CIO - In June, Iceland-based CCP Games brought the hammer down on a group of resource hogs that were clogging its data center.
In an operation dubbed internally "Unholy Rage," the company cut off 2 percent of its subscribers--real customers who had paid to play CCP's massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), known as EVE Online. The small group of players was using software to essentially cheat at the game, automating the collection of resources and the completion of quests to generate gold. These so-called real-money traders would then sell the gold for real-world cash.
Such schemes not only wreak havoc on the virtual world's economy (CCP Games has its own on-staff economist), but the traders also have a significant impact on the company's real-world data center. Case and point: When the company cut off the devious 2 percent of its users, it gained back 30 percent of its computing resources.
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