Diablo 3 Banhammer Dropped Just Before RMAH Goes Live

eldavojohn writes "One thing Diablo 3 has that many other games do not is a 'Real Money Auction House' (RMAH), which went live today for players with two factor authentication. Of course, mere hours before that, Blizzard publicly announced they would follow through on their promises. Accounts they have identified as cheaters and botters have been banned 'by the thousands.' No official number is out, but the news is indicating that as people get off of work and return home to their bot-wives and bot-kids they may find themselves without a valid Battle.net account (possibly tied to other games like SCII and WoW). Blizzard has also included many fixes to remove/dissuade many other exploits but if their past arcane attitude toward the 'gamers of the game' is any indication, thousands will be unhappy."

Comments

That's *it* for me and Blizzard, man!!

[crazyjj]

Many a scorned Blizzard fan will wail away on the message boards over this, I'm sure. But hearing a Blizzard fan say "I've had it with them this time!" is like listening to a crack whore bitch about her dealer. She'll rant all day, but you just know by that night she'll be crawling back, offering to suck dick for more.

Re:That's *it* for me and Blizzard, man!!

[h4rr4r]

I have not yet bought diablo 3 and probably never will. Single player games do not need online access. Nor do I want to support that model.

Re:That's *it* for me and Blizzard, man!!

[h4rr4r]

It has a single player mode.

If it was only multiplayer that would be even less reason for me to play it.

Re:That's *it* for me and Blizzard, man!!

[Anonymous Coward]

It does not have single player "mode". That is a misconception. The game is explicitly multiplayer with the option to play alone if desired. At any time in a solo adventure you can invite others to join you. Claiming diablo3 is a single player game is like claiming world of warcraft is a single player game.

Yes, you can play solo, but that is not the intention of how the game is supposed to be played.

Re:That's *it* for me and Blizzard, man!!

[cheekyjohnson]

Yes, you can play solo, but that is not the intention of how the game is supposed to be played.

It does not matter how they intended the game to be played. What matters is how the player (the one who actually owns the game) wishes to play it, and there happens to be a single player made (playing alone, single player mode, whatever you wish to call it).

Re:That's *it* for me and Blizzard, man!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been thinking about this, and it occurred to me that Diablo 3 doesn't have a singleplayer mode. Every game is like Battle.net play was for Diablo II. Why they didn't just let you play offline and not let local characters access the auction houses is beyond me, but there you have it: they dropped single-player, LAN, and open Bnet from the prior game in the series and called it good.

Re:That's *it* for me and Blizzard, man!!

[HapSlappy_2222]

Well.... having the game, I can tell you that there's really not a "single player mode". Any of your battle.net friends can log into your game at anytime, or send you party invites. The best you can do is set yourself to "busy" and tell your friends to leave you alone. All characters also have access to the on-line D3 features, such as the auction house, achievement system, chat, and "public game" options, at all times. The "single player" game experience is identical to "multi-player" with a party of one; even if you don't have battle.net friends to play D3 with. The fact that they didn't include a truly single player mode in the first place is what is annoying people who just want to experience the latest Diablo chapter (if the online requirement is that bothersome, and I do understand why it would be to some people, I suggest Wikipedia and Youtube for this. The whole story is there.).

Regardless, Blizzard chose to force people online for a reason: The items or gold you get playing in a party of one are just as valid for trading with friends or on the auction house as those gained from groups. Had Blizzard designed a single player mode that didn't have access to the auction house, achievements, chat, battle.net, or classic co-op multi-player, it could have been done without a connection, but a) it would have been a very short single-player campaign, indeed, and b) simply put, they didn't. It's obvious they want people utilizing the Auction House (a clever take on pay to play, when you think about it), but they also have an interest in having people play their games online for as long as possible, just like Starcraft 1 & 2 and Diablo 1 & 2.

Incidentally, D3 is actually pretty fun, but like WoW (or Star Wars, or Tera, etc), a lot of the fun comes from the people I play with, and we all live too far apart to have a LAN party. It's very much like going to the bar with my local buddies and playing pool or darts while we chat, or watching the superbowl or playing poker in my living room. I could do all those things alone, but it's more fun with friends. Specific to the game, it's a riot to watch the loot explosions and wonder what dropped for everybody else, laugh at your friend for being a dumbass monk and standing in green fire, or helping your barbarian buddy (or maybe just some random AH buyer) out with a sweet new pair of boots that your wizard would just trash in a truly single player mode. I'd have finished the whole thing on a lazy Saturday afternoon without these social features; a truly single player mode would have been a waste of cash.

