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Blizzard Removes 400,000 More Battle.Net Accounts 95

Posted by simoniker from the still-300-million-left dept.
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.
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Blizzard Removes 400,000 More Battle.Net Accounts More

Blizzard Removes 400,000 More Battle.Net Accounts

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  • How long until a new map-hack? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Knetzar ( 698216 ) on Wednesday October 01, 2003 @03:56AM (#7101654)
    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 [slashdot.org] previous article on online gaming.
    • So you'll give it a week eh. But these people if they are repeated cheaters, their key will be banned for life or at least for a whole lot of months. They'll have to spend some money to go back and play by buying a new copy in the store. And if they cheated like 3 times and they had static ip's, perm ip ban. Blizzard is going to win this.
      • No, they won't have to spend any money because there are plenty of keygens out there. They just look at the code of the key validation function, reverse engineer it, and voila you have a program that generates a random, valid, unique key. If it's done right it might cover a large portion of the keyspace so that there's no way for blizzard to stop it without banning large numbers of innocent paying customers. However, they could be tricky and make all the actual keys they sell from some algorithm that onl
    • First off, the current map hack is just fine. There is no part of it that is detectable unless they scan resident memory. I was just talking with the guy who made that program today, and his accounts are fine, along with other people who used it. The accounts that got banned were using other things, such as bots for the game. When a program sends no packets, and in no way changes anything besides what is on a display client side, there is no way to detect it without scanning that client, something they
      • When a program sends no packets, and in no way changes anything besides what is on a display client side, there is no way to detect it without scanning that client ...
        How difficult would it be to detect this cheat by examining the players response to information they shouldn't have?

        • How difficult would it be to objectively do this for thousands of accounts? It's obviously doable, but that's not the way Blizzard has made it sound. They are acting as if they can detect it through another method. Other than recording every action a player does and analyzing it to see if she can go from point A to point B too quickly, it's not doable. Do you honestly believe that it would make sense for a large company to view all that data just to ban its players? Or do you believe a company that can
          • I vote for option C... They know they can't stop it so they are spreading FUD.

            As I understand it they only have a couple of people working on battle net. So hand analysing seems unlikely.

            Oh, as far as tracking point a to point b times... Interestingly the concensus is that getting tagged causes this... yet I've been "tagged" even without using mapping features. Thankfully, since I cannot play public games anymore This isn't a problem and private games are uneffected.

            Frankly the only people sufferin
            • I agree, it's a complete FUD campaign. Target people who they obviously can target, and scare the others.

              There are lots of reasons for being tagged. You used to get tagged if you would hit too many monsters too fast. I saw this in full effect with a whirl wind barb I had... Very retarded.

              You'd think they would go after the people doing the malicious hacks, not the people doing self helping or hacks that actually help others, wouldn't you? Shows where their priorities are.
              • Their priorities as I see them are to get rid of the people that play the game. Looks like older accounts were hit harder than new accounts and most bot only accounts weren't touched at all.

                Think about it this way... if you get rid of the old timers the people that still play a lot and you leave in all the botters/hacks/pk then it becomes a lot harder for the noobs.

                As you start shedding more people in the game, more people leave because there is no one to play with without being pk'd. No reward for lot
          • What about a trap that'll only attract the most active map-hack players?
            That should be simply enough for them to have done it already?
            • A trap? What would be the method of detection and selection for those that go into the trap? I don't understand what you are trying to get at with that comment. If it's a trap that would detect "You're not supposed to be able to do this" and 2% of players do... You just banned 1000+ legit players for no reason. That's the issue at hand with that kind of a detection method.

              As I've said, they aren't detecting it. This is FUD, and they just banned groups of botters.
      • Do a byte check on a file? Or a Checksum or something along those lines? I'm not familiar with the program, if it runs off another PC and just sniff's the packets, well nothing they can really do that I know about...
      • First off, the current map hack is just fine. There is no part of it that is detectable unless they scan resident memory.
        Previous to 4.7j, it aparently was detectable. That version's changelog lists:

        Improved socket protection so it can't be detected (now blocks instead of swapping).
        So, at least up to 9-17-03, they could detect maphack users.
    • They aren't responding to that at all... There is nothing to do with unsportsmanship in the game... The players with trigger hack, hacked items, drop hack are not being targeted.

