Blizzard Banning Singleplayer Cheaters

http://www.cheathappens.com/article_blizzardbans.asp

Uhh… What?

What’s the confusion? It sucks if someone has all the achievements and a score of a zillion, and didn’t earn any of it.

I always knew achievements and “gamer scores” were evil. Fuck them.

meh

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That makes no sense. If Blizzard can detect cheating in order to ban the player, why can’t they simply reset achievements upon detection?

I guess they could do that, but this is just a stronger measure against them. They are cheating in an online environment, why go easy on it?

I’m not sure what the situation is on playing Starcraft 2 offline, though. Is it allowed? Obviously I have no issue with people hacking and cheating the thing all they want if it’s not on Battle.net. If that’s not possible, then I think it should be, but that’s a somewhat separate issue.

They banned cheaters who cheated in the campaign and AI skirmish modes too. They don’t want cheaters and it will just suck for the cheaters that they’ll have to buy another copy of SC2 to play again. Win-win for Blizzard.

Or why not just have a “Cheater” achievement?

I disapprove. Strongly. I am all for cracking down on multiplayer cheaters but punishing for cheating in a single player game? That is just not right. I’m with Chris on this one. If they detect single player cheating just reset their achievements when they go into a multiplayer game. If they cheat in a multiplayer game THEN ban them.

Why go hard? The achievement score means nothing - especially in singleplayer.

They don’t want cheating, period. This is what you get when you have to log into battle.net to play. I don’t know if they can detect hacked .exe’s in offline play however.

  1. It’s a 2 week suspension, not a banning.

  2. SC2 comes with cheatcodes, but they disable achievements. These people are running trainers and the like to get the achievements, not to cheat in singleplayer. These trainers modify code in memory.

Now I agree that really, who gives a shit if people want to “steal” singleplayer achievements, and Blizzard did cross a line. But it’s not quite as bad as many of the news stories make it out to be.

You might laugh, but I would predict that creating a cheater achievement would have the opposite of the intended effect, with OCD-driven achievement whores (who I only have heard stories about, and no personal experience with whatsoever) actually start cheating to complete their set. Not me though, that would be wrong.

They should have included the built-in cheat codes from the original and just disabled achievements when you use them.

They did.

I approve, basically for the reasons Stusser outlined. You can use cheat codes and not get your achievements (which actually give you rewards, like new pictures and stuff that carry “prestige”…for some people…I guess). But if you use a trainer or something to get those things, you should get a slap on the wrist.

Man Sartre was right. :(

They’re not banning cheaters, they’re banning crackers. Pretty sure that running a modified executable or modifying code while logged into Battle.net is a breach of the EULA. Which, as stusser mentions, is what they’d need to do in order to actually “earn” achievements while cheating.

While we’re at it, are Blizzard ever going to give players the ability to view their achievements for SC2 and WoW in some combined fashion, like a total score? Or combined viewing of WoW achievements? So if you have one character that has an achievement for 1000 quests, while another character has an achievement for 50 mounts, you’d be able to get credit for them together?

A site that sells trainers for $30/year whines about cheating achievement whores getting banned.

Things can’t get more shameless than this.

And people who think Blizzard is in the wrong, they simply don’t have the grasp of the whole situation.

I hope is false, because is a bad precedent.

You have the right to play the game the way you want. And if you want a easy experience, or maybe spawn 700 units of type X, because looks fun, is your call.
The game company have not say about how people use the game. The authors only have distributions rights, not use rights.