Blizzard Whips WoW Gold Farmers
Ten of thousands banned for violating Azeroth's laws.
Gold farming is, as agriculture goes, a relatively new occupation. It involves people toiling away in virtual worlds to extract wealth from the land with the explicit purpose of abusing the local economy. Sometimes people do it themselves, other times they use add-on programs to do the work for them. Not surprisingly, companies don't like it. Blizzard is one of these.
The developer of massively multiplayer juggernaut World of Warcraft said this week it had banned around 59,000 accounts for gold farming. The company said the death of these accounts removed 22 million gold from Azeroth's economy.
"Such behaviour not only negatively impacts the economy of a realm, it diminishes the achievements of those who play legitimately," reads a statement on the World of Warcraft community message board.
"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."
The community response was quick and mostly positive. Some people even thanked Blizzard for getting rid of the cheaters.
World of Warcraft is one of the most popular online games around and has more than 6 million subscribers around the world.
Alex Wollenschlaeger
Editor, Kikizo Games
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