I agree that Richard cheated his fellow players, but I don't believe he defrauded them or stole from them. He cheated them by engaging in real-money trade, which is against the rules.
Well some games have tried to use proxy/ ip bans of certain countries and it almost never works. The shops simply pay to run their connection through someone else or use a proxy chain so that you really ...
Think oil prices are high? A massive covert banning by blizzard targeted at gold farmers has crippled their operations causing the price of World of Warcraft gold to skyrocket within the past week...
Every day crude oil seems to hit a new high. It is all over the media. Gas cost over $4/gallon throughout America and is even higher if you live in a major city. As such, this 4th of July weekend any traveling you do will obviously be kept to an economic minimum.
What’s one of the best ways to save gas money, limit your carbon emissions, and rescue the planet? Retreating into virtual reality and playing a healthy dose of World of Warcraft of course!
However, the mainstream media in its attempt to cover the surging oil prices and the subsequent effects on the “real” world have missed an even greater crisis! The exchange rate of World of Warcraft US gold has doubled from $20 USD per 1,000 gold to $40 USD per 1,000 gold in a mere week! The mainstream media with its reality bias has completely ignored this story and once again it is up to the internet to restore justice to Azeroth.
Although it has taken a year for oil to double from $70 a barrel to $140
It has taken a mere five days for the price of gold to double from $20 per 1,000 gold to $40!
Although truckers may be blocking roads in America’s capital, Washington D.C
Naked Gnomes are blocking bridges in the Dwarf’s capital, Ironforge
The MSM has been quick to cover the riots over rising fuel costs all over the world:
And yet they have remained completely silent about the protests by races and factions from all around Azeroth about the rising cost of gold.
Take this group of violent naked Orcs who have refused to stop their rampage until gold prices drop:
*Negotiations to at least make them put their clothes back on while they rampage have thus far utterly failed.
Similarly the naturally more hippie-ish Tauren have continued to protest our dependence on Chinese gold:
Tongue-in-cheek aside market insiders attribute the drastic rise in prices to a supply shortage caused by a covert massive banning operation secretly carried out by Blizzard within the past week.
As one worker for a major Chinese farming operation who agreed to speak on condition that he remained anonymous for fear of losing his job said, "We got hit hard. It always a game of the cat and mouse with us farmers and blizzard. Today they got us good. Where I work we lose hundreds of accounts and hundreds of thousands of gold. I never see banning wave this big. Some of the smaller shops may no survive or be able to pay workers."
As thousands of accounts were banned, fortunes virtually disappeared overnight. The true total cost of the bannings has yet to be determined.
For each account banned not only was gold on the account (and the cost of labor to acquire it) lost, but also the time it took to level up the farming characters along with the cost of purchasing a new account key. This drastic drop in supply levels along with a temporary setback in the maximum potential output of the gold farming suppliers have created a short term supply shortage triggering the price of gold to double in five days. This effect was further heightened by the previous historic low in gold prices due to a recent series of price wars (see IGE letter below).
Less than six hours ago IGE corporate had to send out an e-mail to their affiliates/partners (which you can view here) explaining the "lull in the supply market" from the "recent bannings" and that they were prepared to accept the higher prices of gold. The letter also shows a bit of worry that the price increases will cause conversions to drop which is a clear indication that the bannings have at least some effect on limiting gold sales even if temporary.
So far there is no official word from blizzard on how many accounts were banned. We will keep you posted as more information continues to come in.
Nice article! do people that buy gold wait for prices to change? or does it even matter
Comment by Jason Ling on Jul 04, 2008
Haha, I liked the little comparison to oil.
With that said, it seems like these actions are just temporary setbacks. It's almost like a black market, or a drug market where if you raid the drug deals you just raises the prices for the addicts. However, as gold isn't an addiction (well maybe for some) raising the prices, does stop consumption.
Comment by axhed on Jul 04, 2008
who cares? goldbuyers suck.
Comment by kturner on Jul 04, 2008
this is why i have my infant farm my gold and honor for me.
Comment by on Jul 04, 2008
may be blizzard should start selling gold in card form
that will put the farmers and sellers out of business
Comment by fdgdf on Jul 04, 2008
what do you mean who cares? obviously the chinese farmers, IGE, IGE affiliates, other gold farming companies and their staff, and the people who buy gold, that is who cares...
