Blizzard Wields The Banhammer Again

Eurogamer reports that Blizzard is once again clearing house, and this time they mean business. From the article: "Blizzard has banned more than 5400 World of Warcraft players from the game for good as part of plans to clamp down on gold farming and cheating in general. A further 10,700 accounts have been suspended for 'participating in activities that violate the game's Terms of Use, including using third-party programs to farm gold and items.'"

Comments

Encouragement for the survivers

[sinner6]

Won't the farmers that survived the banhammer just be able to increase their prices, as their competitors are at least temporarly out of commision? Plus the supply of gold available for purchase is less so won't prices go up even more?

They should make it entertaining.

[jbeaupre]

Like creating some sort of grim reaper that starts chasing banned folks where ever they go, like in Gauntlet. Only it never gives up and if you're ever touched, you're dead, er, banned forever. Make it move at a nice steady pace so that everyone else is treated to some Pepe Le Pew style comedy. Or make it like a biblical plague. From time to time, folks are cleared out by frogs, boils, flies, etc.

(I've never played, so it may not as good an idea as it sounds)

Re:They should make it entertaining.

[stienman]

It sounds like fun! Make them sick as well, so they can't play at their level, and all the items they own or get during the time of the banishment become infected so they are useless or damaging to other players (makes it hard for them to open a new account and transfer all their loot).

And better yet, they could then be slowly pushed to the banishment zone where their characters slowly turn into NPCs that others can defeat to receive the loot untainted.

I like it!

-Adam

Escape Velocity and Captain Hector

[edremy]

This has already been done by Ambrosia in Escape Velocity. It was shareware- you had 30 days to register. During that time, Captain Hector would occasionally fly by and remind you to register.

After 30 days, Captain Hector got guns and would hunt you down. He wasn't too hard to kill if you had a decent ship, but he'd be back a few minutes later to attack you again. And again. And again. And again...

Re:~0.2% is "clearing house"?

[crabpeople]

"but I think that there are significantly more than 0.2% of WOW accounts involved in "gold farming and cheating in general"."

Really? how much evidence do you have? where are the hard numbers? whats that? you have no numbers? you just pulled that statement out of your ass?

Sure there are farmers in wow - but thinking that they are some measureable menace on the system is just fearmongering. people (especially on american servers ive noticed) LOVE to claim that the immigrants/farmers/non english speakers, are exploiting and farming and are the cause of everyones money problems.

There is a noticeable amount of hypocracy built into this idea. When an english speaker grinds for days to get some ultra rare drop, hes a hardcore game player and should be looked upon as someone who worked really hard for something that they wanted. But, when a non english speaker does the same, hes a farmer.
Blizzard is racist and overly cruel to its users. If you ever had to deal with GMs you would have realized this long ago. There is no farming conspiracy that is destroying wow. its all in peoples heads.