World of Warcraft developer has suspended 18,000 user accounts over the last three months

Dec 23, 2005 08:52 GMT  ·  By

Just recently, VU Games touted the fact that the subscriber base for World of Warcraft had reached 5 million people.

After today's news from the game's developer, Blizzard, VUG may be able to say WOW has reached 5 million users again in the near future. Over the last three months, Blizzard has suspended 18,000 WOW accounts of those who broke the game's Terms of Use, roughly 200 accounts per day.

Most of the suspensions were of computer-run characters made to farm gold and items for resale in the real world. Blizzard is asking legitimate WOW players to report any suspicious activity going down in Azeroth.

These individuals can be identified with scam artists from the real world. This one of the major problems with MMOs today: when you create a virtual world, the reflections of the real word (in this case, thieves) are bound to appear as in any normal society. What will be next?