from kotaku.com/ma...418419

Massive Ban Wave Hopefully Fixes World of Warcraft PvP

Blizzard unleashed its ban hammer again, this time kicking out more than 100,000 World of Warcraft players for a six-month period. Most of them are people who were cheating in various PvP battlegrounds with third party programs, and using interrupt-scripts.

We’ve recently taken action against a large number of World of Warcraft accounts that were found to be using third-party programs that automate gameplay, known as “bots.” We’re committed to providing an equal and fair playing field for everyone in World of Warcraft, and will continue to take action against those found in violation of our Terms of Use. Cheating of any form will not be tolerated.

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According to this chat above with one of the GMs (via r/wow), the ban affected more than 100,000 accounts. That’s a really huge number, even in a subscriber base of 7.1 million people. They’ve all got a temporary six-month ban, which is also surprising. Because back in the day, Blizzard didn’t mess around and permbanned botters.

Botting in WoW (or in any MMO) is nothing new, but it has become an annoying, widespread issue lately. It’s not just about the gold famers spamming the Trade Channel, but a huge number of bots farming PvP Honor Points and ruining the game for everyone else. My personal experience with this on the EU side of WoW is encountering 40-man groups of random Russian bots in Alterac Valley, running around like chicken. But if you’ve joined PvP battles lately, after a few games, it was obvious which one was the one full of bots. It’s not unplayable, but it’s very annoying.

And this ban wave isn’t just affecting hardcore PvP botters. People got lazy over the years, forgetting that this is an exploitation of game mechanics, and started casually using programs that automatically do the DPS rotations in raids or even break down collected herbs into pigments and make item crafting automatic. These players now have to wait six months to rejoin as well.