Over 320K Warcraft III and Diablo II accounts banned

Blizzard has dropped the ban hammer on over 300,000 Warcraft and Diablo players for violating the terms of use.

The developer behind the RTS and RPG games stated in a forum post, “If this is a first offense, the CD key associated with the banned account will be suspended for 30 days, while repeat offenders will see their keys banned permanently. All account ban decisions are final.” It’s serious stuff.

According to Blizzard, the Battle.net accounts are being permanently removed for use of 3rd party programs, and exploitation of “unintended mechanics”- in other words, hacking and glitching.

“We would like all players to remember that abuse of unintended mechanics and/or use of third party programs is a violation of the agreement made when signing on to Battle.net, and can subject your account to disciplinary action up to and including a permanent ban of its access to the service. These types of activities can severely impact the stability of our servers, and we’ll continue to aggressively monitor Battle.net in order to protect the service and its players from the harmful effects of cheating.”

“Many account closures come as the direct result of tips emailed to our hacks team by legitimate Battle.net users. If you come across a hack, find a site responsible for distributing hacks, or have a replay of a newly available hack, please report this to our hacks team.”

This is the second time a great big ban hammer has been dropped on a significant number of players, the last occurence being in September 2008.

The moral of the story? Don’t hack- or you might not play Starcraft II.