It's like the stamina mechanic, only harsher.

An article about China's new (apparently mandatory) scheme to limit MMO gameplay. Basically, it cuts your characters' levels if you're playing for more than three hours, and after five hours you've basically at Level Pathetic. It tracks how long you've played and, since it should be able to tell whether you've just logged out and back in again, I'm assuming they're also planning to have it monitor a player's game-playing time across games.

The number of distributors who've agreed to the scheme is pretty decent, although given that some probably don't have source code access, the ability of the companies to deliver on their pledge is questionable. Still, no MMO developer wants to lose the Chinese market, I'd bet. Plus, as one of my friends noted, this might have an interesting impact on gold farming.