Square and Blizzard Drop The Banhammer

Gamespot has the news that Square has banned some 2000 accounts from FFXI, and Eurogamer reports that Blizzard has banned 59,000 accounts from World of Warcraft. The bans come as game publishers continue to attempt to crack down on Real Money Traders in their titles. From the FFXI article: "The news follows Square Enix's crackdown of 250 accounts in June over money-farming and real-money trading, which is the practice of selling in-game currency for cash in the real world. Concerns over real-money trading prompted the Japanese government--particularly worried about large-scale money-mining operations in video games--to launch its own investigation last week."

Wrong Headline

Should be something like: Game companies expect revenue increase as banned gold farmers buy new accounts...

Same Crap, Different Day

Re:Wrong Headline

Yeah really... The one thing I have to give to Eve is it's mature attitude towards PvP... players actualy hunt down the farmers and disrupt there trade. I would like to see a WoW player care that much about the health of there game.

Re:Wrong Headline

There was some of that on my server, back when I played. But certainly not enough. It didn't take long before it was simply too dangerous to go into the farmer's territory. If you tried to tag mobs before they could kill them, they'd call in their farmer friends of the other faction to start killing you over and over.

Re:Wrong Headline

A lot of WoW players do care about the game and farming just as much. Unfortunately the game is not setup the same way EVE is and there isn't a mechanism to allow anyone to go out and kill/impede the farmers. Some PVP servers may allow for a small amount of policing but the majority of servers don't even have that.

Re:Wrong Headline

To police effectively in WoW, you have to be able to police your own side. It's too hard to tell who's farming on the other side when they're immediately hostile, and you can't talk to them anyway.

I've been on guild "Squish the Farmer" events, but all to often it turns into a pitched battle because people on the other side misinterpret your assault on the farmers. Anyway, that's of extremely limited utility anyway, because the economics of the sides only impact each other through the little-utilized neutral auction houses.

Re:Wrong Headline

Except that in order to play on the WoW US realms you need a US account, and you can't interact between the different segments of the world (US/EU/China/Korea/etc.), so in order to farm gold for US buyers they'd need a US box.

Good, Ban Them

Back when I played WoW, the server I was on was pretty much owned by gold farmers. They drove up the prices on everything, and unfortunately a lot of players just went along with it. People would buy in-game currency with real money to pay for things in the game sold by those selling the in-game money they got from those inflated sales. A vicious circle, but I guess some players felt it was worth it.

Oh Noes!!!

Now what will I do?? - Oh wait - I know, I'll keep ignoring WoW like I have been since it first came out! How ANYONE can support Blizzard after the whole Bnetd thing is TOTALLY beyond me. Screw them. Screw them right in the ear.

Re:Oh Noes!!!

I really don't see the point of going nazi over one of the few cases where it was actually semi-legitimate.

1) Arguing that bnetd enabled piracy is dumb; pirated copies could still be played offline, over a LAN, or through other workarounds. Furthermore, the bnetd developers offered to add support for verifying CD keys against a Blizzard server but were ignored (yes, individuals running bnetd could hack the source to disable the check, but that'd make it pretty obvious what they were up to, and Blizzard could've nailed them, not bnetd itself).

2) People are banned from bnet for other things, such as cheating, and there's a fair population of jerks on bnet. Someone with a valid license may want to play online but be unable or unwilling to use bnet. I own a legit copy of war3 but I'd definitely rather play with friends on a private server.

3) Blizzard's (well, I think it's Vivendi's) management and legal department already had a reputation among a lot of people for being grand assholes, so people weren't inclined to give them any benefit of the doubt.

I'll agree it's not the WORST use of the DMCA, but it's still pretty indefensible. People have a reason for holding this particular grudge.

Re:Oh Noes!!!

How is this a troll? This is a very important opinion and one that I support 100%. Blizzard used the DMCA to blow an open source company out of existance (and take over their domain name and property). The attitude here should not be "Blizzard is doing this and that" it should be "Blizzard, the company that used the unconstitutional DMCA against individuals committing no property crime, is still in business. Let's remind each other not to ever buy anything by Blizzard or Vivendi again."

I'm always shocked how pro-freedom geeks forget their morals when it comes to a game or a product they like. Blizzard is Vivendi, folks, and Vivendi is evil based on their corruption of Congress. Why are we still caring what they do to players who forgot they're evil?

Re:Oh Noes!!!

Standard answer: Slashdot is more than one person. There are people out there who watched the whole Bnetd mess and really are not buying Blizzard or Vivendi products right now. There are people out there who ignored or missed out on the whole Bnetd mess and are buying Blizzard or Vivendi products solely on their own merits. There are even people who watched the whole Bnetd mess and decided the outcome and the issues it raised were not important enough to make them give up the experience of playing future Blizzard products.

