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Blizzard Banhammer Kills 18k
Gamespot reports that Blizzard has banned 18,000 accounts from their popular World of Warcraft MMOG. From official site: " A majority of these accounts were found to be using third-party programs to farm gold and items. Such actions can severely impact the economy of a realm and the overall game enjoyment for all players. We will continue to actively monitor all World of Warcraft realms in order to protect the service and its players from the negative effects of cheating. Please note that selling World of Warcraft content, such as gold, items, and characters, can result in the permanent removal of the involved accounts from World of Warcraft. "
Does this mean we get another "WoW hits 5 million subscribers" news topic in a few weeks?
They should have listened to Celine Dion, get a nice rootkit as a bonus and be able to cheat without Blizzard's Warden client to detect them!
Silly cheaters!
Yes, 18000 people sure sounds like a lot, but since they just past 5 million subscriptions this is just a drop in the bucket.
And I'm sure it will only be days before the gold farmers they banned will be back up and running with fresh bought copies of the game. The draw of easy cash it just too alluring for these people to just stop. I'm not really sure how Blizzard is going to stop this.
Perhaps a better way is to ban the credit card that's being used to pay for the account. But that's not always easy as they can use a game card bought in a store.
Anyone have a solution to this problem? Or is it really a non-problem?
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
I wonder if running WoW on linux with wine/cedega could somehow confuse their hack protection into thinking your cheating some how. I am not sure how their detection works... ;)
I guess ill find out next time i try to log in
For Sale By Owner
One small cottage, large automated gold farm, and one banned account.
It probably should be noted that this was "Over the last three months." But I'm not surprised Blizzard is going after the gold farmers. Annoyances to players aside, most of the gold farmers will simply buy another copy of the game (with a new serial number) to continue their farming operation which in turn earns Blizzard a bit more money. After all, if a copy of W.O.W. cost $30, and even if only 5000 of those 18000 bought another copy, thats still another $150,000 bucks to Blizzard. Probably the salarys of 3 full-time GMs right there.
Damn I wish I could get a roll like that, 18k dead in one fell swoop. I'm guessing their Uber-1337 peerless gossamer armor didn't help much with that one.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
Well, the naysayer's arguement is "I can't do quests sometimes because gold farmers are parked there 24/7"
Who are the farmers selling their equipment to if "nobody can play the game" because of them?
This means that Blizzard decided that the gameplay experience for their rule-abideing customers was worth more than the quarter of a million dollars a month in subscription fees that they will lose from this. Either they really care about the player community, they're only killing off a token number of accounts to make it look like they care, or they're fairly confident these 18k accounts will just get re-opened under a different name tomorrow.
I dunno how long it takes to max a character on WoW, but on my MUD it was easily two weeks of 9-5 playing :O
In the future, there is only farming.
"Useless organic meatbag" -HK-47
Blizzard doesn't need to stop gold farmers. Blizzard needs to keep the appearance of doing so. If blizzard doesn't maintain that appearance then those who start whining because others have more than them (regardless of whether they are hurting for anything themselves) chirp up.
All this does is guarantee another 18,000 game purchases, and that is money in blizzard's pocket.
I think it's somewhat less in WoW, if you know what you're doing. Maybe a week minimum, though I'm honestly not sure as I haven't played it since the closed beta.
Meanwhile, in a different game I used to play, it took over a month of 24/7 training (which you can generally only accomplish by macros and scripts, which are illegal if AFK) to get to level 100 (while not the max as there is no cap, it's pretty much the peak right now).
it took my brother, an experienced player with no job/life at the time, a little under 2 months of heavy playing to get 60
;)
and he played more than 8 hours a day
it took me almost 9 months but i have a life im supposed to worry about
It is a problem, but the problem is actually with the game design. Games that make gold and rare items unneccessarily hard to get are what create these markets. All you need to do is to limit the power of gold. If you want to keep gold a rarity and it is mainly needed to buy weapons/armor, then allow a second way of obtaining the same items either through crafting, or quests, or some other accessable option. You basically kill the entire value of gold because players have more than one way to get what they want and they all revolve around GAMEPLAY, not money.
Gold is just a cheesy way to handle economies in MMO's. Gold has always been basically bullshit in every RPG, think about itif given enough time you could kill 20,000,000 rats/bunnies/slimes and get all the money you need in even the earlest RPG's... what you need is a new system that is more like the real world with multiple ways of coming about weapons/items/armor.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
Wow! 0.36% of users were earning enough to severely impact the economy?
I've observed market fluctuations of more than 25%, and I never considered it abnormal.
I guess those farmers were earning over 50 times the normal rate.
Seriously, I've heard lots of people complain about "farmers", but I think mostly
they're confusing them with run of the mill jerks.
Most farmers (toons) play 24/7.
