Update: Diablo 3 Cheater Purge Imminent

Blizzard gets out the banhammer for bot users and hackers.

Multiple choice time! If you use hacks, cheats, bots or mods in Diablo 3, will you: a) be chained to a mountain, while an eagle eats your liver for all eternity; b) be forced to climb the Mountain of Knives; c) be condemned to wander forever in the third circle, eating everything that comes your way, until a wandering crusader sticks Death’s scythe in your massive butt; or d) get banned?

Blizzard says the answer is d), although they looked at the eagle-liver thing for a while, before deciding that it might be a little excessive. Writ in letters of fire in Blizzard’s latest advisory is a gruesome warning: “[Any cheater] will be permanently unable to log in to Battle.net to play Diablo III with his or her account.” A wandering pilgrim known only as izvr posted to the soon-to-be-doomed in the Battle.net comments thread, “May the Heaven and Hell bless you guys. May the Heaven and Hell bless itself.” That seems only reasonable, under the circumstances.

This comes on the heels of Blizzard’s latest requirement, that players need to use Authenticators if they want to access the Real World Money Auction House. Blizzard has had security on its mind for a long time now; World of Warcraft taught them that the Willie Suttons of the internet try to hack their games because that’s where the money is. It’s hardly surprising that Blizzard prefers to take a hard line on mod users.

Sayeth the announcement, “suspensions and bans of players that have used or start using cheats and hacks will begin in the near future.” Wailing and the gnashing of teeth will follow shortly thereafter.

Sources: Battle.net, Eurogamer

Update: Blizzard has moved forward on its promises, issuing the following statement on the official Battle.net forums:

We recently issued a round of account suspensions and bans to several thousand Diablo III players who were in violation of the Battle.net Terms of Use for cheating and/or using botting or hacking programs while playing. In addition to undermining the spirit of fair play that’s essential to everyone’s enjoyment of the game, botting, hacking, and other such exploitive behavior can contribute to stability and performance issues with the Battle.net service. As always, maintaining a stable, safe, and fun online-gaming experience for legitimate players is a top priority for us, and we’ll be continuing to keep watch on Battle.net and take action as needed.