Re:That's *it* for me and Blizzard, man!!

[cheekyjohnson]

No, but I'm a member of a fairly large community of hackers, none of whom have ever had any keys unrightly banned.

This is about false positives, not about actual cheaters getting banned. Even if 100% of cheaters got banned, that would not mean that no innocents got banned.

Re:That's *it* for me and Blizzard, man!!

[DreadPiratePizz]

You joke, but being able to cheat was why I loved Diablo 2. It's so terrible and boring to level and grind for good gear, so to make it much more bearable I would use a trainer to give my character what they needed. This made the game much more interesting since I could skip all the grinding and just find out which types of characters would be fun to play, and which skills and skill combinations would be effective on Hell difficulty. I saw no reason to waste my time grinding, when that's not what I enjoyed. I wasn't harming anybody else, as this was all on open battle.net or Single Player.

This is also why I did not buy D3 - it's forcing me to grind for levels and gear, or worse, BUY gear. No thanks.

Re:That's *it* for me and Blizzard, man!!

[JonySuede]

steam->restart offline

Re:That's *it* for me and Blizzard, man!!

[Dahamma]

You are both just being pedantic, really.

But to contribute to the pedantry... a "mode" in a software program is generally an explicitly configured state of the application. Your usage is really just talking about a style of playing the game. It's a multiplayer game with N players where N can be from 1-4.

You could start calling a wolf a big mean shaggy dog if you want, but don't expect people to agree with you or take you seriously in a discussion about dog breeds. Or you could reply to my post in ALL CAPS, BUT THAT'S JUST A STYLE OF TYPING AND NOT A MODE OF SLASHDOT ;)

Re:That's *it* for me and Blizzard, man!!

[cheekyjohnson]

You are both just being pedantic, really.

I disagree. I see no value in the DRM, and see no reason that it always has to be online. To me, Blizzard's reasons and excuses are clearly nonsense.

Re:That's *it* for me and Blizzard, man!!

[Brian Feldman]

Shipping the real game engine (the one that runs on their servers) with the game would give hackers a strong chance at finding vulnerabilities in the server. Security through obscurity has a benefit here for the multi-player experience.

Incidentally, I was looking forward to D3 but I truly agree with the viewpoint that you shouldn't have to be on-line to play a game solo and so I haven't been keen on actually picking it up... maybe I am still annoyed about WoW as well, but I just don't feel like giving Blizzard my money.

Re:That's *it* for me and Blizzard, man!!

[mrchaotica]

or, or, or...

You missed the three most important reasons: because Blizzard has violated your property rights by performing a technological end-run around the First Sale Doctrine, because your property will eventually evaporate when (not if) Blizzard turns the servers off, and because Blizzard has stolen it from it's rightful eventual place in the Public Domain.

Re:That's *it* for me and Blizzard, man!!

[Mortimer82]

With your use of swear words and capital letters, it's not unreasonable for one to question the rationality of your statements, however, for the benefit of other readers I will say a little more on this.

Even if one were to ignore the difficulty of an employee dealing with all the internal measures against them doing such a thing, there isn't a good enough financial incentive for them to risk a job doing it. No support is outsourced, and as a first world employee, the amount of money they could get from this doesn't even remotely justify the risk to their job. Gold selling in WoW is very low margins making it only worthwhile to third world citizens.

When I left, there were no notification emails for an account being reactivated, as such, unless a friend questions you through other means about being online, you would not be aware your account was activated. Gold sellers use phishing sites, malware and engage an array of other criminal behaviour to hack accounts, as such they are not fussed to use fraudulent credit card details to add game time or even make use of any other scheme they can to get game time on an inactive account.

An experience of a small group of friends does not make a global pattern, wow has millions of players, there is a staggering amount of coincidence as a result. Also, if you and a friend visit some common website which had their password database hacked, then that could very well explain why both of you got hacked around the same time.

