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!!

[spire3661]

Its not a single player game. The loot is expressly designed with the idea that you will trade other people.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Check out Torchlight and, soon, Torchlight 2. The latter has an online multiplayer but you can play the singleplayer mode offline. And it's a fun game.

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!!

[geekoid]

Not in the tradition sense, it doesn't.

Even when playing solo, it's built for you to use the auction house.
So while you are playing, you are still online with everyone else.

Should they have created a stand alone single player mode? Yes. But they didn't.

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

[Hatta]

Meanwhile, I'll be playing Pool of Radiance on my Amiga 500. The only thing I have to worry about is losing my code wheel.

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!!

[afidel]

D3 doesn't really have a single player mode. You're always connected to their servers, are taking up a game slot (or have to wait for one!), have to deal with server lag, have no choice about what patch to play, etc. You basically have a muliplayer mode that you choose to play alone.

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

[lgw]

Well, I guess if your brain is only limited to ancient repetitive games, that's cool. Been there done that, don't need to do it again.

Sure is a lot of hatred for D3 around here...

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!!

[cc_pirate]

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.

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

[Brannoncyll]

If you had a clue on how games are designed I wouldnt have to explain to you how stupid you sound. Games arent jsut designed form the aether, DECISIONS are made that affect the balance of the game. Those DECISIONS included hampering single player mode so severely that the only truly viable option is to trade. Single player mode was PURPOSEFULLY deprecated to force trades. It was a decision wholly dictated by business reasons, not gameplay.

In the Reddit AMAA the designers explicitly state that they did not design the game around auction house use. During their internal testing they did not have a big enough group to even test a design that revolved around auction house usage. Of course they may be lying, but I doubt it.

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

[JonySuede]

steam->restart offline

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

[Mortimer82]

You are spreading misinformation and creating uncertainty and doubt.

As someone who until recently worked in Blizzard customer support, I can tell you there is absolutely no chance that your account details were leaked from within the company.

Gold sellers are in the business of selling gold for real money, they have a vested interest in compromising accounts in any way they possibly can. Most commonly, people are the victims of phishing scams, but gold sellers try exploit every weakness they can, including: use of malware, zero day software vulnerabilities, trying email passwords they got from hacked websites and forums, use of common passwords between, account sharing, etc. They are *very* determined since they get a paycheck from it at the end of the day.

At this point you are no doubt already thinking of your response in which you will endeavour to explain that it's impossible *you* were compromised in some way and that it *must* be through a fault of Blizzard. I am sorry, but even though you may be too ashamed or proud to admit it, you need to swallow your pride and accept that your account was *in fact* compromised due to a failure on your part with account security and you should carefully evaluate your account security practices or you will be compromised again in a similar way in the future, if not in WoW, then for some other service.

If you choose to believe it couldn't have been your fault, then you are simply in denial and although it may make you may sleep better at night, you are still as insecure as when your account got compromised in the first place.

Blizzard also expends a significant amount of resources addressing compromised accounts and even worse, it's bad PR for them when people are victims, Blizzard has *every* interest in cutting down the number of compromised accounts. This is also demonstrated by them making the mobile authenticator a free download, or the physical token which is available for a nominal fee (less than $10 *including* shipping).

In regards to your account still having not been unbanned after 4 months, there are few explanations. They may have asked you to do a virus scan first and never heard back from you. Sometimes the account management page doesn't get updated until you try log into the game. Or, possibly, but sadly, the agent you dealt with slipped up, they're only human, but it's still exceedingly poor service if that is what happened.

Finally, in regards to your unsubscribed account having game time on it, gold sellers often use free game time promotions or fraudulent means to add game time to inactive accounts.

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!!

[LordLucless]

Close. The loot is expressly designed to force you towards paying money for it via Blizzards RMAH; actually playing with other people is entirely optional.

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

[Anguirel]

And that's a really that bad a thing, being constantly connected?

