Blizzard bans 59,000 WOW accounts

By Patrick Caldwell, GameSpotPosted Jul 26, 2006 4:56 pm PT

The MMORPG developer tries to thwart gold farming and other unauthorized actions with thousands of account terminations; millions of gold also removed.

The number of World of Warcraft accounts that developer Blizzard banned in June has reached about 59,000, according to a Blizzard employee's post on the game's official message boards. More than 22 million gold--the game economy's currency--has been plucked from all the realms, the representative added.

The user accounts that were banned had violated World of Warcraft's end-user agreement. Among other restrictions, it prohibits the use of third-party programs to "farm" gold and items--a practice that lets characters acquire gold and equipment through self-running computer programs.

"Such behavior not only negatively impacts the economy of a realm, it diminishes the achievements of those who play legitimately," the representative said. "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."

Blizzard urged those who traverse the fields of Azeroth to report suspicious activity to the company.

A fellow maker of massively multiplayer online role-playing games, Square Enix, recently announced similar account bans, albeit in much smaller numbers. After cracking-down on 250 Final Fantasy XI users in June, the company handed down 2,000 bans and suspensions this month.

118 Comments

  • jeffv541

    Posted Oct 22, 2009 3:46 pm PT

    59,000 people who can live their lives again.

    www.wowdetox.com

  • MikeMoose

    Posted Sep 2, 2006 4:49 pm PT

    wow,that is a lot of bans.

  • magicmo

    Posted Aug 7, 2006 6:20 pm PT

    You could ban everyone and they would still come back. Crack is addicting ya know.

  • hafaholo

    Posted Aug 6, 2006 2:01 pm PT

    good work blizzard, Keep up the banning!!!

  • westonti

    Posted Aug 2, 2006 6:19 pm PT

    Impatience and desire for instant gratifaction feeds the market for those kinds of services. Powerleveling and gold brokering services need to be cut off from the demand end. Peer pressure would work.

  • Eadara

    Posted Aug 1, 2006 5:49 pm PT

    This just in 59 thousand people buy new accounts in one day. Blizzard makes 2 and a half million dollars

  • thepeter

    Posted Jul 29, 2006 9:09 pm PT

    YES!!!!

  • Troika

    Posted Jul 29, 2006 2:32 pm PT

    Very well; then they banned around 0.84% of their current population. A bold move but, as I said earlier, hardly a drop in the ocean. I believe they're going to need to keep doing it on a weekly basis to make an impact.

  • Eadara

    Posted Jul 29, 2006 1:15 pm PT

    actually Wow is cited to have close to 7 million accounts

  • Ch3ckUr6

    Posted Jul 29, 2006 2:23 am PT

    world of warcraft gold
    Visit Web Site 300 Gold 1000 Gold With Extra Bonus Power Leveling. 24/7 Fast Delivery.

    Ads like this are what causes it. They aren't exactly few and far between. Just search "world of warcraft" on gamespot...

    Or just go to the PC homepage... at gamespot... for another.

    Maybe you should add that to you article Patrick.

  • Troika

    Posted Jul 28, 2006 1:22 pm PT

    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.

  • o0pIumM

    Posted Jul 28, 2006 9:25 am PT

    Funny you mention that curly, I sent a message to google asking them if they could do something about allowing targeted ads for something that the game maker has deemed 'illegal' in the game community. Hehe I basically got a form letter. So much for google not being 'evil'

  • curlys_world

    Posted Jul 28, 2006 5:44 am PT

    The funny thing is, if you're not logged into GameSpot whilst reading this post, the commercials at the bottom of the page still tell you that they're having a sale on WOW gold, and the website to visit!

  • rulo_rezn0r

    Posted Jul 28, 2006 1:38 am PT

    59 k is a lot...my god
    lol, final fantasy IX only banned 2k, so by this we can see the difference of population
    SQUARE, stop doin games like FFXI!

  • God1111

    Posted Jul 28, 2006 12:53 am PT

    ive heard that when blizzard bans you, they dont just do it by cdkey, but they also ban you through ip and whatnot.. they go to the extreme to make sure you don't come back.. thats what ive heard atleast

  • SnuffDaddyNZ

    Posted Jul 28, 2006 12:06 am PT

    I totally support the banning of this practice because the server I play on, the auction house has turned to ****.

    It's a waste of time though as the companies that do this can afford to buy a new copy of the game, and considering you can level to 60 in less than a month it's only a temporary fix.

    People should stop supporting these companies by stopping buying their gold, that's the only real way to stop gold farming.

    At level 60 you can make at least 200 gold per week legitimately, so the only reason I can see that people would buy the gold is if they want to control the economy in the game. All the good gear is soulbound, and once you get your level 60 mount gold becomes pretty worthless.

  • claycarnac

    Posted Jul 27, 2006 11:21 pm PT

    To 'projection72' , if you didn't farm so much gold to be injected into your realms economy then weapons *wouldn't* cost 100k gold.... I have never seen a weapon for that kind of ridiculous price on my home realm, which suggests we don't have as much of a problem with gold farmers as the realm you are on.

    And it's not playing the game the best you can to use 3rd party programs, it's playing it the easiest you can and the most boring in my opinion you may aswell not be playing at all... oh wait, you might be banned by now so you're probably not any more.

  • Damo1987

    Posted Jul 27, 2006 9:54 pm PT

    dam this sounds harsh becaus i just lost my diablo2 acc and i lost heaps much like the wow players did but i got caught for map hacking of magic find runs still it must have hurt wow employees to see that much profit lost ouchhh

  • projection72

    Posted Jul 27, 2006 8:46 pm PT

    WTF? farming is not cheating..its playing the game,the best you can..
    and its why i do it, 3rd party programs just ROCK! I have around 800k of gold now..and spending all the time..giving NOOBS money all the time,helping guilds buy things,they would never ,ever get..cause the cost of things is way to high..100k gold for a weapon..god that sucks.. if things didnt cost so much,we wouldnt farm gold! but i have to say,i don't farm items,or elites things to sell..just money

  • poyupop

    Posted Jul 27, 2006 8:44 pm PT

    I am happy that they took the time to find _ALL_ these gold farmers... now if they can use the same energy to fix their server issues... Ok, I have a chance to change servers... but I have to spend $25 per toon, hmm that equals $125 for all my charactors to go to another server that will possibly have the same problems? Whatever... the servers will be the same. As far as I am concerned... blizzard is no better than the farmers that they banned. Atleast with $125 I was able to get 1200g.

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