Blizzard is on the right track
BLIZZARD IS serious about the World of Warcraft
Terms of Use agreement.
Over 18,000 WoW accounts were
permanently closed over the past three months, which means about one account on each server worldwide was terminated each day.
The majority of cheaters were found to be using 3rd party software to farm gold and items. They described the account closings as being part of their "aggressive stance against cheating in World of Warcraft."
How does this rate of banning compare to the number of cheaters out there? And how certain does Blizzard have to be before they feel it's appropriate to take action? Well, according to WoW's Terms of use, Blizzard can monitor users' RAM, storage devices, CPUs, and video cards. This should be completely sufficient to find all cheat programs, assuming they know what to look for.
On the other hand,
Humphrey Cheung writes, "WoW administrators have rarely stepped in to stop [gold farmers'] message spamming." That is, users who send city-wide chat messages asking if people "want to buy" or "want to sell." Shouldn't that be an easy way to find WoW cheaters, since buying and selling WoW items in the real world is also prohibited in the Terms of Use?
Blizzard probably has a decent idea of how many players are cheating, and who they are.
But to some degree, Blizzard has to find a balance. It's probably not in their best interest to ban all cheaters. Finding every single one would be quite expensive, and losing subsequent subscription fees from those users would also be financially detrimental. But they also have to keep the game fun for other players. Blizzard notes that "Such actions can severely impact the economy of a realm and the overall game enjoyment for all players."
So a more realistic strategy for Blizzard would include only banning the very worst offenders, and announcing it loudly so that non-cheating players can rest assured that there are very few cheaters out there, and so that other cheating players start to think twice about their actions. It is reasonable to assume that there are more cheaters out there, and that Blizzard probably isn't taking action against every last one of them. It would be unreasonable for them to do so. Blizzard is looking out for the greater good of the game, concentrating their efforts on new quests, content, and expansions, while leaving the more insignificant cheaters to play their own game.
The INQuirer
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