14 DAY TRIAL // Blizzard has recently announced that it has banned no less than 320,000 Battle.net accounts involved in violations of the Terms of Use. Basically, all these people cheated when playing either real time strategy Warcraft III or hack and slash role playing game Diablo II and were caught doing it.
Those who did something against the Terms of Use for the first time are just suspended for a period of 30 days, while those who have committed more than one offense have seen their accounts and keys banned forever. Blizzard is also saying that players who have been hit by the ban effort should not try and appeal the decisions, as they are all final.
Blizzard is also reminding all those who use Battle.net that they can employ an official form to report all newly available hacks to the developers so that they can take steps to stop them and to quickly ban those who use them.
The sheer number of accounts affected by the Blizzard move is interesting, especially considering that we are talking about Warcraft III and Diablo II, some pretty old videogames that are not as competitive as World of Warcraft, the MMO Blizzard runs, or StarCraft, which continues to be extremely popular in multiplayer.
The move from Blizzard can also be seen as a warning for the future. The company currently has StarCraft II in beta stage, with keys available to those who preorder the videogame from GameStop, and is also set to put out a new expansion for World of Warcraft, called Cataclysm. The fresh content is likely to draw in a huge number of gamers, some of them probably tempted to cheat in order to gain an advantage over their peers in the initial stages of multiplayer ranking. The company is actually telling them to watch out and be sure that they play nice to continue using Battle.net.