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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.
What ever happens to locked out copies sold on e-bay?
Regarding the rest of your comment though, Blizzard really haven't done much at all for the game since since 2001. While they claim to be addressing the problem of cheaters, this claim is belied by their actions. To reiterate: very occasional account purges are not a very effective way of dealing with the problems of Battle Net.
With the exception of the new features in the 1.10 patch, Blizzard do seem to have done the bare minimum possible to keep Diablo II running on Battle Net. Given they're still selling the game, making a profit on it etc. while touting the secure on-line play as a feature, it really does seem reasonable that they should be obliged to do exactly that. Again, while it would be nice if they did more, this is all we can really expect. Oh, save they they did promise regular new runewords, craft recipes and the like that never did eventuate.
The 1.10 patch stuff though, I concede, has been taking resources that Blizzard didn't have to commit. Until the recent round of QA testing, it seems they've had one employee working on it for the last 18 months. In absolute terms this is a non-trivial amount of money, but it does sort of pale in comparision to the ongoing profits Blizzard are making in new sales. No judgement from me here on this issue.
In short: if they cared as much as they claimed to, there would be regular patching of security problems with the game, and the cloned and bugged wreckage of the online economy would never have been an issue. They would have also followed through on their promises of game maintenance (eg, runewords etc.) Conclusion: they're less committed than they claim.
This is great news for any loyal legitimate D2 gamers. Being one myself, it's very frustrating dealing with all the dupe/hack/bot activities going on on BattleNet. After 4 or 5 yeras of release, DiabloII can still climb up to the top TEN game sale per week. That shows how good the game is. And Blizzard is still releasing patches after patches showing that they do still care about us gamers fans.
I've never used Maphack. Then again, I don't play until I reach level 99 or rely on trading for duplicated Uniques, like "1/2 of the people who still play Diablo 2".
Maphack may be benign but it's still a lame cheat. I've been PKed exactly once outside of a duel in several hundred hours of Realm play, so I don't buy that it's necessary. Good riddance to several hundred thousand maphacking Burizons if they leave because they actually have to guess what their companions are wearing.
- Chris
- Trying to see what other's equipment is. Come on, is this really that important?
- Speeding up Mephisto/Baal Runs. Assuming anybody really does this that much anymore, it will be nerfed during the next patch anyway, as they've stated they will be trying to discourage the farming of certain bosses.
I got the impression that they can't disable it, just detect it. This post is a threat saying that people will be banned in the future if it is detected. Did people leave in droves the last time accounts were deleted? Perhaps some, but there are still a lot of people interested. I'm looking forward to the patch myself. I wish they would do more against hacks and cheats but I'm glad they're still working on a patch for this old game as its still better than any of the new games I've tried to play lately.No it wouldn't. There are several algorithms that would make this a simple thing to code. The actual running of the program (or query, as it's probably a database on the back end) would take some time, but it's not like they're under any deadline except one they set for themselves. Even so, if there are 2 million players (complete guess) and each has 30 items, of which half are worth examining (not health potions and such), that's only 2 mil * 15 = 30 mil rows to examine. Not small but not huge. Look at it another way - if each row is 1K, that's 30GB, which is a small database.
Advice: on VPS providers
but banning the keys makes those 112,000 accounts not so ready to return