In our continued efforts to combat cheating in World of Warcraft, more than 105,000 accounts were closed and over 12 million gold was removed from the game economies in Europe, Korea, and the US in the month of November. The closed accounts were associated with activities that violate World of Warcraft's Terms of Use, such as using third-party programs that allow cheating, and farming gold and items. These types of activities can severely impact the economy of a realm and the overall game enjoyment for all players.
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. 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.
Many account closures come as the direct result of tips reported to our GMs in game or emailed to our Hacks Team <http://www.blizzard.com/support/?id=eHacks000> by legitimate World of Warcraft players. If you suspect that a World of Warcraft player is using an illegal third-party program to farm gold or items, or is otherwise violating our Terms of Use, please report the suspected infraction via one of the means listed above. All reports will be investigated, and those that prove false will not result in corrective action.
As always, thank you for your continued support, and best of luck with your continued adventures in Azeroth!
Anyone noticed the "november" in the post? It could be just me but as its december currently, I really cant see a different Im afraid. Still lots of spaming and annoying gold sellers and bots around :(
Or around once more, as its been a month since you banned them...
I must say i'm realy happy with the GM's on Runetotem. Always get a reply within the hour and they investigate the matter. So i'm curious if those farming hunters in Azshara are there today :D
I mean.. I played a troll hunter up til 52 just to get a feel for horde quests when im rerolling my BE rogue.. and I saw bots EVERYWHERE....
I reported everyone of them... and I added them to friendslist, (those on my faction ofc, the others I killed :D )
The thing that made me really sad is I saw those bots lvl up... and I saw their leather at AH for LOL prices... I mean I farmed hard for thick/rugged leather in ungoro to get some gold until 60 so I might afford epic mount... but sorry, that aint gonna happend because the bots are #@@!ing spamming the entire AH with leather at no cost... and no.. I cant afford to buy everything and raise prices.. because next day the AH will be full of the same @!*@ at lower prices again....
Anyway so its good to hear you stop these SOBs even if you didnt stop those bots I reported.. you did a good job.. thanks guys this makes me feel its worth the 120sek / month I pay ..
So we have about 10% increase in the amount of gold removed and 40% increase in the amount of banned accounts. Am I putting too much weight into these numbers if I interpret it as a somewhat significant growth in the goldselling "industry" and a significant improvement in Blizzard's speed at locate and dealing with violating accounts?
That said, several guild banks are getting caught up in this. It's obvious that Blizzard is using scripts to localize all low level characters with loads of gold and that their safety net has failed on a few occasions.
While this is understandable to some extent, a few of the cases were blatantly obvious, such as an account with a full tier 3 main with 250 days played. I believe that Blizzard is well aware of that and swiftly corrected that particular incident but it suggests that there is potential for improving the search scripts:
These are some suggestions for criteria which could flag a suspicious account (tons of gold on a low level character) as needing above average attention:
- Account has any character with above 50 days played.(nearly all characters serving as goldselling hubs should be gone long before that time).
- The violating character is member of a guild with 30+ members (50 would be more relevant these days but 30 is more reasonable with 25 man raiding).
- Account has any character with BoP raid gear (even goldsellers wouldn't be stupid enough to use a full tier 3 account as hub).
- Account has great amounts of raid materials, such as bijous, ZG coins, fiery/lava cores, AQ idols, scarabs, onyxia scales, elementium ore, T3 armor scraps, frozen runes etc.
Avoiding guild bank bannings entirely obviously won't be possible before the guild banking system goes into effect which could easily take another 6-12 months. I feel it would be reasonably simple to narrow down the damage with simple scripts such as these though.
Co-leader of Defenders of Valor - http://www.defendersofvalor.net "Never trust anything that a man will not set his reputation and name upon." - Medivh
I still see the same old farmers in /who Azshara. Same hunters with unnamed pets on the beech. Sometimes they get stuck on things and you ask them why they're getting stuck. After a while of course. ;)
I didn't know of this link, pretty nice though. I've put it in the suggestion forum before but it would be great, as well as quicker and easier if you build in this same sort of forum for reporting people like this. There are still many farmers still out there and we all can't stand around doing tickets for them. I know of a lot of people that just leave the ones that are in major cities spamming in /s and in /1 because it takes too much time etc.
