Blizzard says gamers found to be cheating or using hacks, bots, or modifications in Diablo III face potential permanent ban from Battle.net.
Gamers found to be cheating or using hacks, bots, or modifications in any form in Blizzard Entertainment's new dungeon crawler Diablo III face a potential permanent ban, the developer said in an update to its website. Those banned will be permanently unable to log in to their Battle.net account, and thus prohibited from playing Diablo III.
Blizzard explained that it "has always taken cheating in any form in Blizzard games very seriously, and that's no different for Diablo III." The developer went on to say that hacking and cheating "goes against the spirit of fair play." According to Blizzard, suspensions and bans will begin in the "near future."
Diablo III launched on May 15 to a warm critical reception and a smashing sales success of 3.5 million units in its first 24 hours and 6.3 million copies during the game's first week. The game was released without player-versus-player support and its real-money auction house, the latter of which has been targeted to launch today.
For more on Diablo III, check out GameSpot's review.
Eddie Makuch (Mack-ooh) is a News Editor at GameSpot. He works out of the company's Boston office in Somerville, Mass., and loves extra chunky peanut butter.
Single player game that refuses to let you play without Internet, has lag spikes and server downtime.. And now banning people from even playing in Single player for a game they bought with their hard earned money? I'm boycotting Blizzard from now on!
Gave up on this game when I realized that I would be playing the same SHORT game over and over for gear drops that are 98% garbage. Not to mention that the gold auction house is crap now because everybody expects people to buy their gear for real money which is ridiculous. Real money for virtual items.....this world is beginning to suck the fun out of games.
It's not like this matters at all. The gold sellers don't give a damn about getting banned; they just buy another cd key off battle.net and start a new account and keep on botting. Blizzard bans 1000 hackers/botters, they use the money they made in the real money AH to buy 1000 new copies of the game, Blizzard makes 60K more in game sales plus the 15% commission from the illegal gold/items they sold before getting banned. Great business model.
@ronnieo54 i agree with you, pretty lucrative since there can be so many serial numbers, one can say there are damn near unlimited keys.
Buys game, cheats/hacks in single player mode, can no longer play his own property ever because Blizzard is too stupid to allow offline play. GG Blizz, I was kinda looking forward to Heart of the Swarm but D3 was the last product I ever buy from them.
1 Like undeserved advantage by buying gear with real money = fair play
undeserved advantage by cheating = unfair play
oh yea this is definitely the last blizzard game i buy
2 Like Biggest waste of $60 ever spent on a video game. I am 22 and have been playing games since I was 4 on my Atari 2600. True story. I will say again: Diablo 3 was THE biggest WASTE of $60 I ever spent on a video game. If only I could return it for a full refund, I would get part of my soul back. Last Blizzard game I ever buy.
what happens if you get hacked and someone sells all your items on real money auction house gets money into his paypal.... lol? How does blizzard solve this problem do they restore the account to the owner with all the items and write off the monetary loss on themselves or do they do nothing?
Cheaters getting their money back from a game with a real money auction house where they profit from cheating? No way you said good bye to your 60 dollars the moment you loaded that hack
1 Like I hate cheaters as much as the next guy. But unlike most, I believe that if Blizzard bans a cheater, they should get a refund (albeit partial) for the $60 they put down on the game. It's only fair...
@Timeaisis when it comes to playing with other people i say that people should all play by the games rules, add all the cheats u want to a single player game
@100proofsoco As much as I find myself amused by your quote, I don't know how it works against my argument.
@Timeaisis Well I can turn that around and say that I believe that the hackers should refund the players they hacked. It's only fair... but life isn't fair. The players who were hacked don't get their money back and neither should the hackers. Hacking in Diablo 3 is a comparatively severer offense than hacking in Diablo 2 because unlike Diablo 2 there is a real money auction house so every item gained through illegal means is almost akin to real life robbery.
@Szeiden I didn't say hackers. If they stole stuff from people, sure. What if I altered the game in my favor? Not negatively affecting others, just getting unfair advantages in the game. Like amazing equipment and quick leveling. Maybe I use this to farm for gold and items that I sell on the AH. I haven't really harmed anyone. Then blizzard bans me. I paid for the game. Now I can't play. Shouldn't I deserve a refund?
