Over 320K Warcraft III, Diablo II accounts banned

Blizzard has dusted off its mighty banhammer again, banning over 320,000 Warcraft III and Diablo II accounts for violating the Battle.net TOS.

Blizzard has dusted off its mighty banhammer again, banning over 320,000 Warcraft III and Diablo II accounts for violating the Battle.net TOS.

Blizzard poster Bashok explained on the Battle.net forums that a good deal of the banned accounts resulted directly fropm users employing hacks, “abuse of unintended mechanics and/or use of third party programs”. Here’s a snippet of the forum post:

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.

First offenders will be able to play again after a 30-day suspension, but repeat offenders are now banned permanently. It seems there’s no use appealing, too, as all account ban decisions are apparently final.

Via [Battle.net forums]