Blizzard has taken measures to get cheaters and gold farmers permanently out of World of Warcraft. This time, approximately 59,000 accounts were banned during the month of June, relieving WoW's economy of 22 million gold.
 
The 59,000 accounts were banned due to violation of Blizzard's Terms Of Use. This primarily includes the use of third-party programs to mine gold and items. The Blizzard poster said, "We will continue to aggressively monitor all World of Warcraft realms in order to protect the service and our players from the harmful effects of cheating".

Merciless actions like this one are supposed to intimidate everyone who have plans of cheating. Blizzard's bans always stir up the fan community. Of course, again lots of people, trying to get their account reactivated, will plead innocent. Is there anyone who's actually right? We may never know. Instead, we watch World Of Warcraft growing and growing. 59,000 may seem like much, but compared to the 6 million total subscriptions...

The game's first expansion pack, World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade will be released at the end of the year, perhaps attracting even more players to the unstoppable MMORPG. And more cheaters. Looking at Blizzard's recent ban-fests, they won't last long.

Well, almost! There's a Windows-only application called OGLE now making the rounds, which intercepts the OpenGL data flow sent by games such as World Of Warcraft and permanently saves the information as a standardized 3D model file.

You could then go one step further, grab yourself a 3D printer (starting at an easy $18,000) and make a little plastic figure out of your character. Obviously this will work with other games (and MMOs: Second Life for example) too, so if you don't even want to separate from your shiny avatar when you're off to work, this is the way to go.

Now, if you're one of the unlucky few not able to afford such a printer, you could always seek help at your local art or design school. Usually, they have access to these machines as they're heavily used as a cost-effective way of instantiating concept designs and prototypes. This is your way to prove you're a real MMO fanatic - if one of you is crazy enough to actually try this, let us know!

Even after Blizzard denied it several times, rumours of a Xbox version of the hugely successful MMORPG are popping up again.

Can't understand why, as the short article in the Xbox World 360 magazine which heated things up again only seems to contain a pretty vague statement regarding a possible port: Although "it is not confirmed it may as well be Gold plated fact."

It's very possible though: With FFXI enjoying a significant following on the console, Blizzard could like to have a piece of the pie in that area, too.

 

 You always see it the other way around, yet in this case, Blizzard actually got whacked for applying their - already controversial - MMORPG policies.

The whole affair started when Brian Kopp, a 24-year-old resident of Bronson, who wrote his own guide to WoW, "The Ultimate World of Warcraft Leveling & Gold Guide", got his account suspended there after Blizzard, Vivendi and the ESA forced eBay to take the auctions where he sold it for $15 down.

After some back and forth, the companies ultimately threatened to act against him with copyright infringement action.

Surprisingly, Kopp reacted by suing Blizzard for blocking sales of his book, claiming that his book does not infringe any copyrights. He quickly gained support from public-interest advocacy group Public Citizen.

After having been suspended from eBay twice, Kopp continues to sell the book on his own site, regardless of the current legal situation.

So is it about time someone strikes back? Restrictive MMORPG policies are no news but this will surely spawn many "this time they went too far" comments, proceeding to push MMORPGs even further into the public media.