      Frankly, I use maphack specifically because I got drop hacked and killed a few times... There really is no other way to protect yourself... I don't see blizzard doing anything about this...

      Shrug. Frankly I find it a little unusual that the last go round people that had never botted got cut and others that bot all the time wer
    • They didn't actually implement any sort of anti-cheat. All they did was some sort of cheat detection, and closed accounts and banned some users and the CD keys of some repeat offenders. I know that not everyone who hacks in any of the games got caught (which is pretty logical) since THE VERY DAY blizzard posted the news, I ended up teaming up with a maphacker in Warcraft 3.

      One of the blizzard reps did say on their website that they were in the process of trying to make the acount wipes happen more often

  • 400,000 Scum Bag Subsidy (Score:4, Insightful)

    by !the!bad!fish! ( 704825 ) on Wednesday October 01, 2003 @04:06AM (#7101687) Homepage
    400,000 is a lot of scum bags to ban.
    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?

    • Why should Blizzard care if these are heavy users? Battle.net is a free service, and Blizzard isn't losing any money by banning accounts here. If anything, they stand to make more money from people buying the game again (I've seen it happen before).
    • Just a note to consider: They banned 400k _accounts_. However, for Battle.net, accounts != users.

      I know many people who have multiple accounts. Heck, there's been times I forgot what my old account was and simply made a new one.

      It's likely that far, far fewer than 400k users were affected by this.
  • 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 warcraf
    • Oh please, quit your pissing. Some random with a week on the server's email "OMFG THIZ DUDE IZ TEHWINN!!1 ON ME!" isn't what Blizzard is basing account deletion on. The accounts in question, "have been tied to the use of a hack or cheat program while playing StarCraft, Diablo II, or Warcraft III on Battle.net". Do you actually believe that the folks making these decisions look at the replay and can't tell the difference between someone who is good and someone with a cheat? Nevermind the accounts deleted be
      • If Blizzard was actually deleting accounts due to duped or hacked items I think a lot less people would be upset. However, they're not. It has been a d2 problem for two+ years and they still aren't doing anything about it. It's terrible. As far as I can tell Blizzard deleted about 0 accounts tied to duped/hacked items, because the dupers/hackers are still trading the bogus items.
        • They most definitely have NOT touched any of the duped items. It's just a move to preserve their bandwidth at this point. They want people to move on to other games, and stop playing the ones that are no longer making money. This is the third round of Diablo II bannings, but they haven't taken the time to do a wipe of accounts that have bugged or duped items. It wouldn't be hard to do such a detection. They just choose not to.
          • 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.
    • Damned if I want some pissy 12 year old banning my account based on "his account" of events

      Blizzard has said that false reports will not get you banned. They seem to be well aware of this issue.
    • The cheaters banned in Warcraft have been people using maphacks which remove the fog of war. The usual way to check it is to watch a replay, and see if the person clicked on something they shouldn't be able to see.

  • Ah ha! (Score:5, Funny)

    by heldlikesound ( 132717 ) on Wednesday October 01, 2003 @04:28AM (#7101752) Homepage
    This explains my dismal 0 - 41,000 WarCraft record!

    I knew I wasn't THAT bad.

  • Going after the wrong people.. (Score:3, Informative)

    by doubleyewdee ( 633486 ) <wd@@@telekinesis...org> on Wednesday October 01, 2003 @04:38AM (#7101772) Homepage
    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.
    • It's a money issue. Your bot uses bandwidth, their dupes are static and don't require any of that bandwidth, which means money. By the way, what bot were you running?
      • Yeah, I know. It bothers me though that they get all high and mighty and say they're taking some hardline stance against cheating. Blizzard doesn't give a fuck if we cheat, as long as our cheating doesn't cost them money. Hey, that's fine, it's their right to feel/act that way, but they shouldn't lie to people about it.

        Also, I was using d2jsp w/ pwnage pindle. It worked really well but was a supreme bitch to setup. :)
        • Hehe... Really? Was it a script issue with setting it up or just getting the program to run in general? If you looked at the credits, I have somewhat of a vested interest in that bot considering I wrote it... Hehe

          I don't play anymore, so this doesn't effect me in the least other than to scoff at the fact that they are doing this for PR and to conserve bandwidth... What better way to do than get rid of the "undesirables", even though they're leaving people that are even worse to go along their merry
          • It wasn't an issue of getting d2jsp itself running, that was pretty easy (RTFMing and all). Configuring the scripts I was using to not sell stuff I wanted was a pain though. Lot of .ini-type files needing to be edited and whatnot. It took about half a day to tune the bot to where I felt comfortable leaving it to run and going away from the computer. Once it ran though, it ran beautifully.

