Destroy All Cheaters

Perhaps it's simply a law of averages -- while 2006 has seen MMO subscriptions climbing to consistently higher record numbers every month, so too must go its admonishing cutbacks. Final Fantasy XI recently announced an additional 2000 accounts removed for using prohibited third-party utilities, a number which seems comparatively large -- more than the accounts removed throughout the rest of the year combined.

But World of Warcraft, its population far-outpacing any other, takes the fell-swoop award for its just announced removal of 59,000 accounts from its roster, for similar gold and farming cheats. The number is in addition to another 30,000 deleted throughout the month of May, and several smaller bans before it.

The numbers of players whisked away are themselves impressive, and indicative of the enormity of the problems continually faced by MMO developers in keeping their worlds running smoothly, but working out the maths and realizing what an enormous yearly loss in subscription fees the bans represent is much more sobering.

Yep perhaps but a older game Diablo 2 LOD has seen its share of accounts removed for use of map hack and other cheats as well. But it is hard with a game so big to keep track of who is legit or not.

Mmm... yeah, I remember this happening. It was a pretty big deal (on FFXI). I mean, usually this many accounts don't get suspended in one fell swoop. But as I understand it, RMT's (or Real Money Traders) have to be tracked and need to have a large amount of evidence brought forth on them before anything can really be done - otherwise, you might just be banning a character that's just been really nice to a lot of his friends.

I tell you, many will do anything to get ahead. I've played Guild Wars on and off, and at one time a bug appeared that made runes sell for 100 gold a piece. Keep in mind that some are usually valued at 40-50,000 gold, it completely destabilized the economy in just minutes. Arenanet (the developers) had to actually roll back the game one hour while they fixed the bug to make sure the market wouldn't get completely ruined.

And then there's the people who hire people in latin countries to farm constantly on the MMO's for rare items they then sell over the net. That problem won't be easy to solve.

Yeah its really crazy I remember in diablo 2 people would try to sell accounts and items on ebay. I think its kind of rediculus what people do over a game.