Yesterday some of you WoW players might have noticed some servers going down for a few hours for emergency maintenance. While we don't know the exact reason why they went down, Blizzard did release an official statement on why gold farming and power-leveling is bad for the game. (When they mention power-levelers they mean the kind you pay someone else to do) Some what suspicious but it does have it's own merit.

The statement talks about how gold farming can unleash mass amounts of spam and junk onto your life and how many gold farmers hack the game to get the gold to sell. They also explain how gold farming messes up the game economy.

Power-leveling on the other hand was not mentioned as much. Blizzard did continue to emphasize that you should never give your account information to anyone as it could compromise your account integrity.

Perhaps the problems of gold farming and power-levelers stealing accounts and their contents has gotten to the point of server compromise?

If you want to read the article you can find it at: http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/basics/antigold.html

Tags : blizzard : gold farming : World of Warcraft : WoW

Comments

By: Dragonfly

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On: 12:39 Feb 23rd, 2008
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SwitchxA;43577

Perhaps the problems of gold farming and power-levelers stealing accounts and their contents has gotten to the point of server compromise?

I highly doubt that. Indirect actions within the game wouldn't force a server down. It was most likely overload.

Frankly, I'm not particularly fussed about gold farmers and power levelers. They don't affect my playing experience personally, although it's still not justified behaviour.

By: MistaRob

On: 07:50 Feb 23rd, 2008
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The power-leveling is more of a privacy and player issue more than anything "don't give out your password." but I can see a good reason for the crackdown on gold farming, not just with spam and virus problems but it does effect the WoW economy in a matter of sorts, assuming you can sell rare and good items to other players, gold farmers would be a problem as they can sell their items dirt cheap (the real money deal being a side bit) and player merchants have to lower their prices to compete and those that can't compete go out.

By: SwitchxA

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On: 01:16 Feb 24th, 2008
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From my experience in WoW the gold farmers and power-levelers do have a pretty big presence. Although they are usually dealt with fast they do have spurts where it seems like I get an invite to a fake group every second. I have also seen the occasional bot sitting in Orgrimmar just spamming tells to visit some site to rip you off. They only cause minor annoyances but I imagine on a high pop server that it can be unbearable, but for me thats all speculation.

By: Evren

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On: 08:24 Feb 25th, 2008
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Interesting of Blizzard to take that kind of stance, and actually explain it.

Though, unfortunatly, it's never going to stop, regardless of what we get told, because some people just dont care.

I dont see why people would pay for a character myself, it just takes away the pleasure and pride of doing it yourself.

By: boa

On: 08:30 Feb 25th, 2008
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Paying someone else to do your character?

WTF is the point? Surely that constitutes paying someone to play the game? How does paying to level up help you?