I'm not trying to glorify cheaters, and I don't cheat. I'm just saying, game companies are becoming a little ridiculous with their terms of service when they can permanently ban someone after they paid for the service.
2 Like It's nice to see them crack down on cheaters, however, what I don't agree with is that by banning them from battlenet, they essentially have a piece of software that is now totally useless since they can't even play offline in single player mode (as in Diablo I/II). I just don't agree with their tyrannical hold on their software, not even allowing you access to it without logging into their server. - how would you like it if Windows or OSX requires you to log into their servers every time you boot your system?
@StryfeBringer Their software should be completely worthless since the hacked. That isn't to say I agree with Blizzard's always online policy however. My friend could have prevented getting hacked if he could have played offline... But if there is one good thing that comes from required persistent connection to play, it's the fact that hackers can have their access from the game COMPLETELY DENIED. They had it coming. Good riddance.
2 Like @rigzzsy Agreed, I hate cheaters on a public server. I'm not condoning that practice, just saying that I don't agree that they can then never access the program if banned (since you can't even play solo without first connecting to Battlenet.) For those that have played Diablo or Diablo II in the past, there were "hacks" that circumvented the need for a CD. Of course this could promote pirating of the game, but for those that owned the game and didn't want to keep putting their CD's in before running the game, the modified .exe file was pretty handy. According to Blizzard's rule, that would constitute a perma-ban and you wouldn't be able to access the game at all. Plus in the past, you could get a bunch of friends together and have a LAN party without having to connect to Blizzard's servers. These days that is not even possible.
1 Like @StryfeBringer I think the issue here your talking about is to do more with ownership and DRM, which i agree would be great if they found a more ellegant solution than forcing a connection to a server.
More proof the of the intensive SHILLING. Cheaters and mods will be banned LOL. SHOULD HAVE NOT MADE THIS AND ONLINE experience. Karma is a B****
1 Like @numairullah Hahahaha.. Blizzard got hit really hard by karma with 10 million first week sales (that's about $500,000,000 in sales!!). As an honest person who pays for his games, and doesn't cheat, I applaud both Blizzard's always-connected model and the harsh stance they are taking with cheaters. The bottom line - if you buy the game and play by the rules, everything Blizzard has done will make your experience better. The online-only nature also helps build a strong in-game economy. It all just works.
@kingJord Its 6m copies sold and it appears that only about 2.5m of those are reported retail sales. Apparently the rest are digital and cannot be confirmed by anyone. Of those, several million were free copies given away for 1 year WoW memberships. Lots of money but not as much as you claim.
@kingJord Better gameplay as in having to read a book when my internet connection fails? That would tend to increase my skills, but for that kind of experience, with plenty of reading, I can play Baldur's Gate.
2 Like Blizzard fails me now... They promised that the DRM would "get rid of the hacker and bring the customer a cleaner gaming environment". Big fail of the year
2 Like Anyone who takes the time to take a half glance at the TOS for the game knows its not legal to "hack or reverse engineer" the game. When you buy a game you dont OWN the game to do with as you please. You own a "permit" to play the game in the manner its meant to be played in. Cheating in the single player mode of a game is one thing: your only hurting yourself and your only taking the risk of wrecking your own game. Online cheating is a different matter.
People who claim they bought the game they own it they can do what are chlidish and need to reach the age of 10 before spouting off an opinion on this.
@Zoomer30 Incorrect it is 100% legal to reverse engineer anything as long as you dont go out and sell it. Companies do not dictate law no matter how official they make it sound. What a company can do is ban you from their servers, this is legal since you broke their product rule but do not confuse this private rule with law. Laws are made by courts not by corporate lawyers.
@Zoomer30 If that's the case; then user-generated content like add-ons and game mods or fixes/balance mods that make the game BETTER should be banned. Because playing some games in "a manner its meant to be played in" is filled with annoying bugs, and frequent crashes...ironic that you go name calling with other people who may potentially disagree with you...