Also, it wasn't just some random company blown away because Blizzard felt like being mean. Bnetd was intimately tied to Blizzard's products and business model and they created this relationship without any cooperation or even permission from Blizzard.

Re:constitutionality?

No, DMCA has nothing to do with copyright. DMCA is about reverse engineering, not about duplicating or distribution.

Also, it could be well argued (not by me as I repudiate copyright entirely) that DMCA has not been enforced by "authors" nor "inventors" but by distribution cartels. Again, not within the meaning of the Constitution.

The DMCA has zero to do with copyright and everything to do with enforcing actions of others that any free thinker would deem legal. Figuring out how something works is part of making a new device that will be better (and not potentially disturb any patents). The DMCA prevents you from figuring out how something works -- it doesn't actually enable or disable copying.

Who cares? It's nothing new.

First off, no one cares about FFXI outside of Japan. But even pretending anyone does:

No one cares about Blizzard doing it, either. Why?

Because they've been banning accounts all along. It's not news. Blizzard bans more gold farmers, twice as many spring up. It's not going to go away just because some accounts were banned.

Now, if this were news about how Blizzard was planning on redesigning their MMORPG to make gold farming a non-issue (and, to be honest, it really is already: the best stuff is gotten through raids, which side-step the gold-seller aspect entirely), then this would be news.

As long as the gameplay rewards people for collecting large sums of gold that can be traded amongst other players, people will be willing to pay others to collect that gold for them. It's nothing new.

Banning cheaters isn't interesting. Trying to fix the root problems that result in cheating would be interesting, but they're not, they're just banning people who cheated.

I wish Guild Wars Would Follow Suit

ArenaNet keeps claiming they care about gold farmers and item sellers and that they're doing something about them in Guild Wars, but it's not true. Sitting in Droknar's Forge you could just watch endless strings of people going out to farm gold and items to sell because, let's face it, stealing an account from a 10 year old isn't hard, and there's no real incentive for them to stop them since they didn't buy the accounts they're using in the first place.

MMORPGs are being ruined by some of the same money-grubbing crap people play them to escape for a few hours. It saddens me that humanity is so pathetic that even something as simple as this can't escape jackasses who are happy to make everyone else miserable for their own small gains here and there.

i report farmers

Inflation in games is a lot easier to trace than inflation in the real world. It's a much smaller economy- until you drag the 'outer' economy into it.

I think we should be banned from BUYING gold, too.

Report sellers, report bots, the next time someone whispers to you ingame to visit their WoWgold site, report it under the behaviour tag in the reporting options. This becomes especially important for casual players, who just can't compete.

I know, isn't that just an artificial control? No, it's more like cracking down on forgery- this is wealth that was created for the purpose of selling it, which makes it an otherwise unnecessary element in the economy that hurts the whole.

I say yay, keep up the farmer bans.

On an unrelated note, every time i clean out my bookbag, i wish vendors in real life bought the trash...

Another day another GP

(Bannings) -59,000 * $15 = -$885,000/mo
(New acct) 59,000 * $40 = +$2,360,000
(Monthly fee) 59,000 * $15 = $885,000/mo

Looks like the business model is working for the farmers and Blizzard. Kind of like a farming tax. :)

Good Job!

I would like to congratulate the Japanese government for solving all of its countries other problems. I mean, they must have solved everthing else if this is somehow now a priority to them, right?

Lesson to be learned

There's a lesson to be learned from this, banning gold farmers and the people who buy from them doesn't work. 59k accounts banned in WoW? That's ridiculous. It tells me the economics are still not working (I played WoW for a year and saw how bad they were). If games companies want to solve this they will have to come up with some stronger defence. such as:

a) better economics.
b) no tweaking.
c) tie characters to credit card details (will cause problems with gamecards).
d) better economics.
e) allow gold/character selling, but moderate and oversee it.

Blizz and any other games company who thinks about doing another MMOG better get this sorted before they write the next blockbuster, as otherwise I foresee thousands of bald programmers in darkened rooms pulling out their hair and screaming as they have to deal with the intricacies of propping up dying economies and stopping farming rather than writing stuff they actually are interested in.

Re:Lesson to be learned

Every time someone starts screaming about the game economics being utterly broken, I have to wonder about their actual evidence. I've played seriously on about 5 servers, and I currently play the auction house on two, and all I see are very predictable supply and demand fluctuations. Stuff goes up today, and down tomorrow. Prices run up on the weekends, and taper off during the week.

Sure you see items that are overpriced, and sometimes those get purchased. More often, however, you see the same item up for sale for a week or more, and get to watch its price trending gradually down until someone buys it.

It's not rampant inflation. It's exactly the sort of cyclical activity I would expect given variable supply.

So give me some data on this completely broken model, because I'm not seeing it.

