30 Million Gold

[Neppy]

Because farmers buy their WoW boxes at best buy.

[DeLLy]

How will I be able to buy cheap gold when they keep messing with the farmers, woe is me!

[Quineloe]

Originally Posted by The Jackal

Why doesn't Blizzard fix the repair cost issues. I mean, most people that I know who do heavy duty raiding have to buy gold because they can't farm enough of it to keep them going between raids. If Blizzard addressed that, you would see a lot of this stuff stop.

Because they want it to be this way, the fact that in 1.11 you can buy half a dozen EPICS almost straight from the AH now shows this.

[Wizerud]

Originally Posted by Neppy

Because farmers buy their WoW boxes at best buy.

How much do they pay for a box then?

[Tingteng]

They buy theirs at egghead.com 39.99

[Nikkohung You]

Steal them of course.

[Nakilos]

These bannings just enable the farmers to sell their gold for even higher prices. So really they aren't losing much money, if any.

[Quineloe]

uh as price increases, demand decreases, and usually this means that they make less money, unless they were offering gold below the optimal value

Also ask yourself: Who's been hit? If it's spread evenly across all the farming companies, no big deal for them, but what if one company lost 90% of their investions?

[masteen]

I think that the amount of gold removed is kinda irrelevant. I'm more impressed by the claimed 30,000 accounts banned. Even using leveling bots, that's still a lot of man-hours to have to replace.

I guess going after the farmers that cheat makes the most sense. Clear TOS violations there, where as the ones farming the plaguelands only crimes are bloating the queues.

[Angry Amadeus]

Originally Posted by masteen

I think that the amount of gold removed is kinda irrelevant. I'm more impressed by the claimed 30,000 accounts banned. Even using leveling bots, that's still a lot of man-hours to have to replace.

I guess going after the farmers that cheat makes the most sense. Clear TOS violations there, where as the ones farming the plaguelands only crimes are bloating the queues.

It's tough to differentiate between the two types of farmers unless they are using hacks, but which is more dangerous to the enjoyability of the game?

I'll give an example as to why I hate the pure farmers more. Instead of infesting instances and simply going for the chests at the end using a warp hack, or even something like DM, I'll compare it to me spending hour after hour wasting time in the Sinking Sands (EQ2) looking for a vanadium cluster a while back, for my level 52 pet. The clusters spawn around the edge of the zone, especially in the area between the clefts of rujark and the giant stomping grounds, all along the wall of the zone. Over the course of three days (and about 4 hours a day), I encountered no less than twenty different farmers, without guilds, and with names like Xihounang and Highsoceviia, roaming the area for clusters and harvesting them. When I asked them if they were rang rang, I got no reply. When I reported them more than three times, I noticed that they disappear. Yet, for every one that disappeared, three more appeared to take their place. It's as if they had a fucking rang-rang rang line to let each other know that the cluster area was open. I got so tired of trying to find a damned vanadium cluster that I started recruiting friends to help me farm it. At one point there were 10 people along the wall; 8 of them friends, 1 of them farmer. The farmer got pissed off because, incidentally, he would not meet his quota that day. We got 3 vanadium clusters and 2 cobalt clusters over a period of about six hours.

My point is; the type of mongrel infesting the plaguelands and sinking sands are the worst type. Hacks? Whatever. Unless they are using the hacks to modify the amount of time it takes to travel between a cluster and harvest it, or teleporting to a named to take it out.

[Millie]

There are basically two strategies a game developer can employ against hacking/corruption:

1) Accept it as a fact of life, and don't bother getting your hands dirty trying to clean it up.

2) Actively oppose it, even if ultimately you're fighting a losing battle.

Hackers will always prevail once they've started, and once hacking becomes commonplace. But at least Strategy 2 holds off total inflation/economic ruin for a bit longer than Strategy 1.

30MM gold across all US servers may not seem like much of a deterrent against hacking/farming, but at least it's something. Compare that to EQ's dev team, who basically looked the other way at organized duping/farming/selling of platinum. In the long run, hackers will always find a way to turn a profit in an MMORPG. But if taking action like this from time to time deters even a few hundred hackers, it's made a small difference.

Now if only they had banned 30,000 accounts back in the Diablo or WC3 heydays. Battle.Net actually might have been really awesome if Blizzard had been that thorough about sticking it to hackers.

Then again, Diablo duping was pretty damned hilarious. There's nothing quite like logging into a game for the first time and being handed a full set of Godly equipment at the entrance to the dungeon.

[Quineloe]

We got 3 vanadium clusters and 2 cobalt clusters over a period of about six hours.

Nice to see that highend EQ2 mining is just as retarded as WoW mining. When did it become cool to remove the "multiplayer" part from tradeskills?

[Angry Amadeus]

Originally Posted by Millie

There are basically two strategies a game developer can employ against hacking/corruption:

1) Accept it as a fact of life, and don't bother getting your hands dirty trying to clean it up.

2) Actively oppose it, even if ultimately you're fighting a losing battle.

Hackers will always prevail once they've started, and once hacking becomes commonplace. But at least Strategy 2 holds off total inflation/economic ruin for a bit longer than Strategy 1.

30MM gold across all US servers may not seem like much of a deterrent against hacking/farming, but at least it's something. Compare that to EQ's dev team, who basically looked the other way at organized duping/farming/selling of platinum. In the long run, hackers will always find a way to turn a profit in an MMORPG. But if taking action like this from time to time deters even a few hundred hackers, it's made a small difference.

Now if only they had banned 30,000 accounts back in the Diablo or WC3 heydays. Battle.Net actually might have been really awesome if Blizzard had been that thorough about sticking it to hackers.

Then again, Diablo duping was pretty damned hilarious. There's nothing quite like logging into a game for the first time and being handed a full set of Godly equipment at the entrance to the dungeon.

What about actively tracking the currency? I know that it's probably too complex for current installations of these online games, but what about the future? Making coins less common (a la DnD) and making those coins easily traceable. Having a tracking system on a large amount of coins from one player continuously to random players would signify a farm account, wouldn't it? And then it's simply a matter of justification for cancelling that account.

[Etadanik]

For each account cancelled in that manner, a GM must investigate the circumstances involved. That's alot of manpower you're talking about, because if you wrongfully ban even one Joe farming gold for his niece to buy a pony, that's a possible lawsuit right there, not to mention bad press across the Intarnet.

[Quineloe]

Originally Posted by Millie

There are basically two strategies a game developer can employ against hacking/corruption:

1) Accept it as a fact of life, and don't bother getting your hands dirty trying to clean it up.

2) Actively oppose it, even if ultimately you're fighting a losing battle.

I strongly disagree with this. What you say is true for the actual executive staff of these games, but Developers have all the power they need to minimize this. WoW turned into IGE playground because, as a guildmate of mine put it recently, WoW raiding = 10% raiding 90% soloing.
From my perspective I see this is true. All those potions, Flasks, repair bills and now item fees I have to farm really require me to put out either a huge amount of gold or many hours to farm all of this. We know that plat purchases were unknown among EQ highend, yet WOW was designed in a way that actually promotes an "Ebay or quit" mentality among those that don't have 40 hours a week to play. If Blizzard at least had the common sense and gave us a meaningful way to GROUP for these materials (this is a MMORPG after all, yet farming = soloing and I absolutly loathe that) there'd be a lot less pro-Farming going on.