The9, the company that operates the Chinese version of World of Warcraft, announced today that a record-breaking one million players were recently simultaneously connected to the MMORPG.

With 5.5 million of WoW’s 10 million players playing on Chinese servers, nearly 20% of the country’s WoW-addicts would have been logged in concurrently to set the record, a feat The9 attributes to the arrival of the Burning Crusade expansion in China.

Poorly conceived claims that the majority of these players were actually gold farms - players who are logged in around the clock, collecting gold to sell for a profit - have already started springing up on the Internet. Of course, most Chinese gold farmers play on Western servers alongside most of the gold buyers, but who ever heard of logic getting in the way of a blog post?

Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade Surpasses One Million Peak Concurrent Player Milestone in Mainland China [The9 via Massively]