2 Like @Zoomer30 A federal court argued that against microsoft when modders hacked their original xbox. If you pay for the hardware then you can do with it as you please same goes with software. HOWEVER the dev can determine if you will have access to their servers or not.
@chrisALLtogetha So true what colt_a said... after you beat it, there's no point in playing unless you want to fight the same mobs, some of which are now "elite" so they're shaded blue or gold in color, and often drop better loot. Other than that, and the increased difficulty, the story, the ending, the dialogue and the replay value.... suck.
@chrisALLtogetha Somewhat. The skill system is absolutely amazing. Now you gotta use your head when combining skill, not rambo through the level. Just the loot system and the DRM ruins the game. It rely heavily in Magic find stat. Without it you never get the chance to make the game drop a set or legendary. And it is not scale as you level up. I'm at act 1 Nightmare and it drop lvl 20 gear?? WTF?
minecraft lets you cheat all the time :D all trolling aside i am on the fence about this i mean on one side its a good thing cause i hate cheaters but on the other side your basically saying you dont own this game its ours and we can ban you at any time my question is if your hacked and the person gets you banned for cheating what do you do then or are you just SOL
7 Like This gets an article, but Blizzard implementation of a new feature that limits a players time spent in the game isn't?
There are dozens of forum threads of pissed of customers because they can't play the game how they like. If you get an AFKer, a crappy team, bots, farmers, or people who want to be carried, you would leave the game and join another one like a sane person.
But now Blizzard doesn't want you to do that. You are now limited by the amount of games you enter and leave, and after you reached the secret limit (which is small) the game bans you from playing for around 15mins.
Diablo 3 didn't deserve an 8.5 at all and Gamespot needs to do a follow-up article on the current state of the game, and on the backlash of pissed of customers Blizzard has now generated.
1 Like @Agent-M The game creation limit isnt nearly as bad as you make out, and is only designed to stop people constantly farming/exploiting 30 seconds of content to either gain gold or power level. And to prevent bots doing the same thing.
The limit is a set number of new games within a certain time which is not designed to penalise "normal players" and Blizzard already said in a blue post they have removed the feature for now whilst they evaluate it.
D2 had the same feature for the same reason for YEARS. This is nothing new.
@50218211 The problem with this is that you will never get the gear you need if you dont farm the game 1,000,000,000 time over on high difficulty. Whats the difference between farming one spot over and over and farming an act or a long quest especially after you have seen all the content already? If they are not cheating then I see no problem because this is an indicator that they are bored to death of the game and just want to end it, but of course we all know that D3 was designed to be unbeatable for 99.999999% of single players at the highest difficulty.
@Agent-M You should stop play the game if you can't find a average team within the maximum join... The game loot system is all base on luck you know...
3 Like @Agent-M Yeah, GameSpot seems to be leaking behind on the real news front sometimes, but thanks to Reddit and other sites these news get out to the players anyways. (whether there are conspiracy theories of GameSpot holding back articles or not, hehe)
You know, their servers not being able to handle the amount of concurrent player sessions could've easily been avoided by allowing us to play Diablo 3 offline from the begin on.
If Blizzard forces their customers to be connected to their servers to play, they should make sure that their infrastructure is up for the task - and it's clearly not, not the bandwidth, not the amount of servers, not from a security perspective.
I would recommend forcing a SLA on companies (Activision, EA, UbiSoft, ...) that require you to be connected to them in order to use the product you bought and to pay the customer compensatory payment whenever their service is not available, then this unnecessary nonsense would stop in an instant.
Besides the name, Diablo 3 has nothing in common with the previous ones anyways, Torchlight 2 is the new Diablo because that's where the old developers are too.
Torchlight 2 and Grim Dawn at least are games how they are meant to be developed and released (DRM free, with mod support, playable offline, etc.)
1 Like @bloody-hell Give it some time. People will realise they're being ****ed over by Blizzard and will stop playing D3. Then, Blizzard's infrastructure will be able to support the players who still play.
Diablo III is a devilishly captivating and addictive action role-playing game.
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