Farmers are going to be level 60, and farmers are going to farm valuable stuff.
If you see someone camping a level 20 named, they're either a jerk or an idiot, not a farmer.
-- Should you trust authority without question?
Try resizing your browser window there, Chief.
Almost a year ago, I helped found the largest and strongest economic special interest group in World of Warcraft. We have representatives on nearly every server and constantly monitor and share information on WoW's economy.
It's no secret to us that "gold farmers" are the dominant force in the WoW economy. Several of our key discoveries in the game have come from watching the habits and patterns of gold farmers across server lines. When a patch changes an aspect of the game relating to the economy, the gold farmers are quick to react.
I'm glad to see Blizzard cracking down on this, although it seems to be directly related to their new "anti-virus and anti-hack" portal system, causing me to think its less about the real "gold farmers" and more about little Timmy trying out a program his friend gave him to run a little faster (a.k.a. Speedhacks.
A majority of these accounts were found to be using third-party programs to farm gold and items
There is nothing wrong with the side-economy of gold-farming in and of itself. In fact, it is just a natural extention of the MMORPG, and if Blizzard killed it by force, it would just be making the game less realistic. In the real world, people with money pay people with less money to do their dirty work for them, why would the online world be any different? Its a game, not a Utopia.
The whole point of the crackdown is that these people were using bots to farm the gold, which basically means making money out of nothing, because they did not even have to be at their PCs to be farming the gold. Now *that* is not like real life, and that should be stopped.
WoW actually does a suprisingly good job of limiting the secondary market. A vast majority of good gear drops in instances, so the mobs can't be monopolized, and is Bind on Pickup, and therefore can't be sold. Most of it is not that difficult to obtain either, it just takes a couple instance runs to get them. Honestly, once you get to higher level stuff you just can't buy anything that's worthwhile, it's all loot.
Tradeskills are another matter. I can see sinking TONS of gold into materials for high end tradeskilling.
The best solution to solving all of the problems with the gold farmers is to have a CAPTCHA feature that ANY player has to answer before getting anything. It worked with web-based games such as Outwar and Kings of Chaos. Why not WoW?
That's a HUGE incentive for Blizzard to ban farmers/cheaters--they'll go out and buy another copy of the game (barring piracy). Why would they put a stop to guaranteed repeat customers?
Perhaps, but you have to realise that these guys are not looking to get the best gear.
/played for a group to make out a single mage to level 60.
I shit you not, it took 3 days
I'd have to agree. The bind on drop was a genius idea. I'm pretty sure it will always keep the economy rather stable. I'm thinking a monthly tax on guilds based on size would also be a nice gold sink also. No real reason than to limit the amount of gold floating around.
No offense, but if it took your brother 2 months to reach level 60 in WoW he simply didn't focus on exping. A hardcore exp player can hit level 60 on any class/race/side combo in less than a week easy.
People who pay the farmers real cash for ingame cash?
That idea is older than dirt anyway. A few other RPGs have NODROP items - in Anarchy Online, for example, a lot of dungeon loot is NODROP. The bind on equip, though, is an interesting idea. I don't know why exactly they put it in the game, but I guess they wanted to stop "hand-me-down" type stuff from happening.
Bare in mind this is 18000 cumulative over several months, this wasn't like they busted the big cartel in Gotham or something. Personally I'm glad, I've seen these bots running in the game and most players are at the concensus that when they see one, they will report the player, and from what I've seen, the player gets banned. Bliz makes 50 bucks (actually more maybe, they also get the days left on the character's subscription too. For me it's aggrivating to see someone running a bot to build up a character that I will pvp against one day - it's like playing Diablo an not hacking. :\
You can get 15 minutes of fame, but you can go down in history for infamy.
It wasn't 18,000 TODAY, it was 18,000 over the past three months. They kill 200 a day, FTFA. Which means, they could still be easily above 5 million. In factm I'd bet they are still over, as they just reached 5 million at the end of these 18k bannings.
Want to find other gamers to play board and role playing game
Quiet fool! The makers of Star Wars Galaxies could be listening as we speak!
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I don't think Blizzard developed Banhammer 18k. I believe that was THC.
i wonder if this had anything to do with that patch they had that checked if people were running 3rd party programs, but they said wouldn't send any of the reports back to blizzard themselves.
Yeah, NODROP can be a good idea, but in AO it's used in a lot of annoying places. For example, if something can be bought, what's the point in making it NODROP? A high level char can simply give the money away and bypass the NODROP... Still, AO has things that I love, like leets (the best mob in any game, and yes, that includes nethack).
First thing I would try is implementing inflation. As more gold is farmed, gold becomes worth less. This will create an equilibrium where the amount of gold in the game will not affect the gameplay because it will not become insanely easy to buy items.