Yes, it's a really bad thing when their servers are overloaded and you can't play, or their servers are down for maintenance and you can't play, or someone hacks your account and gets you banned and you can't play, or they patch your favorite ability out of the game and you can't decide to skip the patch until you're ready to change classes, or your internet is out for any reason and you can't play, or you go to a LAN party that can't afford a major outside connection and you can't play, or you try to play a Hardcore character and you disconnect or lag out at a bad moment and die and lose your character, or, or, or...

There's a lot of reasons why it is a bad thing. The most notable reason was the First Week Launch Experience. Most people wanted to play solo anyway, but couldn't even do that due to the inadequate server capacity. The only reason that caused any problems at all was because you couldn't play in an off-line mode.

If this were an actual MMO, where the entire design is around having lots of players together, that would all be par for the course. This is an explicitly limited multiplayer experience that has no real need for the server connection at all, except for the DRM properties such a connection enforces, and an attempt to prevent some player-base fragmentation that I'd wager is not really going to have any notable effect in any case (those that would have played in offline/local modes aren't going to participate much in the extra features afforded by the always-on connection even though they're forced to be on the server where they are an option).

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!!

[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.

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

[L4t3r4lu5]

For everyone else, there's Torchlight

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?

[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:Huh?

[Mortimer82]

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.

Awesome!

[Papa Legba]

A game now so immersive they included a hardcore mode for botters!

Re:Awesome!

[mwvdlee]

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.

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.

Re:Haha

[spire3661]

It began the day they merged with Activision.

Forget the bannination, how about uptime?

[bobetov]

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?

Re:Forget the bannination, how about uptime?

[Jeng]

Who the hell is going to pay real money for gear in a single player game?

Lots and lots and lots of morons, more morons than Blizzard could ever piss off.

Re:Forget the bannination, how about uptime?

[DoofusOfDeath]

Who the hell is going to pay real money for gear in a single player game?

Lots and lots and lots of morons, more morons than Blizzard could ever piss off.

It seems to me we're seeing the difference between pre- and post-Activision Blizzard. Pre-Activation Blizzard was all about the gamers. Post-Activision Blizzard is all about the profit.

Good business, but poor art.

Re:I've been banned by Blizzard

[mwvdlee]

in Wow, several times. All of them after I no longer played the game.

So you were no longer playing the game... several times?

Be careful Blizzard

[fa2k]

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.

Cheaters kill D2 on public servers

[HockeyPuck]

Playing on a public server in D2 was downright treacherous. You could enter the game only to be instantly killed by some cheater. I'm glad they have the ban hammer. Also, there's not many times when i'm playing D3 and my computer is not connected to the internet given that I don't often shut off my home router nor does my internet connection go down.

Internet is becoming a new "always on" utility, just like power, water and phone.

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.

Re:Diablo 3

[ildon]

That "bug" was just a rumor started by some streamers and people who photoshopped images of them having a ton of gold. They were trying to get people afraid of using the auction house so they could get some low bids on items that would expire during Tuesday's downtime. It was a scam. Yes you can cancel your auction when you shouldn't be able to (because they stupidly made the check for when it could be canceled client side only), but upon canceling the auction the bidders always get their gold back and the person canceling the auction just gets the item, no gold. You know, exactly how one would expect it to work.

Re:Petition

[GrandCow]

There is a petition over at change.org asking Blizzard to release an offline mode path. It would be nice if we could reach the 100'000 signatures necessary

Everything from dungeon layout to boss mechanics to loot drops is done on the server. There is no simple "offline patch" that would let you play without an internet connection. They'd basically be rewriting the game from scratch if they did that (which they won't)

Re:Petition

[LordLucless]

In the initial beta runs, they apparently shipped the server and client bundled together to run on the local machine, presumably because the server code was under development and in a constant state of flux. They stripped it back out fairly early on. But there's certainly no technical reason why someone with the sourcecode couldn't merge them together fairly easily.