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Blizzard Removes 400,000 More Battle.Net Accounts
Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to the Battle.net announcement that Blizzard has removed over 400,000 more accounts from their online gaming service, due to cheating. This comes after earlier similar action in June closed over 112,000 Diablo II accounts - this time, it's been announced: "In keeping with our aggressive stance against cheating, we have permanently closed 276,000 StarCraft accounts, 86,000 Diablo II accounts, and 41,000 Warcraft III accounts." It's also mentioned that Battle.net has "identified the Diablo II accounts with which a 'map-hack' program is being used", and banning is threatened if players don't stop, another sign of Blizzard's continuing, active anti-cheating stance.
I give it a week.
Even though I know that new hacks will come out, I am really glad that Blizzard is doing something about this. They seem to be responding to this previous article on online gaming.
What more, it takes a serious degree of selfishness and dedication to cheat, these scum are often heavy users.
Guess who's going to end up paying more?
Kids today are tyrants. They contradict their parent, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers. - Socrates 400 BC
The way they seem to be going after cheaters seems similar to the recent Texas drug arrests. You know, where people were put in jail based soley on the testimony some ex-rodeo cowboy hired as an undercover "cop" who wrote notes on his legs to keep track of deals.
For Warcraft 3, if someone thinks you're cheating, they simply e-mail blizzard, send a relevant replay and viola, your account can be terminated without notification or chance to defend yourself. All we need now are the legions of bad/new warcraft players who are convinced that your good strategy is "cheating". I payed $50 for the and its expansion. Damned if I want some pissy 12 year old banning my account based on "his account" of events.
Personally, I think players should have more input in this process, since we're the ones responsible for Blizzard's existence in the first place.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
This explains my dismal 0 - 41,000 WarCraft record!
I knew I wasn't THAT bad.
Cloud City Digital: DVD Production at its cheapest/finest
I don't know about the other games, but I play Diablo 2 and I lost an account for 'botting.' Yeah, I ran a bot about 3-4 hours a day. Not one of those 24/7 guys.
Now I know someone is going to jump me for running bots period, but before you do consider the competition. I'm playing with (and against) a ton of people with hacked items. It's virtually impossible to find or trade for good items that are legit on battle.net unless you're running a bot or duping/hacking. Legit items (unided) carry a ridiculous pricetag because the problem of cheating and duping is so bad. But instead of fixing a dupe/hack problem that has been rampant in d2 for *years* Blizzard finds it better to go after people who are trying to compete against the dupers/hackers.
Let me ask, who is doing more harm? The guy who runs a bot for a few hours to improve his chances of finding an item that doesn't suck or the guy who puts together a 100% illegal item and then uses it to run around PKing others or generally gaining illegitimate advantage in other ways?
Got on bnet today and saw the same people trading occy rings and ccb garbage. These people are without fear, because Blizzard seems more interested in harassing those who use maphack or a pindlebot. They feign a desire to keep people from cheating, but the most rampant cheaters remain totally unpunished. These people ruin the closed battle.net economy, and by doing so take a good deal of enjoyment out of the game for a large majority of users. No d2 player likes having to fork over extra stuff just because they want an unid'd item so it doesn't get deleted on them. Unfortunately, because of Blizzard's totally lax stance on the real problem this is the way the d2 economy works.
I really love d2, but if Blizzard keeps going after small frys instead of the big cheaters I'm just going to toss my copy of d2, and I certainly won't be looking to buy/play any other Blizzard games.
you can take the road that takes you to the stars...
I Hope they dont delete my lvl 8, took me years too get there :(
"Fear teh chickens.. do not use teh window, use teh curtain." ~ChickenKillr
See, some folks *want* to run a damned bot. They aren't really interested in spending their life poking around doing the janitorial portions of the game, building up. They're interested in the more exciting portions of the game.
Some games recognize this (Open Source and community-driven games are particularly good here) and try to minimize the amount of drudge work a player must do, if he so desires. MUD clients contain triggers. The roguelikes derived from Moria contain the Borg, a built-in-bot and a large number of automation features.