This would lead though to only the gold farmers being able to farm enough gold. Everyone else would have to buy from them. So how do you solve this.
Well, maybe it should be fairly easy to kill or steal from the gold farmers. The more gold they farm, the easier they are to kill or steal from. Stealing might be implemented such that they have to store the gold somewhere. Say, in pots. And each pot can only hold 100 gold. They have to place these pots somewhere, maybe in their house. Well they can't be in their house when they are farming gold, can they? Well I suppose they could have two characters, with one or more guarding the gold. But consider that a party could take one guy or maybe even a small group and you have a situation where those who have lots of gold saved up are likely to lose it. So by being a gold farmer you make yourself a tempting target, and thus the balance of the world is restored.
the point of nodrop purchase items is to provide a money sink, it also makes it imposable to easilly upgrade by just selling and trading up.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
It's unclear whether the 18000 were from just the US-based servers or from their whole operation. It's known that the 5 million subscriber number includes all of their servers in the US, Europe, and Asia.
Just apply what you wrote to life, and you can see what life really sucks for most of us. If only real life gave us fun ways to get what we wanted, then we wouldn't have to powergame just to get gold just to buy things. :-)
-Jeff
Please learn the difference between a dissenting opinion and a troll before you moderate.
You know, I've seen this attitude before, and it disgusts me. Not the goldfarming attitude (though I find that disgusting, too), but the attitude that since you pay a subscription fee, you're entitled to do whatever you want to in a game.
First of all, you're flat out wrong. If you read your EULA, you will find that there are a lot of things (probably a lot more than you even realize) that are outright prohibited. That in itself is enough to show that "It's my subscription money" doesn't mean jack when it comes to you doing stupid things. Every game I know of prohibits using 'bots in the EULA.
Let me put it another way that maybe you can understand. Paying an annual fee for a driver's license doesn't give you the right to do whatever the hell you want on the freeways. If you deliberately make the roads unsafe for other drivers, you'll be banned from driving. Paying a monthly fee for a game license doesn't give you the right to do whatever the hell you want in the game. If you deliberately make the game not fun for other players, you'll be banned from playing. Capiche?
All that aside, there's another principle at work, too. When you sign up to play an MMORPG, you're also implicitly agreeing to become part of that community. As such, you have certain social responsibilities as a part of that community, the primary of which IMHO is to not be an asshole. Even if the EULA has no prohibitions in it at all, your comment would still be flawed. Sure, maybe you could technically do whatever you wanted, but if any but an extremely small number of people did, the game would quickly lose its community and you'd be left with nothing but 'bots playing. No one will pay a monthly fee just for their 'bots to play with other people's 'bots, and the game would quickly die.
Hey, maybe that's what you want. But it's obviously not what Blizzard and other WoW players want, and I for one hope they wield their banhammer a lot more often.
As for goldfarming, it's just plain stupid, and I'll never understand why a market for this stuff exists in the first place. If I'm paying a monthly fee to play a game, it will be a cold day in hell before I pay other people money on top of that to play the game for me. And anyone who buys in-game items with out-of-game money is a fool in my book. But then, I come from the era of pencil-n-paper RPGs. If I were a GM and someone offered me cash for their character to get in-game wealth or items, I would quickly find a creatively gruesome way to irrevocably kill off their character, and would likely never invite that person to play again.
Perhaps a better idea than outright banning these people's accounts would be to make them waste their time. Slowly nerf their characters until the game eventually becomes practically unplayable. After all, if we're going to let real life affect our in-game worlds, why should such effects only be positive?
I'm sorry if my harsh opinion keeps you from having fun, but it's for the best to the majority of players. Perhaps you should try a more farming-friendly game instead, such as Progress Quest. I think you'll find it infinitely more fun that these boring old games that make you work for what you get.
Well, the naysayer's arguement is "I can't do quests sometimes because gold farmers are parked there 24/7"
With a mage, its pretty easy to beat this. I don't know of some/most/all of the farmers use some kind of macro to auto-attack then not pay attention to whats going on, but on many many occasions I've found someone farming an area, saying random-word phrases now and then, and who doesn't appear to speak any English.
If its a mob that I need to kill and they're hoarding them, I'll just use my instant fire-blast spell to tap the mob, frost nova to hold it in place, then sit back and watch as the farmer finishes the mob off, then loot away. Rinse and repeat. The fact that this sometimes goes on for 5+ minutes without a word or action from them proves to me that they are not paying attention to whats going on, and are obviously using some kind of bot to farm the area. I've not been wrong yet. (I always observe them first.)
And they said zombies weren't real!
It's much more fun to find botters in a mud, because you can send text to the screen to set off their macros and expose them. Not sure how it works in WoW, but I can say " has died." and then "Too heavy!" to get him to travel back to town to try and tell the loot. Good fun.