Recently there have been an increasing number of World of Warcraft accounts using Bots to automate the game play. This is against Blizzards Terms of Use for playing World of Warcraft.

So what has Blizzard done about the problem? They have wielded the ban hammer and suspended thousands of accounts suspected of being used by Bots.

Also Blizzard has not made public the exact number of accounts being suspended, a screenshot from a player chatting to a customer services representative suggested it could be around 100,000 accounts in total.

Blizzard said the suspended accounts would be banned from playing World of Warcraft for 6 months.

The majority of players hit by this round of banning will be “Gold Farmers” these are players which do nothing but farm gold to then sell it to other players for real money. It is against Blizzards Terms of Use to buy and sell gold directly for real money.

Often farming gold in World of Warcraft can be a very tedious affair and very time consuming and is often the only option of casual players to get gold which they can then use in the virtual auction house to upgrade their gear instead of spending hours Raiding with other people.

Some of these casual players which had no intention of selling their gold for real money, but used a Bot non the less to farm gold; may also have been caught by Blizzards ban hammer and have found their accounts suspended. This could be main reason behind the short duration of the ban (only 6 months) as Blizzard does not want to permanently ban players, which may have used a Bot in a very limited fashion.