            As far as deleting people with dupes and hacks, yeah, I'm 100% for it. If Blizzard could nerf the illegitimate item
          • hey, FruitBar, nice meeting you here :o)

            Botting will never stop in V 1.09, since your pwnage pindle just kicks ass, and could only be stopped by changes in gameplay.

            I'm looking forward to 1.10 - CDB might just actually happen if doing multiple boss runs is nerfed enough ;o)

            Kiwaiti

    • Why Blizzard is scum (Score:3, Insightful)

      by 0x0d0a ( 568518 )
      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
      • 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.

        Everybody understands that, when you're in somebody's house, you play by their rules or you're not welcome to play at all.

        Well, when you're playing on Blizzard's Closed Battle.Net servers, you're in their house. If you don't like their rules, then you can play Diablo II off-line.

    • Re:Going after the wrong people.. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by rhuntley12 ( 621658 ) on Wednesday October 01, 2003 @06:00AM (#7102012)
      Cheating is cheating, it's too bad a small time cheat instead of a big time cheat got busted, but you were still cheating. ANYBODY cheating ruins the game for others.
      • Yeah, see, I used to play 100% legit. I did it that way for a long time. Then Blizzard made massive balance changes. They made the game *extremely* difficult to beat solo, and they cut the rewards for playing outside of a large group. The difficulty increase required items of better quality. In search of better quality items I got ripped off more than once, lost *MY* legit items because of dupers, etc. So instead of getting into the bad scene that is trading/duping/hacking I decided to run a bot to ge
        • I guess the lesson you want me to learn is that since other people ruined the game by massively circumventing the system I should have just quit instead of trying to enjoy the game and stay as close to legit as I could? That's a pretty terrible lesson, and Blizzard is setting a pretty terrible precedent.

          Funny, instead of trying to cheat, but not cheating as bad as the others, I quit for a while, then came back and played legitimately. I play the game to play and enjoy it. If I don't enjoy the game, I stop

          • Maybe I'll start playing again now that they've cleaned things up, not that I noticed the cheaters before (except when I was trying to do some trading, of course, when the SOJ is a standard unit of barter there's something wrong, but then pskulls are easy enough to come by legitimately and they were worth quite a bit for a while).

            I don't think you understand how bad it is. The SoJ is no longer a form of currency, the "Occy Ring" is. The occy ring is an oculus combined with an SoJ so you get a +3 skills

    • Re:Going after the wrong people.. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by OldMiner ( 589872 ) * on Wednesday October 01, 2003 @06:44AM (#7102095) Journal
      I play Diablo 2 and I lost an account for 'botting.'

      So you cheat, as defined by the game's creators.

      a dupe/hack problem that has been rampant in d2 for *years*

      But you don't cheat in that way? What gives? Doesn't seem like you have an issue with playing the game on your own terms. Why don't you dupe if it's such a long standing issue that's simply not punished?

      • Please see the grandparent post, as well as my other replies in this thread. I would have no desire to run a bot if Blizzard wasn't letting the dupers/hackers ruin 100% legitimate play. However, as it is they have tuned the game in such a fashion that you need the most elite items to be competitive, but the most elite items are near-impossible to get without doing one of:
        a) botting
        b) duping
        c) item hacking.

        The item hackers are by far the worst, because they end up with items totally outside the bounds of

        • I would have no desire to run a bot if Blizzard wasn't letting the dupers/hackers ruin 100% legitimate play.

          1. You presume that preventing dupers would be a trivial matter. Being a fellow who's worked on a few moderately sized programming projects, I can see how it might be impossible to stop such behavior, depending on the game's organization, behavior of multiple servers, versioning, and CPU limitations.
          2. You speak of competing. But competing with whom? I am under the impression that online play for D
        • I am just curious... Is all this cheating happening on the closed realm servers (which is supposed to be cheat-proof) or open battle.net (which is basically a free for all)?

