Last warning from Blizzard?

[HI5]

Today Blizzard did something unusual - warning for the Cheaters was posted on Diablo 3 community site, which is obviously uncommon event. What does it means for botters? before we say anything, lets read the original news:

Blizzard Entertainment has always taken cheating in any form in Blizzard games very seriously, and that's no different for Diablo® III. If a Diablo III player is found to be cheating or using hacks, bots, or modifications in any form, then as outlined in the Diablo III end user license agreement, that player can be permanently banned from the game. This means that the player will be permanently unable to log in to Battle.net® to play Diablo III with his or her account.
Playing Diablo III legitimately means playing with an unaltered game client. Doing otherwise violates our policies for Battle.net and Diablo III, and it goes against the spirit of fair play that all of our games are based on. We strongly recommend that you avoid using any hacks, cheats, bots, or exploits. Suspensions and bans of players that have used or start using cheats and hacks will begin in the near future.

According to what they've said, we could probably jump to the conclusion and say that they already have huge list of flagged accounts, and this is last chance for botters / cheaters to stop doing what they're doing, but is it really true?

Weird thing is that the warning was actually given, which leads us to question: why would Blizzard want to save botters from being banned? there are few possibilities:

1. This might be just a fake warning triggered by Blizzard acknowledge of amount of botters and gold sellers.
2. This is a real thing, but it turned out the number of botters in D3 is big enough to make huge impact on the number of total players (lets say 30% of total players in thhis example).
3. Nothing is relay happening, and Blizzard just want to calm down regular players complaining about cheaters.

Which one of these possibilities is real? sadly, we have no idea... Till anything happen we can only play guessing game.

[TehVoyager]

R-R-R-R-R-REPOST-T-T-T-T-T-T

jk.

blizzard will ban botters, botters will buy new accounts, continue botting.

this will never change.

[MadameGrip]

Number 2 seems fairly smart.. Because it would make sense that activision wouldn't wanna ban 30% of their income XD

[toasted]

Maybe it has something to do with the release of the method to change the language of a russian account to english!

[Confucius]

This is probably mostly a PR stunt to calm the players who are complaining about botters destroying the economy. However, Blizzard may believe that some people who are botting in D3 don't know it is against the rules, as the game attracted a lot of new people who have not played online games before; so this could also just be a legitimate warning so that all the players know, rather than having to send out warning emails to everyone flagged.

[rep09]

Did they announced something about how they will ban people who are botting?
Have they intention to give a temporary suspension to people that bot if they are caught for the first time or did they will permanently close the account?

[HI5]

Did they announced something about how they will ban people who are botting?
Have they intention to give a temporary suspension to people that bot if they are caught for the first time or did they will permanently close the account?

They haven't announced anything regarding this, but if banwave happen the bans will be most likely perma (looking back at WoW banwaves)

[iike]

I'm pretty sure there will be some bans, the real question is.. how big the banwave will be, as in how many accounts.

[Cenny]

Today Blizzard did something unusual - warning for the Cheaters was posted on Diablo 3 community site, which is obviously uncommon event. What does it means for botters? before we say anything, lets read the original news:



According to what they've said, we could probably jump to the conclusion and say that they already have huge list of flagged accounts, and this is last chance for botters / cheaters to stop doing what they're doing, but is it really true?

Weird thing is that the warning was actually given, which leads us to question: why would Blizzard want to save botters from being banned? there are few possibilities:

1. This might be just a fake warning triggered by Blizzard acknowledge of amount of botters and gold sellers.
2. This is a real thing, but it turned out the number of botters in D3 is big enough to make huge impact on the number of total players (lets say 30% of total players in thhis example).
3. Nothing is relay happening, and Blizzard just want to calm down regular players complaining about cheaters.

Which one of these possibilities is real? sadly, we have no idea... Till anything happen we can only play guessing game.

Dude, people are gonna get banned, and there is no way that 30% of the population are botting. MAYBE 5%, MAYBE. you're basically saying that about 2 million people are botting which just isn't the case.

People are going to get banned, I'm expecting a ban on my accounts, I don't really care, I have plenty of $ to play more d3. Not a big deal.

[Gramexer]

They have given *Warnings* before too, Starcraft II Article in 2010 has the same text but word Diablo III is replaced with Starcraft II

Cheating in StarCraft II - StarCraft II

I'm pretty sure that pretty many accounts are now flagged and soon to been banned, in this or next week

[Angiie]

Not really sure about this, in one way a warning for botters would be kinda stupid in a game liks this , it makes alot more sense in a game like WoW where they risk to lose income if someone gets banned (they will lose the monthly cost), here they would just gain money to ban em sinc the worst thing that could happen is that they would stop playing but it doesnt really matter here since there is no monthly cost. Instead they could only gain money on em since they can buy a new game. So it would be kinda stupid to warn em. So yeah i think the same as Confucius, is just a way to calm ppl.

[Liis]

Number 2 seems fairly smart.. Because it would make sense that activision wouldn't wanna ban 30% of their income XD

Actually, no. If they ban 30% of the accounts (which are bots) they wont loose anything, since we're not paying by the month. But instead, if they do ban those 30%, they'd get atleast 15% of those back buying new copies of the game, which, leads to new income for them.

Dude, people are gonna get banned, and there is no way that 30% of the population are botting. MAYBE 5%, MAYBE. you're basically saying that about 2 million people are botting which just isn't the case.

People are going to get banned, I'm expecting a ban on my accounts, I don't really care, I have plenty of $ to play more d3. Not a big deal.

He's not saying that 30% of all people playing are botting, he's saying that 30% of the accounts active are. Seeing that alot of botters have several bots, and there's possibly people with ALOT of bots, I dont see why it cant be as high as 30%.

[phantom325]

HI5 was just using 30% as an example, not a static number.

[tcslasher20]

I understand that the 30% was just an example, but the above posts still show that people focus on it--way too much. Over 6.5 million copies have been sold and 30% of that would be just under two million users. They WOULD ban botters--regardless of first offense--because of the potential profit from a percent of those people buying the game again, however not as much as half of the people banned. There is less than a little of a chance that 30% of the total community of Diablo 3 would be botting.

One of the few things that bothered me about this post is the "there are few possibilities" comment, for this is greatly untrue. There are an infinite amount of possibilities that could arise. I could have taken that comment out of context because of the language difference--if so I apologize.

Thank you for posting about this, I've been interested in botting Diablo 3 myself, but please just make a "News" or informational post omit anything that is just speculation--people take it seriously.

[Elitetech]

I'd say it's just to stop people from complaining about botters/hackers etc. A lot of people are like "oh my gawd blizzard, fix plz they ruin game plz om nom nom bananas", this way they can just answer with "Yeah oh ma gawd, we know the problem don't you read our posts!!!!! noob omfg banhammer" and people will start shutting up about it.

You know.. The usual