters. Now, only female players can play female characters, and they’re required to prove their gender via a webcam. Females wanting to play males are still allowed though.

I’m still waiting to hear a reason for this though. The best I can think of is that they wanted people playing to be sure that the people they were talking too were really the gender they claimed they were, but then why still allow females to play male character? Seems like a pretty easy way to drive off a lot of customers though. Besides essentially getting rid of any male wanting to play as a female character (a fairly large consumer base), what about all those people who had their characters really built up at the time of the ban? Are they just out of luck and have to start over? And the webcam thing really isn’t going to deter male players from playing as females. All you’d need is a female friend willing to sit in front of a computer for a couple minutes or a penchant for cross-dressing.