If most of you try and register a new account with Yu-Gi-Oh! Online, you’ll notice a whole host of nations that are unavailable for selection. This is nothing new, but one nation actually is selectable, but not shown to most. That nation is Korea.

This discrepancy stems from the passing of a 2007 law in the Republic of Korea intended to combat common problems in Korean online games. This law states that in order to register in a Korean-based online game, you must enter your Resident Registration Number (a good equivalent in the United States would be your Social Security Number) to confirm your registration.

Some time back, we here speculated that this would potentially damage Korea’s participation levels and thus its ranking, in Yu-Gi-Oh! Online as any addition to the demanded criteria of registration, no matter the common sense of it, is always going to filter out potential duelists.

Korea were once ranked 4th in the world in a position that seemed nearly as guaranteed as those of the big three above them. Outside of the US, Japan and Germany where international and continental offices are based, Korea is very much Konami’s favoured child and are cultivated as Japan’s only challenger for regional and world dominance. Even Konami can be the international competition card when they think it can make some cash from it, you see.

Of course, nowadays Korea ranks 6th in the world. That’s certainly not a bad position and it does mark Korea as one of the world elite. But it is a fall that hurts in terms of perception and reality. For such is the nature of TP rankings, and it is easy to forget this, that this suggests that Korea, believed by Konami to be its second or third most valuable market is represented less and likely draws in less profit overall than either Italy or the United Kingdom (All that TP accumulation has to be financed by buying BP, remember. If you’re not ranked highly, you’re also not making Konami money).

As of the time of writing, Korea is no closer to reversing this trend than it ever has since its initial fall from grace. The irony is that this online game being so affected by the law is also one of the few that does not stand to gain much, if any benefit.

The law is intended to accomplish two things. The first to avoid undue strain on Korean servers by stopping international game players from playing on Korean servers. While this is an issue in online games with very low participation in English servers, it is not the case in as internationally popular a game as Yu-Gi-Oh! Online where the server most likely “infiltrated” the most is in fact the English server.

The second goal of this law was to fight against the prevalence of “gold farmers” who damage the virtual economy in online games by offering to earn you in-game currency in exchange for real life cash. Of course, the irony here is that the only party capable of doing this in Yu-Gi-Oh! Online is Konami themselves, who sell Battle Points in exchange for real currency.

Whatever the positives and negatives of this law as regards the vast majority of online games, when it comes to Yu-Gi-Oh! Online these restrictions end up making the much-vaunted Korean wave (the recent spread and interest in Korea culture in Asia, north Africa, eastern Europe and the US) more of a ripple in a pond as far as the online game is concerned.