Blizzard Warms Up Banhammer for StarCraft II Cheaters

If you have been cheating in games of StarCraft II online, it may already be too late for you to repent.

Let’s get one thing straight: Cheating in online games ain’t cool, brothers. It’s one thing to win a game via skill and proper planning; it’s another to win a game because you were using a modified client of the game that told you every single one of your opponent’s moves in advance. That stuff just isn’t kosher, yeah?

Blizzard agrees. The developer is already known for sweeping bans of hundreds of thousands of cheaters, and big blue looks to be warming up its mighty hammer for another swing, StarCraft II style. The following came in from Blizzard earlier today:

Blizzard Entertainment has always taken cheating in any form in Blizzard games very seriously, and that’s no different for StarCraft II. If a StarCraft II player is found to be cheating or using hacks or modifications in any form, then as outlined in our 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 StarCraft II with his or her account.

Playing StarCraft II legitimately means playing with an unaltered game client. Doing otherwise violates our policies for Battle.net, 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, or exploits. Suspensions and bans of players that have used or start using cheats and hacks will begin in the near future.

In other words, don’t think that quitting the cheater scene this instant is going to save you: Blizzard may already have you on its nuke list. It’s like when the guy from Fist of the North Star would tell his enemies, “You are already dead,” and they’d be all “Huh?” but then their heart would explode. Only here, the consequence is less of a brutal and bloody death and more of you having to schlep on down to GameStop to pick up a new copy of the game.

And this is why we don’t cheat, people.