The popular multiplayer roleplaying game "World of Warcraft" has millions of players on its servers every month.
While most accounts spend their time hunting down monsters and raiding monsters, some of those accounts are used for insidious purposes.
These accounts are controlled by third party programs and perform certain functions, such as farming in-game gold, killing monsters or just harassing other players. These bots take away from the player's experience and are frowned upon by the game developers. Most games will try and ban accounts that they suspect to be bots.
And that's what "WoW" developer Blizzard Entertainment did last week.
Blizzard Community Manager "Lore" posted on Thursday that it had banned a "larger number of World of Warcraft accounts that were found to be using third-party programs that automate gameplay."
One of "WoW's" GMs revealed that the "large amount" of banned accounts totaled 100,000. This round of bans is one of the largest series of bans Blizzard has enacted in years.
But who were these accounts, and what were they doing that required a ban?
Kotaku discovered that most of the accounts were mostly gold farmer accounts that tried to sell other users in-game gold for real-world money, as well as accounts that used the player-vs-player battlefields to harvest Honor Points, which are an exclusive in-game currency that is used to build PVP-specific weapons and armor.
While the ban did put a stop to all of those farming accounts, it also affected players who used third-party plugins to automate their attacks during raids.
This round of bans was so intense that it inspired one of the biggest bot developers to close his farming program. Some suspect that this round may kill the "WoW" botting market. Only time will determine if this is true.
