Thursday, July 3, 2008

Banning works! For small values of "works"

A reader sent me a link to the latest Gamerates charts showing how the price for 1,000 gold shot up from $20 to $40, apparently in reaction to another wave of bannings from Blizzard. So apparently bannings work to disrupt the gold commerce. But only to disrupt: Gold prices go up while the banned accounts are replaced with fresh accounts, and I'm pretty certain prices'll go down again in a while.

Which makes me wonder if periodic ban waves are the best strategy here. After all it means that some bots have been identified and allowed to continue until the date of the next ban wave. Would it be better to ban every account as soon as he is found? Or is the ban wave more effective in striking the gold farmers infrastructure, because it grabs all of their accounts at once? In either case the bans only hold the gold farmers down for a short while. Anyone got a better idea how to remove botters more permanently?

No comments:

Post a Comment