Mythic Entertainment has now banned in excess of 10,000 accounts for its recently released MMORPG, Warhammer Online: Age Of Reckoning. These accounts aren’t your garden variety MMO gamers, though: these belonged to gold farmers, widely regarded as spammer scumbags by honest gamers and despised by MMO developers for breaching intellectual property rights and the T&Cs of the game. The figure currently stands at 10,578 accounts banned – which pretty much equates to sticking heads on poles as a stern warning to the 750,000 other subscribers. Check out the current Banhammer figure here.

GOA, EA and Mythic Studios have announced that the open beta for Warhammer Online: Age OF Reckoning will begin on 7 September. Fans of the highly anticipated MMO will be able to enter the European open beta by pre-ordering WAR and going to the GOA account centre or visiting the EA Store to sign up for a limited number of spots. GOA also announced on the official forum that they have lifted the NDA for all players in the current closed beta phase of Warhammer Online. The game will be released nearly two weeks after the open beta commences, on 18 September.

Both Mass Effect PC and Spore are to use SecuROM as copy protection for the retail versions. The controversial anti-piracy software requires an internet connection to connect to an EA server and verify every ten days. Derek French, technical producer at Bioware clarified the news,

“An internet connection is not required to install, just to activate the first time, and every ten days after. You can be completely connectionless for nine days and encounter no problems playing Mass Effect. And you don’t need the disk in the drive to play.”

While PC security and privacy issues aren’t at stake here, this will obviously pose a problem for those that haven’t got round the clock internet access and It also flies in the face of EA’s claim that Spore can be played as an offline game.

EA-Land, or Sims Online as most know it, will see its final day at the end of July. EA has chosen to shut down the last of the servers on 1 August having seen a rapidly diminishing population in recent years since its 2002 release. Those still playing will get the final 60 days free of charge and anyone that subscribed as of 29 April 2008 will get $15 off any game in the EA store or three months Club POGO subscription… and maybe you’ll be able to win your money back. Nice.

Check out the full details of the shut down on the EA-Land Blog site.