Blizzard bans 100,000+ for cheating/gold farming

[Dave]

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=59377507&sid=1

I know, it's linking to another forum, but that's the only news on it I've found.

Simply awesome. I remember how annoying gold farming became in Galaxies. This game has such a massive playerbase that the necessity to remove cheaters and those who would screw with the economy becomes far greater.

Good to know Blizzard can look past the $1,000,000+/month it cost them to do this.

[Cauton]

And it's not the first time they've done it either. By now they must've closed upwards to 500k accounts for cheating/goldfarming. It's a testament to WoW's success - and Blizzard's commitment to keeping (as many as possible of the) cheaters and gold framers out of the game - when they can get rid of as many accounts that makes up other MMO's entire subscription base.

[Ryos]

Unfortunately, it's a case of though it looks impressive on paper, in reality it doesn't do a whole lot.  I had to get the mod SpamSentry because the damn gold farmers (and if you look at the gold circulation it's pretty obvious most if not all of those were left intact) spam the general chat seemingly every 10 minutes.  The quiet I've had since then is nothing short of surreal. ;)

[Masamune]

Not like it's a surprise, with how often Diablo 2 and other Blizzard games were hacked, they should be quite good at stopping majority of them by now.

[Raze]

Unfortunately, it's a case of though it looks impressive on paper, in reality it doesn't do a whole lot.

Well, they can't stop them, but FFXI proved that effort needs to be maintained to keep them in check. SE's attitude was that if they banned a gil seller they'd just make a new account so there was no point, but then the RMT seriously fucked over the economy about a year ago. They sold so much gil for so cheap that only the gilbuyers could buy the big items as paying more wasn't a issue for them. So SE started targeting the RMT mules so they didn't have enough to sell and it helped.

While the economy in WoW doesn't seem to have the large FFXI flaw of it being to damn hard to make money that drove people to buy gil in the first place they should still do everything to make it as hard on the RMT as possible. Banning accounts and filtering website names is a good move.

[Akanbe-]

I'm glad for expensive money sinks like mounts.  Mounts/epic mounts/flying mounts I imagine remove a ton of gold from the game.

I believe Blizzard is doing a pretty decent job with this.  Last time I tried looking, I couldn't find any exploiters/farmers in Scholo, Strath, DM, and oddly ZG (I saw two single mages go in there and were in there for awhile.  No idea why.  I can't imagine two shitty geared mages could even kill one trash mob without running out of mana even if they are exploiting).

Also, they seem to be cracking down on the more obvious places for RMT.  You used to be able to search ebay and find lots of accounts for sale as well as lots of gold listed.  Now, it's harder to find accounts to buy (price seems to have fallen big time) and blizzard is actively shutting down auctions.  Gold prices have also seemed to gone up 75%-100%.  

Blizzard is also going as far as trying to sue the creator of wow-glider (doubt they will win, but I'm not sure).  Wow-glider is a program that the bots use that pretty much automate everything.  I checked out their page the other day and had a decent laugh.  I enjoyed the part of their faq where they say something along the lines of "if we actually wanted to, we could create a bot that would destroy any human player in 1v1 pvp".  I think for the most part that's crap.

on a side note, anyone see the gold farming documentary on mtv?  i believe the guy who made it has a site: www.chinesegoldfarmers.com

[Rico]

ZG mages are typically not paid goldfarmers.  I'm sure it's possible, but compared to botting with multiple computers at a time, AoEing crocs isn't going to be an efficient use of worker time.

[Akanbe-]

That's what I thought as well.

Both of them had china farmer names (unguilded as well) and didn't understand English.  Also it was mid afternoon so they were the only two in there.