While there was some talk that Blizzard might be looking to take games like Diablo II to the current generation, the firm told Gamespot the issue is really about making sure it’s older titles are getting enough attention. Considering the company is moving forward with other projects like Hearthstone most of the team that currently works at the firm have their attention on the new games. The firm will be looking to hire this new position to pay attention to its classic games.

“We need engineers to help maintain our legacy games. We have a history of maintaining our games for many years. Our earlier games are still played and enjoyed today, so we want to continue to maintain them for those communities.” The company said in a recent release. It doesn’t appear the team that might eventually be hired won’t be very big, considering the person hired would need to wear “many hats.” Still, it’s cool to see the company paying attention to games we grew up playing.

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.