Hive

Ask Google about ban archeology bot and it throws up 60K results from the last week. There is a mass ban wave of the cheaters who used a bot to do archeology. The reason why these cheaters were captured is technical: the bot was terribly written and announced botting in public channels. I wouldn't be surprised if it was written by a disgruntled employee of the botting company.

OK, these morons had a "ban me" sign above their head but are they different from Historyy, the farmbot who was online 24/7 doing no quests, PvP, instances, just grinded and skinned the same monsters in Sholozar in the magnitude of 100K? If Blizzard allowed Historyy and friends generating tens of thousands of gold, why did they go berserk on idiotic kids who botted archeology?

Such ban-wave happened already. On May 20, 2008 about 500K glider users were banned. What else happened on this day? Age of Conan was published. While the game turned out to be a huge failure, before publishing it was expected to be a WoW-killer.

Now the internet is full of Rift, which has many new features and much better graphics than WoW. Also, the dynamic battle with opening invasion rifts is much more interesting way of leveling up than mindlessly grind 10 wolves over 2000 quests. Rift is expected to be the WoW-killer, of course this kind of expectations often fail. But in March 2011, when Rift was opened to the public, Blizzard made this ban-wave.

Why ban kids who bot archeology? Like anyone cares if he has the stupid achievements. PvP bots are much more annoying, practically make leveling BGs instant lost for one side. When half of your "team" don't leave the start room, I'm sure you are much more annoyed than seeing some guy with 4 dancing dwarves.

I believe Blizzard banned these morons exactly to make them "take a break" from WoW (just as they claim to do on forums) and "try out Rift". The forming community of a new game can hardly survive the influx of this cheating filth.

One must see that not every paying customer is desired. No matter how much I pay in a restaurant if I insult other guests. Having my money is smaller gain than losing the other customers. This is the case with M&S in MMOs. One of the wonders of WoW is player separation: you can level up alone and enter dungeons and raids with your guild. So you don't encounter with the obnoxious morons unless you read trade chat for a long time, or ask for trouble by queuing up LFD. WoW is Massively Single Player game, this is the only system where M&S can be kept as customers. In a true MMO they must be kicked or they force every sane person out.

Since Blizzard can be sure in their return (with buying a new game + expansions), the company is free to use this horde of mindless things to invade and destroy competing MMOs unless they are written also as parallel single player games.


PS: what should Blizzard do if some game would arrive that is really that good to destroy WoW?
Shut down WoW servers for two weeks blaming technical failures or DDOS attack. By the end of that period, the other game would be abandoned by everyone except obnoxious trolls, and hand-holding demanding M&S.