59K WoW players banned The biggest mass banning yet for the hugely popular MMORPG. Blizzard has banned 59,000 players for cheating in World of Warcraft in June which removed over 22 million gold from the game's economy. "While we regret having to take such extreme action, these accounts were participating in activities that directly violated World of Warcraft's Terms of Use, including the use of third-party programs to farm gold and items," said WoW's Eyonix. "Such behaviour not only negatively impacts the economy of a realm, it diminishes the achievements of those who play legitimately. We will continue to aggressively monitor all World of Warcraft realms in order to protect the service and our players from the harmful effects of cheating." If you ever wanted proof of how successful World of Warcraft is, then this is it, being able to ban 60,000 of your users in one go. Source: WoW ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This is freaking crazy... that is like $900,000.00 dollars a month that they are throwing out the door. But I guess when you have a million players you can do that... Shesh... :blink:
"The World of Warcraft population was cited as being over 5,000,000 back in December '05. 59,000 accounts less than about 1.2% of that number. We can assume the percentage is probably well below 1% by now. Many of those gold farmers have already set up new accounts with new IP's by now and will be back where they were within a week. I want Blizzard to be successful with this but I just don't see it making much of an impact. As long as people buy farmed gold it's going to be a problem." Found that someone had written. This reminds me of the first (and only one that I played) MMORPG Ultima Online and the way they delt with this problem. They simply banned you. For anyone who played this in the earlier times it took FOREVER to max out different skills, some were damn near impossible, and so banning was feared and had a big impact. Then they changed it to make it easier to gain skill (or level) because people were bitching, and of course that just plays right into the cheaters hands. They can just start a new account and cheat some more to get their characters right back up to the highest levels in no time. They would have to continously moniter and ban people constantly, not once in a while, to actually have an impact *OR* make it so difficult to get a good character that no one would dare. Neither are likely to happen, so as long as you can make money on eBAY off of it and it's addicting as hell, the cheating will continue. Ultima Online ruled all MMORPGs before they ruined it. Such a great game because it was realistic. You go outside of town with no guards and you can be robbed or killed, it was dangerous. It took a long time to get good, and people banded together when they went outside of town ect...Then people complained that it took too long to raise skills and they kept getting killed randomly so they made it all easy and fagged it up with stupid artifact items, item insurance so you never lose stuff, turned up the spawn in the dungeons so that no one goes there, copied the whole world but made it so no one could attack each other, damnit!! I'm still bitter...
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