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Blizzard Bans 30,000 from WoW

By Ed Oswald, BetaNews

June 12, 2006, 3:04 PM

Video game manufacturer Blizzard said Friday that it had banned over 30,000 users of World of Warcraft during the month of May in a crackdown on cheating. The online role-playing game has over 6.5 million subscribers and nearly a 50 percent share of the market, according to recent estimates.

The bans remove about 30 million gold from the economies of the virtual worlds in the games called "realms." Blizzard says that the cheating affects the economy of the realm and hurts gameplay for others, as well as violating the game's terms of use.

"We will continue to aggressively monitor all World of Warcraft realms in order to protect the service and its players from the harmful effects of cheating," the company said in a statement. "Please note that selling World of Warcraft content, such as gold, items, and characters, can result in a permanent ban of the involved accounts from World of Warcraft."

Blizzard said most of the reports of "gold farming" came from tips reported to Game Masters, who serve as overseers to ensure the game is running smoothly. Additionally, players mailed evidence of instances of the practice to the game's Hacks Team.

Gold farming is not the first problem for the realms of World of Warcraft. Players in the game suffered from a virtual plague in September of last year. In February, the company created a stir when it prevented a player from creating a GLBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered) friendly guild, saying it could encourage harassment, but then backed off.

Blizzard said it would continue to investigate the cheating, and issue further bans if necessary.

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By laobao

edited Sep 3, 2006 - 12:50 PM

Is there a lawyer in the house?

Blizzard are liars.

They claim from their game site bans are "rare." Yet the truth is they have banned perhaps over 60,000 so far this year.

Blizzard are liars.

They incorporate a spy program that players are extorted to approve or they not allowed to play the game.

Blizzard claims that this spy program is only to detect cheats and hacks. If you believe this I got a bridge in Brooklyn I want you to buy.

Blizzard are owned by the French firm Viviendi.

When you are banned, you are guilty first and it is very hard to prove your innocence against these liars.

I contend that Blizzard's success is leading to the bans. Their game servers are getting slower and slower. What better way than to ban accounts, take their prepaid money, and free up space for game servers.

I was recently banned and have gone through the ringer. I log in from China. I am a teacher. I play the game to relax.

The letter on banning claimed I was doing things that were not true. I don't have cheat codes or bots but I do have "mods." Mods are add on programs that make the game easier to play. For example, CT map will help you move around the world easier using grid map numbers to find your way. Most players have "mods" that have played this game with any seriousness.

The rules forbid mods. But the site called www.worldofwar.net "the unofficial wow site," a site that offers "mod" downloads, claims you won't be banned because of mods downloaded from their site.

So who is the liar here?

America is founded on the principal of "innocence until proved guilty." The French legal system, and the system used by Blizzard is one where "you are guilty first and must prove your innocence."

I would like to see who the hell were the majority of people banned. I bet most were easy targets to steal their money; namely, someone not knowledgeable about their rights, a long way from a legal jurisdiction of California, and one whose mother tongue is not English. What a perfect mark to steal their money. Especially when you are guilty first and must then prove your innocence later.

Blizzard are liars. I know this first hand. They need to brought to court. Discovery must take a serious look into the spy program they have.

All lawyers interested in a thread I started at http://forums.worldofwar....php?p=3767688#poststop

talking about my bannishment is welcome.

Score: 0

By battlepuma

edited Nov 15, 2006 - 1:29 PM

Wow this guy is right i just found out i have been baned for 3rd party crap i dont use. i have a few mods that my guild insited everyone has to make raids doable (ctraid decursive and a few more) and now i cant play wtf

Score: 0

By Robmtx2

edited Jun 13, 2006 - 12:26 PM

I find it funny that because this article has info about World of Warcraft, the Google Ads that get automatically inserted based on content are all advertising GOLD FOR SALE! MUAHAHA

Score: 0

By Paul Lush

posted Jun 13, 2006 - 5:14 AM

Pity Sony are spinless as hell and wont do the same to cheaters/farmers in Everquest 2

Score: 0

By rijp

posted Jun 12, 2006 - 5:26 PM

According to Wow, they can monitor transfer of gold from accounts. So if they see a large transaction (mostly first level characters) in excess of 500 gold (not sure what the actual number is) that's how they can tell when you are "farming" gold. But the key is that people use first level characters to transport the gold, and obviously that gold is being used for purposes of transferring, because at first level you shouldn't have 10,000 gold or whatever in your possession.