Now, it's entirely understandable that Blizzard wants to provide an option to allow players to play with other players who are under some constraint (not use use bots, or what have you). The other players want level footing without using a bot, and they should be provided with such an opportunity. However, Blizzard enters the arena of being reprehensible when they *also* try squashing bnetd, so that the people that purchase a copy of Diablo 2 cannot go elsewhere and play their game in such a manner as *they* would like to do.
Plus, I hold a firm conviction dating back to the Starcraft/Total Annihilation days that Blizzard is a wonderful marketer, yet mediocre developer.
May we never see th
how about 'active move to a newer game from us' stance? since they COULD have been doing this all the time, thus giving a firm response that no cheating, no hacking for bogus items & etc.
now it's just huge mass deletions of people who have come to except the cheating to be be a norm(and thus,not being cheating really since everyone does it)
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
The way I see it, these people have paid to cheat or run bots or whatever, but I don't want to play with them at all. So it seems to me (bandwidth issues aside) it would be a better solution to dump all of the known cheaters into their own server as they are identified leaving the folks that don't cheat to play in peace. Probably the servers for the cheaters would become overloaded but hey it's a small price to pay in order to use the game in an unintended way.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Blizzard Removes 400,000 More Battle.Net Accounts
Now that's what I call bad weather!
You know that a large portion of those banned accts will result in new sales.
Is there some kind of appeals process?
Some way to try and prove you weren't cheating or maybe a light weight?
Or even that they (blizzard) may have made a mistake?
Somebody got 0wnz0r3d by the big company and wants to pout about it.
Really man, good ethics say that a lesser wrong is still a wrong. I don't see how you can possibly think Blizzard had no right to boot you, nor do I see how you can possibly think it's "unfair" to boot you. Either way, you played the dirty game and you paid for it. I'd give you a cookie, but instead I'll just tell you to go buy one yourself, as it doesn't sound like you can do anything for yourself.
Always good to see Blizzard close the old barn door after the cows have gotten out, killed the local population, ran back to the barn to party, and left the barn again to poop.
Really, though, Blizzard really needs to tighten security on Battle.Net: I know I won't be buying their online game, knowing their record on security.
Vincent J. Murphy
Spandex Justice
Once again, Blizzard > *
This gives me some hope for WoW, even though from the screens I've seen it's not a graphical style I prefer.
The reason it gives me some hope is because I'm comparing it to SOE's record regarding bans in Star Wars Galaxies. Sooooo many dupers, griefers, and assorted other cheats and exploits that people have discovered and used, in direct contradiction to the EULA, and yet SOE continues to sit on their hands.
I have a lot of respect for Blizzard's actions. It takes some cajones to tell people, "Yes, you bought the game, but you're not playing by the rules, so sod off."
and in other unrelated news, Blizzard raised the price of Starcraft and Diablo to their original retail prices of $49.99
So Blizzard bans a crap load of cheat using accounts from battlenet. Most people applaud there "tough stance on cheaters" and "this bodes well for there upcoming MMORPG World of Warcraft"
but when you think about it banning so many cheaters (including the "lite cheaters") doesn't really harm Blizzard and in reality gives them an chance to resell those old games.. You don't pay a fee to play on BNet.. and the majority of players on Bnet are playing older games which aren't really flying off the shelves...
personally this is a good way to get people to repurchase these games to play on Bnet again.
"I am a kernel in the linux army"
So thats what happend to my account...............
DUKEY!
Personally, I've ran the maphack while playing Diablo2 and I don't exactly feel bad about it. I don't do PVP at all, so no players are being cheated; just PVM, and we all know how mindless D2 monsters are. Quite frankly, I'd be hard pressed to classify the maphack as a cheat since it only extends the functionality of the existing map so that you can do exactly what you were doing before, just in less time. Since D2 is a game that involves very little skill just a lot of mouse clicking, there is little lost; you are playing in the same 4 (or 5) areas over and over again, fighting the same exact monsters.
Maphack actually increased my enjoyment because I didn't have to spend as much time playing the areas I do not like since I could navigate out of them quicker. An earlier poster was right that the real problem isn't people using a maphack or a bot, its the people abusing the rampant bugged items that ruin the game since it destroys all attempts at trading non-godlike items. I no longer play D2 since players on Battle.net can very quickly tire you with the rampant scams and general childish behaviour, but D2 is more likely to collaspe under its own item-bugs than from people using bots or maphacks.
