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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."
I bought Diablo 3, but have had 3 separate occasions where my "single player" game was unavailable for multiple hour long "maintenance" windows. Not being able to blow off steam in a dungeon crawler so Blizzard can get more value out of its players is leaving a SERIOUSLY bad taste in my mouth.
Who the hell is going to pay real money for gear in a single player game?
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It would be fun if they didn't simply ban the bots, but put them all on a separate server with eachother.
Similarly, grievers should all be moved to a server where they are treated to a never-ending stream of NPC noobies that curse them.
I have no issue with assholes, I have issues with assholes being near normal people.
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In my experience, it is not. The keys/accounts they ban are an underapproximation of people actually cheating. That is, I've never had a key banned that wasn't cheating, and I've been a D2 hacker for a long time. I've probably had over 1k D2/LOD cdkeys banned, and I've had countless temporary (IP-based) bans for sending invalid packets experimenting with the game protocols.
One thing Blizzard doesn't do is ban people who don't deserve it. Anyone saying otherwise is simply lying.
Diablo 3 is inherently set to fail. This is coming from someone with 180+ hours into the game. The basic mechanics of this game prevent any long-term success. I mean for fucks sake just last night hyper-inflation ensued on the gold auction house because a bug got out about buying an item from the auction house, then changing your COMPUTER's date back two days, thus getting the gold back and still keeping the item. Really Blizzard? This game is and was a complete pile of shit. Unfortunately.
This makes the requirement to be online to play D3 much worse. Blizzard better be 100 % sure there are no false positives. They probably have all kinds of CYA stuff in their EULA, but now that there's real money involved, some victims of wrongful banning may actually try to sue.
The story in an MMO should never require reading any quest text. Story is great - but it needs to be what I do, not what I read. So called "second person storytelling" (not that that excuses Charlie Stross's bad game-related books actuallly written in second person).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
You conveniently failed to mention that it wasn't as simple as "you could accidentally get more loot than you should", people who exploited this went out their way to do so.
The steps required was something like *all 25 players* had to manually choose to pass on the loot, then having the member who wanted the loot leave and then re-enter the instance.
On top of this, the once per week per boss rule was highly publicised prior to the patch going live and the UI clearly explains this limitation, *everyone* knew it shouldn't be possible, but when the bug was found which allowed them bypass this limitation, some players exploited it for all the could.
Interestingly, no one had their account closed permanently for this, however anyone found involved had their account suspended for a full raid lockout (one week), and had all Raid Finder items removed.
One of the reasons I am a Blizzard fan is their stance on cheating, and I feel they dealt with this very fairly.
No, but I'm a member of a fairly large community of hackers, none of whom have ever had any keys unrightly banned. With literally tens to hundreds of thousands of data points between us, it's highly likely that we're right.
You are full of excrement. Allow me to rebut.
My case. Last year I decided I had finally played enough WoW. I had 2 characters at level 85 and 2 others at level 80. After thousands of hours of WoWing, the fun just wasn't there any more. So, I cancelled my account.
I cancelled my account on April 26th, 2011. As of May 1st, my account was supposedly no longer 'active'. On May 15th, 2011, I got an email from Blizzard indicating that my account had been banned for 'gold selling'. How in the f*** is that possible, I asked myself? I don't even have an active account any more! So of course I contacted Blizzard and told them the circumstances (as well as me being absolutely positive that my PC had no root kit and no viruses - and believe me I checked, long and well) and got a useless 'Your Account Has Been Hacked' form letter from them and them telling me to reset my password and follow this 'process'. So I did that and my ACCOUNT REMAINED BANNED for at least several weeks, which (very conveniently for Blizzard) kept me from posting this issue into their forums. Apparently Blizzard has some folks 'inside' who sell cancelled account details to gold farmers. I know this because this same exact thing happened to another guildy of mine. You'd think Blizzard would want to know that. You'd think they would take action. But they don't and they didn't.
So, Blizzard can and DOES ban people that do not deserve to be banned. Even customers who paid them monthly for over 4 years.
So they can burn in hell forever as far as I am concerned. I am DONE with Blizzard. Will never buy another game from them again. Heck, not even sure if I CAN buy it since I never bothered to continue to try past the 2nd or third time to get my account unbanned and you can't even BUY and download this idiot game without a Battlenet account.
"There are laws that enslave men, and laws that set them free. " - Sean Connery as King Arthur
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.
... or there's my experience. Similar to the GP poster, I disabled my account after WotLK, intending to be on hiatus until the next expansion came out. As you note, I received no notification emails. Later, when Cataclysm arrived, I went to re-activate my account, and found I had been banned for gold selling a month or two after I disabled my account.
At this point, we have only mere anecdotal evidence, but we seem to be accruing quite a bit of it, from disparate sources. And no, my machine has no malware on it, and my Blizzard password was only used for WoW.