That's how you get nailed. but I can transfer to my character 500 gold, with no problem, because I am 60. They won't bat an eyelash.

Maybe people don't want their high level characters banned.. But they ban the account sign on, not each character. So your serial number tied to your account becomes useless.

Score: 0

By bourgeoisdude

posted Jun 12, 2006 - 5:07 PM

30 million gold! Man, that'd be nice...

Score: 0

By The Man

posted Jun 12, 2006 - 5:00 PM

WOW
6.5 million users

Score: 0

By xyzcb1

posted Jun 12, 2006 - 4:56 PM

I remembered back in Diablo 2, cheating is very minimal. You get duplicate method every so often, but it's extreme hard to pull it off. And anything worth anything is rare, that mean there is only 1 of it in the service. So if it dupe, server see it and it will delete the duplicates. It actually making treasure hunting fun. But when d2 expansion came out, everything is base on unique, and all has virtually the same stats and it make duping easy. Not only that, all you have to do is run a pindle bot and it drops everything.

My point of it? If the game economy is base one or two items (for WoW, it's gold), it will promote cheating. They should use the system that was used in original D2. Althought it accepted SOJ in the beginning, but a lot of very powerful items can't get with just SOJ.

Score: 0

By rijp

posted Jun 12, 2006 - 5:19 PM

Diablo 2 allowed OFFLINE / Solo play. That is an ENTIRELY different matter. Blizzard ALLOWED trainers, as they were called, for Diablo, but if you wanted "realm" play you couldn't transfer chacters from solo play to the realm, you had to create a new one.

WOW is ONLY online, and thereofre you can't tamper with the character, and the interface prevents interaction with the desktop programs.

Dupes on Diablo 2, were EASY if you had the right trainer. It would "trick" the software into thinking that when the item was picked up, it was no longer in the backpack or on the ground, and that's how you can make dupes.. the system would "give" you the same item, because some refresh in the background would read from the file, and "see" your contents, and it would therefore appear again.

Diablo 2 "uniques" were not unique at all, since there was no checks or balances with regard to how many were in use. Therefore cheating in Diablo 2 was rampant.. moreso than you think.

BOTS are not allowed in WOW, and that is one way to be 100% certain your character would be banned. They know you are "botting" because your character follows a pattern of behavior.

So your assessment of WOW, is skewed. WOW is gold based, yes, but people will cheat, not for monetary reasons, but for status as well.

GOLD only makes your character that much more powerful, but mages in the game of WOW have very little armor, and don't need it.. their spells can kill a fully armored fighter type from a long distance, and you would never get close enough, even with all the items 50,000 gold buy you.

Do Diablo and WOW there is not comparison, they have the same maker, but are 2 entirely different games.

WOW is built from the ground up to be unique. Cheating is under control, and I think blizzard basically ignores the gold issue, because even they recognize that the gold isn't suddenly created, there is only a set amount of gold to begin with, you aren't some alchemist that makes gold from lead. The gold is mined from the game, and transferred to other characters. Those people just want to be compensated for their hard work.

VERY few accounts, if any get banned for gold reasons, they are banned for other reasons.. Like yelling.. or not playing well with others with respect to items, etc...

Score: 0

By maniakmx3

edited Jun 13, 2006 - 11:17 AM

The only cheat or "hack" persay I've every used in online gameplay was "maphack" for D2 LOD. It just made MFing alot funner and faster. All it did was show you the entire map. So if you have a Sorc, you can easily tele around to get to meph or diablo or somthing, kill him, and take the good stuff haha

Score: 0

By mjm01010101

posted Jun 12, 2006 - 4:50 PM

God I wish I had the time to play these games, support a family, and work. But I don't. Can't kick the kids out quite yet, so out goes MMORPG's.