"What can a thoughtful man hope for mankind on Earth, given the experience of the past million years? Nothing." -Bokonon
it's about time there's a gaming company that's taking a stand against this garbage...
The pisser here is that if bnetd had not been shut down, folks would be able to run their own servers and write/employ mods for their servers like UT's CSHP to detect and prevent cheating (is there a website for this? I couldn't find one that I can link to). Unfortunately, this is a case where bad copyright law stifles innovation and usability. I hate to say it, but if this severly hurts Blizzard, I wouldn't shed any tears.
-Turkey
and the majority of players on Bnet are playing older games which aren't really flying off the shelves...
Excuse me? Do you even bother to look at sales charts? Diablo II (and Lord of Destruction expansion) was the #7 selling game for Sept 1-7, 2003. It has bee consistantly in the top 20 selling games for the past FOUR YEARS.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
they could be tricky and make all the actual keys they sell from some algorithm that only generates a 10^-6 size subset of the keys that the installation key validation algorithm will take, but then use a much more stringent validation algorithm for the online games (and that code can't be seen or accessed by the players or keygen producers)
This seems to be the case. Generated keys don't work on Battle.net.
They have a MMPOG coming out soon. They did not thing about this kind of shit for 2 years.
MMPOGS as in DOAC/SWG/EQ don't handle a little hack as well as something like Diablo/warcraft/starcraft. Blizzard has always had the out of "free service" we do the best we can.
They will charge for Worlds of Warcraft. They need to show "we are serious" about cheating. LOOK what we did! It cost them nothing and was a great PR move. Even if it was 2 years late, mark my words you will see it in print to prop up the hipe on WOW.
They did not do it to stop cheaters in Diablo/war-starcraft. They did it to sell there new game because they know people in that area of gaming will not live with it, they will leave. Unlike the people that play currently on BNET. No one pays to play in a hacked world....
Neck_of_the_Woods
#/usr/local/surf/glassy/overhead
What a bunch of losers. Kind of a sad commentary on society, when so many people have to cheat just to win a fricking game. I, personally, would pay extra to play on a server that was closely monitored by Blizzard that could catch cheaters and ban them. Maybe keep these servers at a low population or something.
Starcraft... Warcraft 2?
Where are they on the list...
"I am a kernel in the linux army"
A fine example of what happens when the "1337 h4xX0r" kiddies get out of control would be Ragnarok Online. Because of botters (some of them running a dozen or more at once), the market is saturated with rare items that sell for monetary amounts that only other botters could possibly afford due to the global devaluation of the games currancy. Going out and finding them yourself is quite a hassle too, considering that most maps are brimming with bots that can make finding enough mobs to effectively level on almost impossible. The game is effectively ruined and they've only been P2P for a few months now.
I honestly wish I understood why someone would pay good money to let their computer play a game for them...
Number of accounts before the banning: X
Number of accounts after the banning: X-400,000
Simple, right?
However ...
About 90 days ago, Blizzard released a beta test copy of the 1.10 patch - and anyone who uses it cannot play on battle.net. I wonder how many of these 400,000 accounts were automatically purged due to lack of use?
Mine should have been automatically purged in the previous few days, for example.
Maybe their math accounts for it, but I wonder, was it really
Number of accounts before the banning: X
Number of accounts after the banning: X-5000
Number of accouts after the purge: X-400000
Chivalry is not dead, it's just frequently misspelt. - M. Langley
It seems the battle.net pages and forums especially are having serious issues this morning. DoS attack from the leigions of pissy child haxors?
lol flamebait...
...+5 insightfull
why I dont know what you are thinking, these moderators are quite thoughtfull in their decisions.
Think about it, through 7 degrees of seperation from the original duper, you get traded a duped item. 2 weeks later your account is deleted because your posessed a duped item. Trust me, this is not a good thing. Deleting the duped item is another story, but given the number of duped items that are out on bnet, I don't think anyone who has ever traded with someone can say with 100% certainty that they have never posessed a duped item.
You should read "sold" as in "printed on a disk" label instead of "sold from a shop". Then the keeping track is much simpler.