According to a recent report by GameRates.com, a large banning effort by Blizzard has caused the price of WoW gold to skyrocket. Allegedly the ban nabbed many gold sellers and gold “mules”, characters with enormous amounts of gold that companies used to distribute their illicit goods. Blizzard used to announce the fact that they’d closed numerous accounts for violations of the TOS (including botters, gold farmers and the like), but recently they’ve decided to keep the bans hush-hush. I don’t know if their goal is to keep the community guessing or what, but I’d think that the bust of a bunch of gold farmers (who are the bane of a WoW player’s experience) would be a big PR opportunity.
Nevertheless, it’ll be interesting to see the effects of this ban. Will gold sellers start farming again, or will they move on to other games such as Age of Conan? WoW is still the industry giant at around 11 million subscribers, but perhaps there is opportunity to be had selling gold for other games. After all, less competition means higher prices and higher profits.
Jul
10
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