If Blizzard swings its ban-hammer and you don’t get out of the way, that’s your fault. That’s what a post on the Blizzard blog today seemed to say, reminding readers very carefully of the terms and conditions that they’d signed up to. Meanwhile, they were denying the existence of a supposed flaw in the auction house that allows item and/or gold duplication in the EU (as Phill reported earlier, the Korean servers are down while Blizzard investigate the exploits over there.)
The key phrase is that “Suspensions and bans of players that have used or start using cheats and hacks will begin in the near future.” They don’t clarify why they’re saying this now, or just starting to ban people, except as a deterent to hack-users. We’re hoping that this doesn’t affect users of Dark D3 or any other purely cosmetic mod.
The blog says in full;
“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.”
Meanwhile, their response to the duping question denied the exploit worked at all, denying the reports of players creating up to 3 billion gold; “We haven’t deployed any hot fixes this evening. As far as we can tell the supposed exploit never worked, but we’ll continue looking into it. Yes, changing the system clock can change auction times, but that doesn’t dupe gold. It’s pretty easy to see how much gold people have, and we have no indication anyone has/had that much.”
Image courtesy of Grandpa