It IS something new

About 2-3 months ago Blizzard really started to crack down on the buyers and the sellers of gold in World of Warcraft. Before that they would sometimes ban farmers if they caught them. What they've started to do is take back gold from the buyers when they ban seller accounts. This led to a large jump in the price of gold. Where gold was selling for around 2000G for $125 USD a few months ago, it's back around 1000G for $169 USD. That is a huge jump.

I've actually heard of people quitting WoW over this, because the only way they thought they could compete with full time players was with buying gold. Between the growing gear gap, and increasing price of gold, it's making some people reconsider playing.

Gold farmers

I always thought the best way to remove farmers was to create a game that's fun to play in ALL regards; farmers only exist because part of the game is so tedious that many players don't want to bother with it. Personally, I'd be insulted if people were paying money NOT to play my game...

That's a very good point

I wish I had mod points today. You are exactly correct, people buy gold so they can skip a lot of the game. The reason they do this is because WOW is perhaps the most boring RPG ever created.

I borrowed a friends discs once and bought a month's worth of access just so I can see what all the fuss was about. I simply couldn't believe how bad this game is. All of the quests were of the "find ten of these useless things and get back to me" or "kill that asshole over there" variety. My seven year old son's Putt-Putt and Freddi Fish games have more depth.

And I really hate how everything seems to "charge" you in time. Cast a spell, wait a few seconds. Open a chest, wait a few seconds longer. It's like the whole mechanic of this game is to make me sit here wasting my life watching progress bars while charging me $15 a month to do so. And then there's the fact that half the game experience is watching your character's back while he trudges slowly across the landscape.

And there's other really dumb things in the basic interface. You click on a guy attacking you from behind with your sword and it says "facing wrong direction". Well no fucking shit, man. I thought I communicated my intention to turn around and whack that fucker when I right-clicked on the monster. The game is filled with stuff like this. I had far, far more fun playing Diablo online.

I'm just not getting why this is the most successful game of all time. Maybe it gives obsessive-complusive people something to do? Seems like the best play here is to just not get involved in it in the first place.

Re:That's a very good point

Actually, no, neither of you are correct. It doesn't matter how fun the game is, there will always be people who want to get ahead of others by any means possible in an MMO. As long as some person with more money than sense wants to be greater than other people, this will be the case. If there is no economy in the game and characters progress on their own merits, then the accounts will be sold. Buying gold has nothing to do with the boredom, it has to do with getting ahead.

You played a little of the game. You are right, a lot of the quests are fairly boring kill and fetch sort of things. But for the most part, you have no idea what you are talking about. Abilities you have take time because this game has PvP elements in it. If everything was instant, then it would be overpowered and make playing against other players less interesting. The same with the turning and facing your enemy. If there wasn't PvP, fine...make you turn and face and whack away. But this game was designed with PvP in mind. Controlling you chracter is essential when competing with other players.

Beyond this, the best items in the game can not even be purchased with gold. All of it has to be done through working with other players to down interesting bosses that require teamwork and strategy. This is really where the game begins. Whacking a few bunnies at low level isn't going to show you anything.

It is more successful than other games because it is more accessible to people who don't have a lot of time. Other MMOs force you to group up and spend hours online just to level. With WoW, you can solo your way up to the highest level at your own pace.

Re:That's a very good point

I just hit level 40 and wanted to get a mount. That would take about 90 gold, and I figured it would take me about a month to save that much. (I'm a casual player, maybe 5 hours a week). For $12 I got all the money I needed, in an hour.

New the game is fun again, and I travel / level faster.

Why is this wrong?

The Banhammer

good thing a heavy chunck of banination hardware like that stays in hammer space untill they whip it out.

preferred solution

Blizzard has probably banned more players than the peak populations of most other games... What would make more sense is just to transfer the characters over to a "banned" server. Let that economy fight itself out... Just need a good name for it....

Wish

When will MMORPG makers realize that when you create a capitalistic economy you're going to get capitalists?? I'm not convinced that banning people is the right solution, it seems fairly doomed to failure. Though if they're going to do these things I wish they'd clean up what's left of Diablo II: Lord of Destruction.

FFXI was not about Gil Selling per say

In FFXI land not all the 2000 accounts where banned (most got 3 day suspensions) and most where not for RMT. The users in question had been using flee/pos/warp hacks and or engaged in MPK or other offences. A large portion of them happened to be endgame players who where using cheats to steal or easily beat high level monsters instead of playing fairly. SE is now flagging accounts for punishment if they are caught cheating and depending on the level of your offence you could be subject of a ban.

An alternative

Or you can do what I do - play a game [entropiauniverse.com] where the economy is based on a real currency. I think there are others like it. I'm guessing they don't mind if I sell currency - after all, they do, too. OTOH, why would you want to? There are few reasons why you would.

How is the economy on EQ?

