Several Thousand Diablo 3 Players Banned for Using Bots

Blizzard has just confirmed that several thousand Diablo 3 owners have been banned because they used bots while playing the dungeon crawler.

Diablo 3 came out at the beginning of May and, given the fact that it featured a special online auction house that dealt not just in in-game gold but also in real-world money, lots of owners started using exploits and third-party programs to gain as much gold as possible.

Even if Blizzard kept a tight watch on the community, lots of players soon owned millions and even billions of gold.

Now, the studio has confirmed on its forums that it's taken action against several thousand Diablo 3 players who used bots and botting programs to accumulate gold.

"We've recently issued account bans to several thousand Diablo III players who were found to be using botting programs while playing. In addition to undermining the spirit of fair play, botting, hacking, and other forms of cheating can also cause technical problems with the game as well as contribute to performance issues with the Battle.net service," a Blizzard representative wrote on the forums.

Blizzard says that it will continue to monitor the community of players and that, through a future patch, it's going to add a special option in the game so that players can report those who they believe are using exploits or bots.

"As always, maintaining a stable, safe, and enjoyable online environment for legitimate players is very important to us, and we'll be continuing to keep watch on Battle.net and take action as needed. We will also be adding the ability for players to report this kind of behavior directly through the game client in a future patch."

Do you think Blizzard's efforts come at a good time or do you think the company should have acted faster and much harsher against those who use bots and others exploits in Diablo 3?