Blizzard Files Lawsuit Against Gold Sellers

21 Apr 2008 at 18:31:52 by Paul Younger

Taking on a gold selling company has been something MMORPG developers have been shying away from for years. In a bold move, Blizzard has decided to take a stand and issued the following statment to the World of Warcraft community.

As many of you know, the latest content patch, along with many great new content additions, contains technical counter-measures designed to combat in-game gold spamming. Our efforts to reduce in-game abuse and create a fun, safe environment for everyone are never-ending.

With that said, we felt that it was important to share with the community just how serious we are in our efforts to combat this type of abuse. 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.

If this organization refuses to act accordingly, further legal action will be taken. We'll be sure to keep you posted on the progress of this topic.

The company in question can be considered an easy target that will probably not have the legal backing to fight Blizzard but this is an interesting development nevertheless. Could it be the start of something? Will we see Blizzard going after the bigger fish? Let's hope so.

Gold spamming in-game had become a real issue up until the v2.1 patch where Blizzard added numerous features to protect the player from in-game spam such as ignore lists. The issue had become such an annoyance that something had to be done and it appears to finally be happening.

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