By the way, don’t accumulate too much wealth in World of Warcraft. Either SPEND! SPEND! SPEND! or give to the poor — may I suggest aiding the Ironforge war orphans?
The Blizzard Collective is temporarily locking accounts for “having excessively large amounts of in-game currency”.
Incredible.
Update:
—————–
After further investigation, this account has been unlocked. I take responsibility for this mistake, however our intent was to keep the economy clean. Again, I do apologize for your inconvenience.
Maleki
In-Game Support Manager
——————-
Thanks Wreak for the update on the first link. The 2nd link was resolved thusly:
I wanted to clear things up a little. This account was specificly locked due to both excessive gold being stored on the account, and questionable behavior associated with the gold. Protecting the game economy is very important to us.
Maleki
In-Game Customer Support Manager
I know they’ll never share what constitutes questionable behavior … but wording the response so as to raise IGE/ebay suspicions is a nice touch.
I believe they decided to replace content patches with drama. Each day there’s a lot of new stuff going on about the game. It’s incredible how they are able to produce that despite the game doesn’t move an inch.
– New drama every day!
It doesn’t sound great to write that on the box instead of a cheap “monthly content”.
This is fear, pure and simple – “the little-death that brings total obliteration.”
Blizzard has let its fear of what might happen destroy their ability to manage the game well and make well-reasoned decisions. There are good reasons for some fears. And the way to address them is though innovative and intelligent game design choices. But they haven’t really made any game design choices. They are following in the footsteps of others, i.e., ‘being a better Everquest’, and thus are afraid of all the things they perceive as problems in other games.
There was a nasty autohouse exploit exposed recently that at least one person was abusing to amass large amounts of gold. And that’s just one that’s been talked about, there may be other shady methods being used. So frankly, I don’t have a problem with Blizzard actions – given that they did follow up with the investigation promptly.
Never go on an adventure without a hat!
Indy
**this is Foton: Spam Karma marked Indy’s comment as a false positive FOR SOME UNKNOWN REASON, so I attempted to reconstruct it. I added his data to afkgamer’s whitelist and apologize for any inconvenience and please bear with me. (sound familiar? MUAHAHAHAHA)
This is sadly hilarious. One of the other online game blogs mentioned “mudflation” and I believe that it’s inevitable. Blizzard is incredibly noobish and downright stupid about how they’re handling issues in-game. I agree with Abalieno – this drama-sleight-of-hand bullshit is distracting the masses from the real lack of content and customer service that they’re subjecting themselves too.
“Are you not entertained?!” Aye, Blizzard, aye.
“Are you not entertained?!” Aye, Blizzard, aye.
Heh. Love Gladiator.
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Blizzard made a mistake. They admitted it and corrected it. What’s the problem? I guess by that attitudes Abalieno, Bloo and the coward hiding behind Anon that they have never made a mistake. Grats lads on being perfect…NOT!
Companies are made of people and thus still are not error free.
I think the large problem was locking the accounts while they were investigating. Even 5 minutes of thought would have told them there could be many benign reasons that a character (and a low-level one at that) would accumulate large amounts of game currency.
Locking first, asking questions later puts the onus on the player to seek restoration of his account (for which HE IS PAYING) — the appeals process is virtually nonexistent.
Of course we all make mistakes, but repeated gross errors in judgement is quite another thing. Not every cheater can be caught with algorithms and data traps.
Woot! Acknowledgement from the peanut gallery! Of course I’ve made mistakes, silly lad, but I like to think I’ve learned from my mistakes and the mistakes of others who’ve tread the same path.
Such a silly fanboy argument, “Well, YOU’RE NOT PERFECT and YOU’VE NEVER MADE a game, so how DARE you criticize?”
Listen to Foton – the ham-handedness of these actions, with no means to counter them effectively, would suck coming from any company.
You’ll note that in this topic here: https://afkgamer.github.io/afkgamer-com/archives/2005/03/03/something-rotten-in-azeroth/#comments -that I agreed with you on your last point.