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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?
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
For Sale By Owner
One small cottage, large automated gold farm, and one banned account.
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.
In the future, there is only farming.
"Useless organic meatbag" -HK-47
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
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.
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?