Score: 0

By rijp

posted Jun 12, 2006 - 6:33 PM

The trick is, make it a family game : )

Invite the kids and the wife to play. Then when you get the entire family hooked, you can just have family time "on-line". hehe...

That's how I do it..

Score: 0

By maniakmx3

posted Jun 13, 2006 - 11:10 AM

I agree! That's what I would do...haha

Score: 0

By Tenoq

posted Jun 12, 2006 - 11:47 PM

That's wrong and sad on so many levels! ;)

Score: 0

By rijp

posted Jun 13, 2006 - 11:52 AM

Well that's how I met my girlfriend... :) She was whipping my a** in some online games, and I won a bet.. so the rest is history..haha.

Score: 0

By Paradise-FH-

posted Jun 12, 2006 - 3:58 PM

hehe. i don't think i'll ever get mmorpgs but i know that it's definetly time for some people to unplug from the matrix.

Score: 0

By PC_Tool

posted Jun 12, 2006 - 3:53 PM

Out of curiosity, before the ban, were the servers lagging a bit?

Not to be a cynic, but could it possibly be that this was only slightly cheaper than the alternative of upgrading their hardware to support the massive amount of users?

Score: 0

By Marticus

posted Jun 13, 2006 - 4:09 AM

The lag varies from day to day with some servers.

As per how many servers exist: I did a quick count and came up with 171 servers. or count for yourself
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/realmstatus/

I play almost daily and still feel lag on my nice high speed cable connection. I ping between 60ms and 300ms on avegage, but on occasion something goes wrong and that rises from 300-2500+ Which is still playable but makes everything horrible.

I sincerly doubt blizzard removed all the accounts to reduce lag. Also, it should be noted that blizzard is banning people all the time, I guess they like to post their numbers sometimes.

Later,

Marticus

Score: 0

By rijp

edited Jun 12, 2006 - 4:53 PM

WOW is not laggy. Iron forge (otherwise affectionately known as LAG Forge) was problematic, because certain parts of the game lag, due to high concentration of players.

WOW has fixed this, and linked the auction houses together, to reduce lag. You can, therefore, go to other less populated cities to buy things from an auction house, and you didn't have to do Ogrimmar or Iron Forge (the 2 biggest cities in the game) to do it. There are times when the servers do get over burdened, one of those catch 22 things. They need more servers to offset the load, but the people need to fill the servers to capacity before they can increase the servers.

WOW has I think 50 maybe 60 servers. I haven't heard specific stats, but some say each server can hold 100,000 users online some say its only 50,000. Overall they have the lag problem under control. It does drag around high areas with lots of people, especially on Sunday night.. that seems to be a popular WOW night.

Score: 0

By Grazer

posted Jun 12, 2006 - 5:54 PM

How many shards on a server in WoW? Because, if it is one shard per server, then the 100k/50k estimate is probably way off. Right now Eve Online holds the record for concurrently logged in users on a single shard at around 25,000.

Score: 0

By rijp

posted Jun 12, 2006 - 6:08 PM

That is also difficult to determine. Each shard would represent an "instance" of a dungeon or place. If you enter an instance, its only you and your group. Technically, you are still on the server, you are just in a different area.

The lag only comes into play when you are around other players.. if you get say 100 people in a given area, you notice that the game seems to slow for a few seconds every so often as its "refreshing" the content.

I don't know about Eve Online, but who is running this contest? I would put Blizzard Servers as a record, because Battle net has about 300,000-500,000 people logged in at any given moment... during peak periods, so that pretty much shatters that record. But WOW doesn't use battle net, it has its own server community.

Where do you get the information for this "single login" record? I don't know where you found it, but I would put my money on blizzard.. besides, the point isn't how many people are logged in on 1 server, its how many people you can accommodate.

Maybe eve only has 1 server, and THAT's why the high rate of logins.

Do you play Eve? Is it laggy?

Score: 0

By Grazer

edited Jun 12, 2006 - 8:05 PM

Eve can be very laggy or very smooth, it really depends on how many people are on the same node as you, and actually it has a cluster of servers, but only one shard. Everyone playing Eve is playing in the same world. It may take you a couple of hours to cross the Eve Universe; but if you know where they are, you can travel to any players location.
Eve probably can't handle as many people per server as WoW, because its servers must constantly talk to each other to maintain a single-shard game world.

