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Diablo 3 Banhammer Dropped Just Before RMAH Goes Live

Posted by Soulskill on from the i-do-not-envy-their-customer-service-reps dept.

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."

13 of 540 comments (clear)

  1. That's *it* for me and Blizzard, man!! by crazyjj · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
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    1. Re:That's *it* for me and Blizzard, man!! by h4rr4r · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:That's *it* for me and Blizzard, man!! by spire3661 · · Score: 5, Informative

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

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      Good-bye
    3. Re:That's *it* for me and Blizzard, man!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    4. Re:That's *it* for me and Blizzard, man!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    5. Re:That's *it* for me and Blizzard, man!! by Anguirel · · Score: 5, Informative

      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).

      --
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  2. Re:Haha by spire3661 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It began the day they merged with Activision.

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    Good-bye
  3. Forget the bannination, how about uptime? by bobetov · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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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  4. Re:Awesome! by mwvdlee · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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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  5. Re:Awesome! by SuricouRaven · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  6. Re:Huh? by lgw · · Score: 5, Insightful

    *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.

    --
    Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
  7. Re:Huh? by Mortimer82 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  8. Re:Petition by LordLucless · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    --
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