Those "uber 1337 haxxors" finally get the chop

[Isolde]

I don't think that the banning of D2 players has anything to do with W3, despite the timing. And it has nothing to do with server costs (we want as many people to play as possible, and didn't really forsee that bots were taking up as much of our server capacity as they evidently were).

Actually, detecting hacks takes a lot of time and there aren't enough people working on it, and all those people are really really busy.

And several mistakes made throughout the career of D2 made it that much harder to deal with hacks. We've spent a long long time just trying to deal with people maliciously attacking the servers just to see them go down.

Personally, I'd much rather see people migrate to newer games not because of lack of support but because the newer games are better. (oh you think i'm joking ;))

And open support is pretty cheap (since it's just chat). The reason D1 got restricted is because of its lack of security. Will D2 get restricted? Perhaps, but not because of server costs! Oh, and with regards to what I said about it being "just chat"... b.net is one of the largest chat services in the world, and it's running on an ancient architecture. All these things contribute to ummm... a lot of work for the people that have to support it.