Didn't Sony set up thier own service to sell characters, gold, items, etc? How is the economy doing on the EQ realms. Maybe Bliz should set that up. Then they get a portion of the profits, people that are casual players can buy the things they would like to have (epic mounts) and casual people can cut the farming companies out of the loop.

Anda's Game

Every time I read a story like this I think of Cory Doctorow's Anda's Game [salon.com]. It's an interesting thought-experiment for both sides of the issue. While I certainly don't condone game currency sales, it's not a terrible way to get another perspective on who is really affected by it all.

Money Sink

I don't know about WoW, but in other MMORPG's I have played, there is simply too much money in the economy. The game had several ways to make money, but few ways to take it out of the economy. The effect was rampant inflation as the total amount of money in the economy kept increasing. If a new skill or event was created that would take large amounts of money off the economy, inflation and money farms would have less of an effect.

re: Square and Blizzard Drop The Banhammer

Square and Blizzard Drop The Banhammer

...and made one insomniac EQ-camper very very happy.

Gold farming exploits

I used t play WoW. I am quite bored with it now but I played for about a year. I played through to lv 60 twice and enjoyed everything but the buying and selling. Epic items cost way too much for me (a hardcore gamer to my wife but actually a casual gamer to the Slashdot crowd no doubt) to get many.

In the last two months of playing I made a discovery that just about blew my mind. For those not in the 'know', Blizzard allows a certain amount of mods to be used in game. These do various things such as map enhancements, custom button grouping etc. Now one of these is called auctioneer [auctioneeraddon.com]. What it does is make you money. Not just a little bit but a whole CRAP PILE of money. This mod will NOT get you banned from WoW that I know of either.

How does it work, you ask? Glad you asked. Its very simple. If you have ever heard the phrase "Buy low. Sell High" well no truer words have ever been spoken about this addon. It scans the auction house for items that are being sold under the mean asking price. So if the average price of a stack of gold bars is 2g (for instance) and there are 5 auctions with bids below it will flag them and allow you to bid on them. You can say show me items with a bid

I struggled with the morale of using such a tool, but as my subscription was running out I wanted to see how much gold I could make in my last 30 days. I tried to do this on paper for a few weeks early in my WoW career but it is a tiresome process. I had about 6G in the bank. I would run this once a day and by the second to last day I had over 1000g in the bank! Broken or what? It was then I realised I would never play again. What is the point? If its that easy and I can buy whatever I want then there certainly is little use in playing.

Oh well. y other $0.02 is that I don't think I can support Blizzard too much any more. I loved Diablo2 and WoW for a time but I can't stand it when companies treat their customers like criminals. Close the loops you idiots! Don't blame the guys that spent possibly $100(s) on your @$%^ games. Its THEIR (read: Blizzard's) fault.

End rant.

Gold Farmers FTL

I play WoW on a regular basis and I have read about gold farmers and how they detract from the game so it pleases me when I hear about Blizzard dropping the Banhammer from upon high. However there is one impact that gold farmers have that isn't commonly documented: racial discrimination. Because most gold farmers come from the same racial group (i.e. Chinese) other players automatically condemn everyone from that racial group regardless. If you say "Ni hao" to another player in WoW don't expect a friendly response. This problem also occurs in other MMORPGs. My friend plays Lineage 2 and he says there is a lot of discrimination against Russian players in that game. He has even gone to the extent of learning how to curse in Russian! It saddens me when groups in society are judged wholly on the actions of certain minorities within those groups.

Blizzard is screwed either way.

More people are abandoning the game not because of the inflation because you can't even buy the good armor but because its getting way too tedious. They are restructuring the dungeons so now instead of bosses dropping loot they will drop "tokens" which you can turn into loot. But they don't drop enough for 1 person to make 1 item. So you'll have to have every character if every class run through dungeons for much longer without seeing a return on their time spent. ZG and AQ are like this but they are making EVERY raid instance token based. And I won't even get into the China farmed PvP rating nonsense that went on. The problem is that Blizzard is making advancement past 60 so ridiculous that you either have to be pissed slaving away for hours or just give up.

Big deal.

This is just something Blizzard likes to flaunt that doesn't really mean anything. On the server where I play, there's a bot that farms the same set of harpies repeatedly. People post about him in the forums to try and get him killed by the other faction. We've tried to bust up his program, initiating duels, trades, inviting him to groups, tagging his kills, mind controlling his kills, etc. I reported him twice. The first time, I got your standard CSR email "We've investigated and taken appropriate actions." The appropriate actions were, apparently, nothing. So I reported him again, and this time I got some big speech about how Blizzard is anti-bot and has banned nearly 60,000 accounts in the last month. The GM assured me they were going to investigate him, again. That was 2 weeks ago. As of a few days ago, he was still there, running his same circuit through the harpies.

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