DRM News

Blizzard has announced that the accounts of over 320,000 Battle.net users have been suspended. The crime? Use of third party programs that violate their user agreement.

From the forum announcement :

We’ve recently banned over 320,000 Warcraft III and Diablo II accounts that were found to be violating the Battle.net Terms of Use. 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.

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.

They go on to mention that all closures have come about as a result of investigations based on tips emailed to their hacks team by other Battle.net users.

More than likely this big swing of the proverbial ban hammer comes from a desire to try to clean up as many cheat and hack issues as possible before the rollout of Starcraft II later this year.

Unfortunately, some innocent users were no doubt caught up in the net as well, and thanks to the ‘decisions are final’ policy of Blizzard, they’re now stuck without account access for a month.