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Blizzard to sue gold farmers

Blog written by The Paladin on May 29, 2007 at 08:53 AM | 1 Comment

EBay recently announced that it would be de-listing all MMO game items from its Web site. Blizzard is also threatening to send in its legal eagles in after the gold farmers.

A Blizzard staffer, who uses the username Eyonix, commented, "Blizzard has filed a federal lawsuit against the operators of Peons4hire, a popular gold-selling organization which many of you have no doubt seen advertised. As part of the lawsuit, the operators of Peons4hire have been asked to immediately cease all in-game spamming efforts by all entities and websites under their control." The statement added that if the group Peons4Hire continues to spam other users, further legal action will be taken.

Blizzard recently released a patch for World of Warcraft which contained "technical counter measures" aimed at putting a stop to in-game spam from gold-farming organisations and individuals.

Gold farming is a practice whereby players of MMORPGs such as WOW exploit the game by undertaking repetitive actions to acquire valuable virtual items or currency, which are then sold to other players via sites like eBay for real-world cash. Sometimes bots or other unauthorised programs are used to automate and speed up the process.

In China and other Asian countries the virtual farming trade is big business, and a number of companies exist which run gold-farming sweatshops as a professional business.

These companies are a big headache for online game operators, and various online worlds--including WOW, Ultima Online, and Final Fantasy XI--have banned accounts and/or removed farmed money from their virtual economies.