Generally, only big companies which have personal details or credit card data actually notify their users of security breaches, a little fan site which only has your email address and password might not even know they got owned, never mind actually tell their users if they found out.

Compromised accounts are nothing but bad news for Blizzard who loses customers, and thus revenue, as a result of them. It is worth it for them to do everything they can to prevent compromises, they have a serious financial motivation for doing so. It doesn't pay Blizzard to be ignorant on their security, it would cost them way more in terms of lost revenue than spending the money to be doing everything they can to keep their side secure.

With the above in mind, what is more likely, there was a failure with Blizzard, or that your username and password combination was unfortunately leaked into the into the hands of hackers.

No one is infallible, not me, not Blizzard and not *you*. However, once one considers how much compromised accounts cost Blizzard, then the only options become that either there really is a somewhat irrational conspiracy and Blizzard is to blame for your compromise, or the more reasonable explanation is that the compromise was completely external of Blizzard.

Re:That's *it* for me and Blizzard, man!!

[cheekyjohnson]

No it does not have a single player mode.

Yes, it does.

every charachter you create has the ability to interact with other charachters and is thus a multiplayer charachter.

You also have the possibility to play in single-player mode.

This, to me, is clearly DRM and/or greed-inspired nonsense. I won't support any game like it, and I'll tell others to avoid it.

Re:That's *it* for me and Blizzard, man!!

[Luckyo]

Whoever modded parent insightful, hit yourself. Hard.

Diablo 3 is a carbon copy of all previous diablo games in terms of gameplay. It has both single- and multiplayer modes. Blizzard put in a very brutal DRM scheme into single player, and to defend it fanboys like parent try to pretend that there is no single player mode in the game.

In comparison: you cannot avoid other players and their impact on your gameplay in WoW. You can easily avoid this in diablo 3.

Re:That's *it* for me and Blizzard, man!!

[bertok]

Inherently with any software, there are sometimes bugs which is of course always going to be a frustration for support staff.

In which case, it's their job to pass it up to people who can fix it, the developers. Blizzard support never does it. NEVER. They explained that to me in writing. If they don't have a workaround already, you are shit out of luck as a customer.

While your mileage may vary between the representative you speak to, most of the people I worked with were all passionate about the games and about giving the best support they could. I know this sounds cheesy, but it made my day when I managed to help someone out with a really obscure issue, or that I got a compliment on the service I gave.

That's nice, but why would I care as a customer if support fails to help me... with a smile?

I don't know enough about your particular issue to comment on the real cause, but as the launcher is working fine on my 64 bit win7 installation, it leads me to believe this is only affecting a minority of those users meaning it could be a very hard one for the developers to track down. However, support requests costs them money and I would imagine people are being appropriately pestered to get it fixed.

Something that breaks 1% of the time because of a bug, has a bug in it 100% of the time. Deadlock and timing issues are notorious for this. YOU CANNOT BLAME THE CUSTOMER FOR BEING UNLUCKY! Saying that "it works for me" doesn't help the customer, who then just becomes even more angry.

I can offer some very generic advice, almost always, it was background program's or antivirus interfering with the game. Do try a selective startup with nothing else running in the background and see if it helps:

Are you fucking kidding me? Next you'll be telling me to try turning it off and on again.

I spent days writing carefully worded messages to Blizzard support explaining in painstaking detail that no amount of generic cut & paste support bullshit is going to help if the Launcher design is fundamentally broken. There are thousands of posts complaining about the same issue: The Launcher used to work, it was modified for the D3 and MoP betas, and has never worked since. Either thousands of Blizzard's customers broke their PCs at the same time in the same way, or Blizzard fucked up the re-design of the Launcher. Which do you think is more likely?!?

Also, keep in mind that for every forum post about that issue, there are likely 10, 20 or maybe a hundred other users with no problem at all and thus haven't posted there. It is one of those unfortunate thing about support forums, you tend to only see the problems and never all the other users with none.

Why would I give a shit about other users? *I* have a problem! Again, you're shifting the blame, which is typical support tactics from a company that doesn't care about their products or their customers.

Here's a better statistic for you, which you really should memorize: For every customer that complains, there's between a hundred and a thousand that have the same problem but didn't bother to complain.

