It looks like the anti-detection abilities of World of Warcraft botting tools such as Glider, OpenBot and Inner Space were once again proven to be imperfect. Blizzard celebrated the May 20 launch day of Age of Conan by doing some spring cleaning of their own - booting out tens of thousands of botters and other cheaters. In addition to botters, the Banstick of Doom was applied to account traders, gold sellers, gold buyers and those repeatedly cheating in the Arena by win trading. Some estimates put the number at over 300.000 accounts, but we have to wait for Blizzard's press release for the official figure.
You can amuse yourself with the obligatory whining from those who ended up at the receiving end of the banstick here. The thread is already 41 pages long, which is remarkable when you consider the fact that banned accounts cannot post in the official World of Warcraft forums - so this thread covers only the moaning coming from people who own multiple accounts or (ab)use someone else's account to post their proclamations of innocence. A tip of the iceberg, so to speak.
Timing Is EverythingThe timing of this latest ban wave is hilarious - at least to me. It's as if Blizzard wants to dump the undesirable part of their playerbase to Funcom's lap. It's obvious that Blizzard has been "taking names" for quite a while, probably ever since patch 2.4.2 which is rumored to have included a new detection routine to catch these botters.
To apply the bans on the launch day of Age of Conan is probably more than just a coincidence. My guess is that Blizzard waited with their massive list of confirmed botters and other lowlifes until Funcom managed to get their game out, and then dropped the hammer - hoping that at least some of them would pick another game to exploit when they venture out to get a new MMO account. After all, hunting down and banning cheaters takes considerable effort, and processing all the inevitable complaints about "unfair" bans requires a lot of expensive customer support manpower and it seems that some people just can't get a hint. It's not like this is the first time Blizzard has mass-banned cheaters.
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