          If it's going on on open battle.net then I have no sympathies since you chose not to log in to the secure servers.
    • 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.

      • Re:Sounds like... (Score:4, Informative)

        by doubleyewdee ( 633486 ) <wd@@@telekinesis...org> on Wednesday October 01, 2003 @08:21AM (#7102417) Homepage
        Thing is, I'm not saying that it was unfair. All I'm saying is that Blizzard is going after the jaywalkers and letting the grand larsonists go free. They have every right to drop my accounts with or without cause. Hell, they can do whatever they want with their games and company. However, I am also free to comment on the sudden decline in quality that Blizzard is showing. My comment was simply that Blizzard is not being at all even-handed in their distribution of punishment, and that this shows the decline in quality of the products the company claims to support.

        As far as good ethics.. Blizzard has shown a distinct lack of ethics in effectively lying about their stance on "cheating." The only "cheating" they care about is any activity which might cost them some money. They're entited to feel that way, but ethically speaking they should come out and admit that they don't care about people cheating as long as the cheaters don't add any load to their servers. When Blizzard shows me good ethics, I will be more than happy to exercise good ethics in my dealings with them. For a long time I was a religiously ethical Diablo 2 player. Then I learned that Blizzard just didn't care, and that anyone who didn't help themselves was going to be screwed as far as playing/enjoying the game, because Blizzard didn't have any interest in fixing what was wrong or even letting anyone else fix it either (bnetd). So until the time comes (if it ever does) that Blizzard is either honest with their customers about their motives, or their motives change, I will do what I can to continue enjoying the product I paid for, even if Blizzard doesn't care for it.
        • I can't comment on the quality of Blizzard's anti-cheating effort, all I can comment on is the hypocrisy that you're putting forward. Two wrongs dont make a right if it's first your wrong or not. Cheating to anti-cheat the cheaters still ruins the game for those who are working not to cheat at all. If any of that made sense.

          Money related or not, Blizzard is showing more effort than many games online which is good. Constantly I see folks selling their exploited items on StarWars galaxies, problems that stil
    • man I played Diablo 2, 4 years ago, when it first came out. It didn't take me more than 2 or 3 times on the battle.net to realize that it was crap. Let's spend all day clicking on monsters, then they die, then I click on monsters, and then they die. Pretty frickin' boring if you ask me. Not much game there. Hell I could write a program where stuff appears, you click on it, and then it dies. It's not much of a game.

      But as for cheating, all cheaters of all sorts need to be banned. I'd go so far as to
    • in all fairness, Blizzard should get you and the big ones too. you think that by running a bot you aren't weakening/playing with the d2 economy? you can have my account cause i quit d2 cause of this bullshit.
      • If Blizzard got me and the dupers/hackers I wouldn't be particularly bothered. I knew that by running the bot I ran the risk of getting my account nerfed. However I think that bot runners are, sadly, helping the economy. They at least provide a small counter to the immense flood of dupes and hacks. At least bot items are legit, if not truly legitimately found.
        • The real question is, if there are fewer legitimate items in the Diablo 2 economy, will Blizzard be more likely to stop the dupes?

          Fixing the economy is not really a matter of adding more legitimate items into the economy, it's a matter of reducing the items in the economy to their 'natural' state. By using a bot to 'counter the flood', you're also reducing the rarity of certain legitimate items, thereby hurting the economy in much the same way duped items do. The simple fact is that it's probably a lot eas
    • Dude, you're whining about virtual items in a virtual world. Get over it.

      I played Diablo II (a _lot_), and I finally just kicked it. It was nothing but hunt for items, and make a character to exploit whatever new patch came out recently. I never hacked except for MapHack, which I got rid of after a few months. I picked up the game again about a year later, playing hardcore mode (1 death = character gone), and map hack kind of defeats the purpose there. That lasted about 3 months (felt carpal tunnel coming
      • I enjoy how you insult cheaters at the end of your post ("you're complaining about a bunch of 15 year olds cheating and using it as an excuse that you should") nary a few sentences after you yourself admit to cheating ("I never hacked except for MapHack").

        What gives, you hypocritcal cheater?
  • I Hope they dont delete my lvl 8, took me years too get there :(
  • 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)

    • how about 'active move to a newer game from us' stance?