Score: 0

By Paradise-FH-

posted Jun 12, 2006 - 3:59 PM

i think "conspiracy theorist" might be more accurate than "cynic"

Score: 0

By DigitalSin

posted Jun 12, 2006 - 3:19 PM

This is one of the things that destroyed Ultima Online (besides a new dev or content team every 2 weeks to replace the previous). I'm glad Blizzard is still taking a hard stance on gold farming\selling and trying to keep the economies in check.

Score: 0

By psycros

posted Jun 12, 2006 - 3:16 PM

They should just ban all Chinese and Korean logins. Problem solved.

Score: 0

By DigitalSin

posted Jun 12, 2006 - 3:17 PM

or the Americans buying the gold

Score: 0

By rijp

edited Jun 12, 2006 - 3:38 PM

Well I bought gold. I fail to see what the problem is. Cheating to me is like when you hack your character and give him super powers. That's cheating. SOMEONE mined the gold, it just doesn't appear out of thin air.

They transfer the gold to me, because I pay 20 bucks for the request. That's not cheating. Cheating would be if I had some program (using your ultima example) to hack the program. WOW doesn't allow hacking, ultimata had much easier ways to modify the character. Wow prevents this.

People do find clever ways to cheat, but buying gold from an online guild that their sole function is to mine it, and make a profit, I don't see a problem with it.

if Wow has 10,000 gold pieces on a server. I obviously didn't get the gold myself. So I pay a guild to give me 500. There is still 10,000 gold on the server, it has just changed hands. I don't see this as a big deal.

If they somehow exceed the level limit, have armor that is super powerful (That's cheating).. and that's another point, items in Wow are soul bound. Which means you can't trade them, you can't give them to another character, even yours. So that prevents simple "hand me downs" from proliferating the server. Gold has to be mined, either by myself, or someone else. Someone else has the time to mine, I don't, so I buy some gold to help my cause.

Yes I am aware this is against WOW rules. My account, if banned, would be my fault, and since its proudly displayed on their TOS, I wouldn't have a case to appeal. I understand that.

I just don't think buying gold is cheating. Wow views it one way, I view it another, considering its my money, and gold isn't being printed like money. I am in essence paying a group to mine gold for me.

Score: 0

By Marticus

edited Jun 13, 2006 - 4:21 AM

I don't look at buying gold as cheating. But lets look at how it does affect everyone on the server.

Farmer farms his gold from a good area that drops something that sells well on the auction house. He then gets his Gold from someone with a lot of spare gold browsing the Auction house.

Once this starts happening, these Farmers start selling rare items for 500, 1000, 2000 Gold. And the only people who can afford these items are the people who buy gold from the farmers.

The farmers now practicaly camp the unique monsters and rare spawns so that no one can gain access for a chance at killing them. All so that the farmers can sell these items on the auction house for Heavly inflated prices, just to sell that money back to the people who are buying their auctions.

This is a very bad thing for people who do play a lot and want to earn their items. Blizzard made the game as fair as they could with out people selling gold.

I understand you know its wrong, and I know a few people who have bought gold. I'm just letting you know that it effects everyone else once the farmers take hold.

Score: 0

By rijp

posted Jun 13, 2006 - 12:05 PM

OK, I do see your point. Maybe they can do something so that those people camping can only gain 1 unique item from the same area a day.. or whatever. Put some restriction on it.

Plus, they do auction the items, and if they sit for a few days, the price will go down.

But you do make a very valid point that they are making a killing from people willing to spend the money for items they find.

But just like real life, to the victor go the spoils. They spend the time and energy to get the items, and those of us that want those items, we want them bad enough we are willing to pay for it.

BMW's and Mercedes sell for a premium. The people with the larger salaries or have the ability to buy one can get them. The rest of us have to settle for a used one, or for some other type of car. Those items are available, and you don't *NEED* them to survive. They are just nice to have.