Comment by hff135 on Jul 04, 2008
I had no idea that they could have such a knock on effect. It's cool to look at -- I'm just glad I wasn't holding a bunch of gold which got taken away.
Comment by jsquared on Jul 04, 2008
That's pretty crazy, I liked the video's hah.
It's really weird, that blizzard could ban enough accounts (with a 10 million+ playerbase worldwide) in this apparently billion dollar plus market to actually make a difference. You forget how much money there is in all of this. Thanks for the read, and for the laugh!
Comment by BArkingturtle on Jul 05, 2008
That's pretty neat. Sucks for the gold farmers eh? However, I wish that companies like IGE ans Swagvault and whatnot go hit harder, it seems that really just the suppliers got hit. From what I hear the major distributes limit their stock just for instances like this so that they don't get hit.
Comment by Snafzg on Jul 06, 2008
Hmmm, considering all the resources Blizzard has, I'm surprised it's taken them this long to have such an impact.
Comment by Chris L on Jul 06, 2008
That is really crazy. It will be interesting to see how this price increase will affect how people buy gold - maybe it will also scare people away from buying gold a little bit too, with the threat of being banned that much more imminent. I just wonder if this will be a better time for the smaller seller too, who might be able to be more low key about how he sells. I mean its pretty obvious what the intent of a level 1 character with 1000 gold is.
Comment by Ken D on Jul 09, 2008
Great article. Keep up the good work!
Comment by markee dragon on Jul 15, 2008
just farm you're own gold :)
Comment by LOL on Jul 16, 2008
The movie's are so funny xDDDDD
Comment by Tes - Wildhammer on Jul 19, 2008
Thank god prices are soaring - I hope they go to $100 got 1000 gold
Comment by Bob Bobson on Jul 21, 2008
I know people who keep a level 1 alt next to the AH who they post all their saleables to and who monitor prices. Those characters can easily have 1000 gold on them. Because perfectly valid players obeying the T&Cs do things like this, its not easy for Blizzard to act on such things without getting false positives.
I hope the people made unemployed by this move get new jobs soon - and that their new jobs aren't in an industry that makes my gaming less fun.
Comment by Ben harper on Oct 20, 2009
Its kinda like California wasting billions combating the marijuana "problem"... They waste more money than the harm being done and are losing the battle horribly as well.
For every 100 accounts that get banned, 1000 take their place. That is the bottom line.. If the gold sellers have to resort to hiring factories filled with asians played the game LEGITIMATELY they will do it.. It will still be hugely profitable.. With the volume of players, the volume of servers, the volume of transactions there is NO WAY TO LOG THAT VOLUME OF DATA WITHOUT ENORMOUS HARDWARE COSTS AND MANUAL LABOR THEN NEEDED TO ANALYZE THE DATA.. Enterprise class storage isn't cheap. I was personally responsible for doing a proof of concept project for something similar to this while working at SOE, and even with the meager subscribers to their online games the storage costs and man hour costs were staggering. Blizzard may claim this do this, or claim to have this capability but they sadly do not. To even add the hooks and routines into the code to track and monitor every player trade, auction, and mail transaction would create such undo stress on the existing servers a very expensive tech refresh would be needed to compensate for it -- this isn't even including the purchase of storage needed to store it.
In my opinion they should have architected a game/economy no so dependent on hours and hours of easy to do farming. Maybe design it so that most things most be done in groups and in instances and solve the other scathing problem with WoW... dying PVE.
Comment by LolBen on Nov 24, 2009
Ben your solution will not work, they will should raid and group and farm together in there net cafes:)
Also the monitoring is already is being done, but they can only monitor millions of players so much and by adding a fully smart tech computer to monitor would be very risky, one error could cause major issues.
For them to ban 1 account it has to go through 2 departments to confirm everything. Now i agree with that due to security issues, so banning is not so easy.
The best way would be to some how track there proxies with a secruity system and ban all foreign players from EU /US servers, and keep them on asian.
Comment by Andrew on Dec 06, 2009
Well some games have tried to use proxy/ip bans of certain countries and it almost never works. The shops simply pay to run their connection through someone else or use a proxy chain so that you really can't detect the difference.
