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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. "
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
Well, keep in mind that those accounts were likely being played 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The subscription fees are likely based on some kind of budget where they figure out the average playtime, and hence the average number of players online at a time, and hence the number of servers needed.
So if my guesses are correct, anyone who plays 24/7 is actually costing them more in bandwidth and servers than a normal player, and therefore isn't nearly as valuable to them as someone who only plays a few hours a day tops.
"The amount of intelligence on this planet is a constant. The population is growing." -Cole's Axiom
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.
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.
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