Sunday, November 18, 2012

Diablo III Ban

I read this on Blizzard's site this morning:
We've recently issued several rounds of account bans for cheating in Diablo III. In each of these cases players used a hack program for exploitive purposes, for example to zoom out their game view and kill monsters that were beyond the normal range at which AI is triggered. As we do with all Blizzard games, we will continue to monitor Diablo III for cheating and take action as needed.

First, I don't like Diablo III as much as the previous titles. I have the original Diablo game plus Diable II and the expansion. I hesitated for a long time on buying D3 because of the "always connected" requirement but after playing the game for 2 months, the main problem is that the game is boring. The difficulty ramp is lame... the game is too easy at first, then gets way to hard. My guess is that Blizzard wants you to buy better items on its Auction House with real cash, where they make a commission. So after paying $60 for a game, you can only play it when connected to the Internet, and you have to spend more money or otherwise keep dying in-game. I'm too old for this crap...

Anyway, I wonder what happens when you are banned? I think I used "trainers" for D2 since the single player games/characters were not authenticated and were local to your computer. Does the D3 ban only affect your existing characters or to the entire game? Since your registration key is linked to your account, does that mean you can't play the game anymore? Does Blizzard refund the $60 (or whatever you paid)? Does it impact all your other games, like Starcraft II, that is linked to your Battle Net account?

I'm very disappointed in Blizzard. I also have bought every other Blizzard game except for World of Warcraft, but I'll probably pass on the next SC2 release... didn't realize I paid $60 for 1/3 of a game when I bought SC2. To think some executive is probably sitting in my old office in Irvine (Blizzard took over our office space when Broadcom moved to its new campus by UCI).

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