I want to have some nice stuff so I can be competitive when I fight the horde. I am tried of having a disadvantage.

On a side note, I did have a very nice 60 warrior. I had krol blade, shield of the dead, and some other stuff I did find myself. the first two items are purple, which I bought. 2000 gold, which as a player you know 2000 gold on WOW is like having a milliong dollars in real life. Its basically unheard of, unless as you say you camp sites and sell the rare and elite items.

I agree with your assessment, but how would we go about changing this? They ban accounts, but for another 30 bucks you can simply get another account, or buy one from ebay for people that aren't using them anymore..

But this was a very good post. Thank you :)

Score: 0

By Gunzip

posted Jun 12, 2006 - 3:38 PM

Well, I'm not going to be all "holier then thou" here, but I think I would define cheating as doing something to gain advantage that involves doing things "external" to the game context... Not sure if that sounds right, but buying gold *outside* of the game, I do view as cheating. Am I going to report someone? No... That's their business and if they want to do, that's fine. Me? I don't think its right... Not starting a war RIJP or anyone else, just an opionion here.

Gunzip

Score: 0

By rijp

posted Jun 12, 2006 - 4:52 PM

Well thank you Gunzip. I see your point, that its outside the perview of other players. I can play and work at my character, but I feel sometimes I want to "catch up" a little, because I don't have time to dedicate to my character, so I "buy" gold to just give me stuff I buy in the game anyway.

Epic items, uniques, and other "blues" cannot be bought, because once picked up, they are "soul" bound, which means they can't be transfered to other characters.. but Gold does help for things like healing potions, upgrades that I can buy from auction house..

I do try to mine my own gold, its tough, but then if it were easy, what would be the point to playing? It would get boring quickly.

Score: 0

By Gunzip

posted Jun 12, 2006 - 7:15 PM

Yeah, I hear you. I've actually thought about the buying option myself. I want an epic mount and I'm broke. It's either I spend the time grinding or questing to get the cash, or just bail and buy some gold. It's interesting because on the one hand I do think it's cheating, on the other hand, I *really* don't have the time to spend accumulating the gold. How much is my time worth??... What am I going to do? Probably just keep grinding till I get there, but it's food for thought and I think about it plenty. :)

Score: 0

By patrykstencel

posted Jun 12, 2006 - 5:31 PM

When you have people farm gold then they have a lot more then everybody else. That in itself isn't the problem. It's when you start selling it and it works its way into the economy you have inflation. The same way real economy works. So what ends up happening is that people who play honestly have to work harder to get more hold to be able to buy things in the auction houses.

Score: 0

By rijp

posted Jun 12, 2006 - 6:01 PM

Well, I can agree with that.

Still, as long as people have ways of offerring to buy gold, then I will still do it.

They are banning the people SELLING gold, not buying gold. So if they keep selling it, I am buying it.. as I need it.

Right now, I am not even playing, I am waiting for the upgrade. Which could be who knows how long.

Score: 0

By KohlyKohl

edited Jun 12, 2006 - 11:33 PM

You guys are missing the point here. The same farmer that sold you the 1000 gold, is also selling you that Epic Item you just purchased for 1000 gold. See how that works? Now he just goes and sells it all over again. The problem with this? It drives the price up. When this game first came out I could buy and Epic for under 100 gold, now it can cost 3000 gold, because someone can buy the gold with little ease and that justifies the price to them. If you have to work many hours to get 50 - 100 gold, you are not going to pay 1000 for a an Epic. Its economics at work, and gold farming, its throwing it out of wack. Now like another mentioned that he was thinking of buying Gold, is doing so because of gold farming. Its a 2 fold idead that goes full circle. Without Gold farming this game would be more fun in my opinion and I might actually play it again, but I doubt it.

Score: 0

By bourgeoisdude

posted Jun 13, 2006 - 7:42 PM

Ditto!

Score: 0

By Marticus

posted Jun 13, 2006 - 4:26 AM

I agree completly.

And we all know how hard it is to make 1,000 gold, but if you don't, imagine working for around 30 hours in a game for one item.

A game mind you!

Score: 0

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