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Blizzard Bans 100,000 Cheaters In Massive "World of Warcraft" Ban Spree
MojoKid writes: Like many MMORPGs, World of Warcraft can be a grind. To sidestep the time commitment required to continually level up a character, gather resources, improve skills, or whatever else is desired, some gamers turn to bots, software that automates the process. The only problem is, Activision Blizzard isn't so keen on this behavior and has dropped the ban hammer hard on gamers who've been using them. Activision Blizzard didn't specify exactly how many people it booted, saying only that it was a "large number of World of Warcraft accounts." However, a screenshot of a conversation between a player, Game Master, and Activision Blizzard employee suggests that over 100,000 World of Warcraft accounts were identified and booted.
I think that they are making a choice between short term profits and long term customer satisfaction
Maybe this leaves a market segment open to people who want to run games as large scale hack-a-thons, but Blizzard does not seem to want to be that company
Wherever You Go, There You Are
That might lead a jaded person to believe that they are simply pumping revenue
Wherever You Go, There You Are
It appears to be a six month ban, not permanent. Also, although it's hard to be certain, part of the motivation may have been to combat farming of honor points in PvP, which apparently has been rampant. There are cheat programs designed to help players do just that in PvP, so it could be that Blizzard found a reliable way to detect those programs running, and laid down the ban-hammer on everyone caught using it.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Normally I'd agree with you, but if you look at the kind of things that these bots do, it turns out that the bots are not a symptom of bad players, but of a bad game. Repetitive skill-less tasks that take forever and are required to get to the promised exciting parts of the game. No wonder that people want to bypass that. And this doesn't hurt other players at all, this is just the grind before you can even think about what competition means in a game like that. Who cares how long another player has been grinding?
Well, Blizzard does. Because for Blizzard the grind is simply an extension of the time needed to play through, which is an extension of the time the player pays for the subscription, which in turn may mean that the player still subscribes when the next expansion is finally ready, which increases the chance that the player stays p(l)aying.
But don't think this is about cheating. It isn't.
Instead of banning them, give people a settable-but-not-clearable checkbox:
- "I won't cheat", if you're caught then you're subject to a ban
- "I might/will cheat", fine, but you can't run multiplayer with others who won't
Heck, go one step simpler- no checkbox, but if you're caught cheating you can only go multiplayer with others who were caught. But the flag clears itself after 'X' amount of "time served".
I am not a sig.
The smart thing would be to sort the players. But the bot-users and hackers on one set of servers, and the genuine players on another set. Get money from both camps, without them disturbing each other.
1) Each month you get a certain "allowance" and hours played deduct from that. Any unused allowance is turned into some form of in-game loot (gold or random enchants, or credit for next month). Therefore when you aren't able to play due to work or holiday for some time, you don't feel you've wasted the months' subscription. This also means you can avoid some grind and gold farming becomes less necessary to pander to: you farm gold already, or play and get much more gold by actively playing than you would when you can't.
2) Self hosting servers. Hell, if their scares about how the protocol would be hacked and their servers compromised for cheaters were relevant (See SMB and the Intel BIOS for why it's a load of crap), have two protocols, at least different interpreters, therefore compromised differently, and use one for the self-host and the other for official walled garden games. Banning accounts merely becomes a "You can't cheat on our systems, play with others who don't care".
3) Cut the grind. Maybe by making a single line of synergistic abilities easy. The grind would come when you need to up the other abilities to get a well rounded character that doesn't lose if they're not playing a well balanced and cohesive party. Two problems fixed here:
a) you need all archetypes playing together, and this can be hard without including people you don't know, hence cheaters get "in". Making the grind game rounding out your character means experienced players can gravitate away from forced co-op with random strangers and the demand for all usual players to organise together to play at the same time. You can do without one or two of them for sessions.
b) you can speed up the grind without unbalancing. Those who grinded already have more varied skills, so they won't have to restart.