Blizzard bans ‘several thousand’ Diablo III players

By: Muhammad Qasim Hassan

  |   December 20th, 2012   |  

PC News

Developer takes strict action against players using botting programs; to make reporting bad behaviour convenient through future patch.

Blizzard has been facing the nuisance of hacking and cheating for years now, but is not ready to put up with such behaviour in its action role-playing game (RPG) Diablo III.

The developer has passed judgement on several thousand players who were found using botting programs, issuing bans to them to punish them for their crime.

A Blizzard community manager said on the game’s official forum said that players stooping to cheating and hacking not only undermine the spirit in which the game should be played, but also ruin the experience for other games.

Further, the use of botting programs and other hacking tools end up causing technical issues with the game and take their toll on the performance of Battle.net servers.

“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,” said the Blizzard community manager.

The Blizzard representative asserted that the developer is committed to providing the best possible experience to legitimate players and will therefore continue to take strict action against any player who forgets to adhere to the basic principles of morality and tries to ruin the online experience for others.

“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,” said Blizzard community manager.

For now, the company has requested the Diablo III players to cooperate with it by identifying and reporting cheaters and hackers by sending an email at hacks@Blizzard.com.

A future patch for the dungeon crawler, however, will make the process of reporting players cheating and indulging in other types of bad behaviour significantly easier by adding an option of bringing such issues to the attention of the company via the game client itself instead of having to send an email.

Released in May earlier this year, Diablo III is unarguably the most popular PC game of the year, with a recent report by Google revealing the game’s title to be fifth on the list of top trending searches of the year.

Even though the fans of the Diablo franchise were made to wait many years for the third title in the popular series, the wait proved to be worth it. The game went on to sell a record 3.5 million copies in its first 24 hours of release.