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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. "
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.
for a while there tons of "farmers" were trying to exploit a dupe bug on dungeon entrances by going in and out of a dungeon. It causes a new instances of the dungeons to be created and alot of work sending character information for hundreds of players back and forth between servers, each second. It was actually crashing servers and making whole dungeons/regions inaccessible which obviously caused EVERYONE some problems
and in the event they were successful with duping they could double their gold, and double their count on rare items (im not sure how often this actually worked, but it didnt stop them from trying)
several (an i even mean SEVERAL of the SAME ITEM, from the SAME PLAYER) expensive items were showing up in Auction house for a 1/3 or less of their usual cost.
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.
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