Blizzard bans 320,000 Battlenet accounts

"Blizzard has banned 320,000 Warcraft III and Diablo II accounts it says were in violation of its terms of use, aiming to protect its games from cheaters and security exploits.

First-offenders will endure only a 30-day suspension, although repeat offenders' CD keys are permanently banned from the service, Blizzard says. It discovered many of the accounts it closed from user tips, and the company encourages players to continue to report violators.

Account abuses generally take the form of game mechanic exploits or users running third-party programs designed to advance one's own statistics or steal information from other users."

www.gamasutra.com/view/news/28183/Blizza..._320000_Accounts.php

Nice to see that Blizzard is taking action against their one time purchase accounts!! Lets just ignore the WOW accounts that are being used for gold farming, cheating, etc.

I just really see this as some kind of ploy more than a real reactive measure for a problem.

My guess is that the REAL reason they did this is to prompt all of these non subscription fee paying users into buying starcraft dos..

Just think of all those monthly subscriptions they are going to miss out on. Wait wait, they have soo many paying people they can afford to ban or loose a quarter of a million people!
Must be nice!

Twodavez wrote:

Just think of all those monthly subscriptions they are going to miss out on. Wait wait, they have soo many paying people they can afford to ban or loose a quarter of a million people!
Must be nice!

These were Warcraft 3 and Diabo 2 accounts.. WOW wasnt effected.

ohh, good job reading on my part

If it was the diablo 2 accoutns i can see that i still play like alot and botters and websites selling this stuff plus mad stashes of gold are beiing created in such a large amount right not its almost bs

wish they would do that to hackers on mw2

theyd have to find a way to track them first.. hacks in MW2 are client side... theyre exploits on rendering engine and hardware interface ( mouse is tricked into movement)

Wasn't the whole point of removing dedicated servers in MW2 to prevent hacking?

garfi3ld wrote:

they don't care about hacking, its only to make sure everyone pays for the game. After you pay for the game they stop caring. Unless its Valve

Agreed. I'm just saying that, they make claims of doing all these changes to make things better and safer, but in fact they are just taking out LAN support and custom features. I don't know for sure, but I think that if they allowed dedicated servers, hackers would host their own matches like that and hack just there, instead of going into any legit game.

One word: Activision

Good point. Activision handles both MW and Blizzard stuff. Plus, they are talking about making a future Guitar Hero that is pay-to-play, probably subscription-based like WoW. And the long-held rumor of a CoD game that's online-only, subscription-based. And I'm pretty sure they've talked about doing a Tony Hawk game with subscriptions.

"If it works for WoW, it must work EVERYWHERE! We'll be RICH!"