Blizzard Deletes 112,000 Diablo II Accounts

pixelblur writes "An update over at fan site DiabloII.Net points out that Blizzard has deleted 112,000 Battle.net accounts for Diablo II." The official post from the Battle.net team in part reads: "Numerous.. ..accounts were tied to the use of a hack or cheat program while playing Diablo II on Battle.net. In keeping with our aggressive stance against cheating, we have permanently closed over 112,000 of these accounts and documented the CD keys with which they were used." This clean-up comes ahead of the forthcoming 1.10 patch for the seminal title.

Comments

Why just infrequent account purges?

[HalfFlat]

I still can't see why they couldn't have gone through and deleted duplicated or 'bugged' items on the servers automatically. Give each item a unique id; every night check to see if the unique id turns up in more than one inventory; delete all but one.

The fact that they haven't conjures up various conspiracy theories, or (in my opinion the more likely option) demonstrates that they really don't care that much about the problem despite their press releases.

Further, the two years without a patch, despite the myriad insecurities brought to light, gives further evidence of a lack of caring. Again, despite their PR face. While this new 1.10 patch which will rejuvenate the game and all will be most welcome (presuming it ever comes), this in no way precluded security fix patches in the interim.

Patching and server-side item clean-ups would have been much more effective and much more welcome than the rare and irregular account purging that they seem to engage in instead.

Re:Why just infrequent account purges?

[Nagatzhul]

I think the last major patch was in December. That hardly qualifies as two years. Also, a patch came out with the expansion.

If you play on Battlenet much, it downloads them automatically before you connect (Yeah, a "duh" I know, but this is someone who thinks it has been two years since the last patch.).

Re:Why just infrequent account purges?

[HalfFlat]

The last major patch, 1.09 was released on the 20th of August. So, there is some small exaggeration in my statement, but close enough, surely. Perhaps I should have said 'nearly 2 years'.

On the 9th of December, the very much minor patch to the patch, 1.09d, was released, and this was the last patch of any sort for Diablo II from Blizzard.

Source: Blizzard Timeline.

Re:Why just infrequent account purges?

[Dark Nexus]

Umm........ v1.07, the expansion release version, is only about 2 years old RIGHT NOW. There have been 2 major revisions since, and a larger number of minor revisions.

Re:Why just infrequent account purges?

[quandrum]

Items do have unique IDs. This was introduced in 1.09 I believe, maybe 1.08. That's one of the big problems, how late this solution was. All the Stone of Jordans (the currency in D2 because in classic you could basically buy them and they are extremely rare.) The other is that the dupers have found ways around this. Especially items that the dupers create, although I have no idea how they create completely new items.

Unfortuantely, I don't think they could server-side item clean. This task would be beyond daunting. They don't even seem to have or want to devote teh resources to cleaning up inactive accounts. To sweep through the ?millions? of accounts and cross-check the 20-30 items average each has would be insane. So the only thing unique ID's do is prevent items from being in the same game, which should limit duping on a massive scale. However, like I said the hackers have since gotten around this on several occasions.

while they may not be supporting very actively, they do support it. They always patch server side exploits relatively quickly, but that's not something you'd notice if you just look at nice timelines. I think they are doing a remarkable job supporting a game that is so old...

Re:112,000 ??!!

[KDan]

You're assuming a 1-1 mapping between accounts and people. Many people have a lot of accounts - especially if they use cheats or tradehacks and such. So divide that by at least 10, probably more. Still a large number, but not so huge.

Daniel

Re:mules?

[thumperward]

Nope. Muling's both legal and harmless (okay, it harms the economy in that it reduces scarceness over time, but it doesn't result directly in the death of other characters like cloning greatswords does). ...but you'd know that, had you read the article instead of frostpissing.

- Chris

Re:Good

[SoVeryWrong]

Battle.net is Free
They already have the money from the sale of the game, there isn't any lost revenue.