      Unfortunately, that doesn't work so well, since not everyone interested in StarCraft or Diablo 2 is interested in WarCraft 3 (and they also banned WarCraft 3 players).

      If they had a StarCraft 2, Diablo 3, and WarCraft 4, then I could see that theory meshing with this announcement.
      • ah well.. but you have already PAID for the diablo, starcraft and wc3.. so you're just dead weight to them anyways.

        oh well, they could care a shit for the customer but doesn't really feel like that..
        • I don't understand whiny brats like yourself. No other company supports games as well as Blizzard. If you think that's different, you are either really stupid, or just a whiny little brat angry that you got banned.

  • Preferred servers (Score:3, Insightful)

    by bhima ( 46039 ) <Bhima.Pandava@DE ... com minus distro> on Wednesday October 01, 2003 @05:25AM (#7101907) Journal
    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.
    • I actaully like this idea. Once an account is noted as cheating, simpley redirect all server requests (or logons) to the "cheat" server. Then folks who want to play normally go to the normal servers, the ones who want to cheat go to a cheat server.

      Enemy-Territory has punkbuster with it, and it seem to do fairly well. I have seen some folks who seem to shoot a little too acurately, but they might simpley be their connection or something. But, there are some servers that do not use punkbuster which I avo

  • from the do-we-really-need-subjects? dept. (Score:5, Funny)

    by InsaneCreator ( 209742 ) on Wednesday October 01, 2003 @05:40AM (#7101959)
    Blizzard Removes 400,000 More Battle.Net Accounts

    Now that's what I call bad weather!
  • but I gotta wonder if they do this just to make more sales.

    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?

  • Good to See (Score:5, Funny)

    by vjmurphy ( 190266 ) on Wednesday October 01, 2003 @08:25AM (#7102439) Homepage
    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.

  • Once again, Blizzard > *

    This gives me some hope for WoW [blizzard.com], 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 cajone

    • Ummm... what? Do you watch the SWG forums at all? They have stated that they do ban anybody that is caught using exploits. Their stance, however, is that they do not want to ban somebody who inadvertantly uses an exploit and sometimes it's difficult to tell. They also state that it's their policy not to plublisize these bans and to handle it on a case-by-case basis. They said that typically when a person is caught using an exploit, they give that person a phone call and give them to opprotunity to either co

      • Re:Once again (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Xenothaulus ( 587382 )
        I have specific individuals in mind, who have actually bragged about exploiting on the boards, and the devs have done nothing about it. As you're obviously a subscriber, you probably know the people I'm talking about, or at least some of them. My actual point was that Blizzard's support record, (tech, customer or otherwise), is much better than SOE/Verant.

  • mmm (Score:2)

    by Ty ( 15982 )
    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...

    pe
  • So thats what happend to my account...............
  • 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;

    • Re:Diablo 2 and cheating (Score:5, Insightful)

      by akiaki007 ( 148804 ) <aa316@nyWELTYu.edu minus author> on Wednesday October 01, 2003 @11:41AM (#7103859)
      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

      Just because you don't call it cheating doesn't mean it's not cheating. By the rules, IT IS CHEATING. You can't decide what the rules of the game are. If you create it, then you get to decide. Since you didn't you either do what they say, or you're a cheater. There is NO grey area here.

      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.

      Then don't play.

      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.

      So because you cheated and got to the final goal quicker, it made the game more fun. Well, because someone else cheated and got the coolest items in the game, they had more fun. What's the difference? It's still *cheating.* Stop pretending you're better than all the other cheaters. Just because you do it at a lower level doesn't make you any better.

      A thief that robs a bank or steals from a grocery store is still a thief.
  • 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

  • Only one real reason they did this. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Neck_of_the_Woods ( 305788 ) * on Wednesday October 01, 2003 @12:17PM (#7104226) Journal


    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....


    • One day when I have more time to type I will spell/grammer check my posts....until then!

    • The cheaters nowadays are getting too ballsy and Blizzard wants to be sure they seem as opposed to their actions as possible after such a long period of letting it happen.

      A fine example of what happens when the "1337 h4xX0r" kiddies get out of control would be Ragnarok Online [ragnarokonline.com]. 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 curran

  • 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.

  • 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 ban

  • It seems the battle.net pages and forums especially are having serious issues this morning. DoS attack from the leigions of pissy child haxors?

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