I read that in a scientific research paper, and I have personally collected hard statistics over years to back that up: An automated crash reporting system that I managed would collect several hundred crashes for every support phone call regarding the same crash.

Re:That's *it* for me and Blizzard, man!!

[mr_gorkajuice]

No, it does not. There's only one game mode, and it's multiplayer. However, unless making your game public, only friends may join your game, and you have a checkbox option that prevents even them from entering without explicit consent. But "single player mode" doesn't exist. My girlfriend has been playing "single player" all along, untill she needed help beating some boss, at which point I simply clicked the "join" button from my friend list, and poof - there I was, in her "single player game". Why is that possible? Because it was always a multiplayer game. She was just the only person in it.

Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Blizzard has also included many fixes to remove/dissuade many other exploits but if their past arcane attitude toward the 'gamers of the game' is any indication, thousands will be unhappy"

So they should keep thousands of cheating douchebags happy at the expense of hundreds of thousands/millions of good paying customers who are trying to have a good time?

Re:Huh?

[wmbetts]

It's one thing to use a bot / external program to cheat. I agree ban those people, but Blizzard does ban people for stuff that isn't really a cheat IMO. Like the other poster mentioned buying item for Y from a NPC then selling it for Z (that's higher than Y). A recent example is when they added LFR. There was a "hack" were you could run it more than once and still get loot. If I remember correctly what you'd do is run it once roll on everything you can normally. Then you'd run it with a friend and they'd roll on what dropped. If they won it they weren't suppose to be able to trade it to you, because you weren't eligible. It didn't work that way though, because it did let you trade it. When they did patch it they banned a bunch of people for doing that even though they were playing within the parameters of the game. It's not their fault the developers overlooked such a simple thing to check.

Re:Huh?

[lgw]

*marks off the "It's in the game so it's not cheating!" square.

The rules of the game are the game software, unless Blizzard goes out of their way to make it clear where they diverge. It's kind of the point of these games, after all, that you try whatever the game software allows to solve problems.

Re:Haha

[spire3661]

It began the day they merged with Activision.

did not buy diablo 3

[Dan667]

the more I hear about it the more I am glad I didn't. Sounds boring and a constant money grab / drm crap fest.

Re:did not buy diablo 3

[Mortimer82]

If you dislike Diablo III because of the controversial lack of single player, then that is your opinion.

However, this article refers to Blizzard banning cheaters and if you aren't playing the game because you can't cheat, then myself and many other Blizzard fans are quite happy to see you stay away from Blizzard games.

Re:Petition

[Anonymous Coward]

"Nice" in the "pretty, but worthless" sense, right?

Good riddance

[kommakazi]

of the cheaters, modders, and botters...hopefully there's some sort of appeal process if you are mistakenly banned from the game however. I'm tired of people bitching about the internet connection requirement...do you really disconnect your computer from the internet often when gaming? It's not like you have to pay a monthly fee. It makes sense seeing how the single player game is still tied into the auction house and now the real money auction house. It keeps a level of legitimacy to the items in these places. Don't like it?, I don't care. It's a good game and I'm all for keeping out the cheaters, modders and botters as much as possible.

Re:Good riddance

[LordLucless]

do you really disconnect your computer from the internet often when gaming?

No, but apparently Blizzard didn't get the memo, seeing as how they frequently disconnect their servers from the internet while I'm gaming.

Re:Awesome!

[SuricouRaven]

Running a second server set would be expensive. Easier to just rig the random number generator so all they end up farming is an endless stream of worthless bottom-tier loot, and can be defeated in combat by even a new character with ease. Thus they add a new sport: Whack-a-bot.

I'm a Diabo 3 hipster...

[AdamTrace]

I liked Diablo 3 before it was cool to hate it.

Seriously, you all go ahead and not play. Make your protest and stand up and shout about how lame it is that you need to be online. The rest of us (or maybe it's just me and my friends) are having a TON of fun playing.

If you don't like it, that's fine. But don't tell me that *I* don't like it. 'Cause I do.

*NOBODY* bought Diablo 3

[mrchaotica]

...because what Blizzard is "selling" is something considerably inferior to ownership!