In a mere 25 days, Blizzard managed to ban about 59,000 World of Warcraft accounts.  This topped the 30,000 or so for the May bannings.  From the horse’s mouth:

As part of our efforts to eliminate cheating from World of Warcraft, we recently banned approximately 59,000 World of Warcraft accounts in the month of June, and with that removed well over 22 million gold from the total economy across all realms. 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. Such behavior 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.

Once again, I maintain that this is excessive, unsubstantiated, and perhaps motivated by corporate greed (i.e., Blizzard wants a less expensive hosting bill).

This entry was posted on Friday, July 28th, 2006 at 7:53 pm and is tagged with world of warcraft realms, corporate greed, extreme action, month of june, world of warcraft, blizzard, third party, economy, gold. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.

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