04-05-2003, 11:34 PM
Battlenet is a free service. The United States is the 'greatest country' in the world.
If we decided to save on the cost of prisons, and simply execute everyone ever arrested, would you be happy or fearful?
If you weren't personally falsely accused of something, or had a close friend you know 'killed', then you'd be happy, you'd probably be telling everyone that this is great, we're finally getting rid of the criminals. You would probably tell everyone who complained, "Don't worry, this is the greatest country in the world, those criminals deserved what they got"
And you'd be right - except for the very small minority who were falsely accused and had no chance of defending themselves.
To all of those legitimate players who think their accounts will be there tomorrow:
What's easier:
-> Banning the top 1-5% most active accounts eating up expensive bandwidth
-> Asking player's permission to scan their memory to verify that 'no hacks that modify the game' are being run. Then banning or preventing 100% of those attempting 3rd party modification programs and making absolutely no mistakes.
Which option would free up more battlenet resources?
Which option do you think the majority of legitimate players prefer?
Just a clarification, if your account was banned for 'hacks' by Blizzard, you have NO appeal. As they said, they made no mistakes and if it was Blizzard who made the ban/account pswd change, they will never correct it.
If you just happen to have a password problem at the same time, totally unrelated to the account banning, those are the only cases they will listen to.
> In other words: cheaters can make great liars to save their own butts.
In other words "Shut up all you complainers, we could have done an effective, through job to ban hackers, botters, and fix the realms, but we'd rather just get rid of those who use up too many of our resources instead, bot users or not."
> People who left will come back, and people will stop screaming about it
Only problem with this is - they will come back only to get unfairly banned again.
Think about it - if they were legitimate players to begin with, and set up enough false positives to get banned in the first place, do you think they will change how they play the game?
The real hackers/botters will come back of course, they know what they did wrong, and will stop doing it. Only the people who were banned unfairly are still scratching their heads and asking why... and still getting no response other then to 'shut up'
Let's take for a second the assumption that Blizzard's programmers setup reports to log player activities, and searched those logs for events that looked like botting, ie hundreds of games created in a short period of time.
Then they deleted every single account created under the same CD-Key.
-> Some kid opened up a Diablo II case at his local store, wrote down the key, botted, and got all of his AND your accounts banned.
Response: Blizzard says that one of the accounts created under the same cdkey was botting, they have 'proof' - therefore you're lying.
-> You purchase the game from Ebay, from a friend, similar to the case above, and someone else has your CD-key.
'Ditto, account banned, they have proof, you're lying, no appeal.
-> (my particular case) - You are trying to do millions of cow games to prepare for the next patch, you and your brother are doing 3 minute cow runs for 3-4 hours a night, over the last month or two, getting a account of '90 characters. Heavy usage + frequent lag/connection interrupted/realm downs/'create button faded' gets you banned.
What is the evidence for banning? Their reports showing you using/abusing their service. I'm sure that if they didn't have a report on you, your account would be restored, but if report was triggered due to similar behavior you took that made you look like a bot, then they will not 'under any circumstance' restore your account because their report is right and you are wrong.
-> Blizzard is forbidden to scan your computer for 3rd party hacks.
Bots simulate player behavior, if player behavior is close enough to how a bot operates, how are they going to tell the difference? Instead, why not simply ask people's permission to 'detect' known hacks or bots running in memory, and simply ban 100% of those who use them and leave the legitimate users alone?
If they can't scan for the exact signature of a bot program, then they are looking at bot-like behavior. And if your play on Diablo makes you look like a bot, why is it hard to conceive that you could get banned?
-> Blizzard's programming techniques are not flawless.
There are many people on my friends list today that are still botting - it's obvious, they've set their away to a generic message, and simply spam you with 'Player30412' 'Player30413' games over and over again, even late at night.
If there -was- a clear and easy method for detecting all botters, why didn't it catch all of them? And vis versa, why is it so hard to assume it 'caught' some people incorrectly?
-> Why will Blizzard not specify at least vaguely 'why' your account was banned?
This is a new pattern, in the past they've announced that 'X number of users were banned from using Chest Hack'. 'X number of Warcraft III users were banned for using Maphack.
Maybe it's because in this case the top let's say 1-5% of all users using the most amount of Blizzard's resources were banned. Or else as I mentioned above, reports were generated figuring the most probable 'possibilities' of using a hack. Since their techniques aren't flawless, and since they admitted themselves, they are obviously not foolproof and could be easily circumvented if they told people how they did it.
And also, easy to assume, not 100% accurate and banning people incorrectly.
-> Unfair realm down, unfair cd-key tagging suggest hack-detection is not foolproof
How many players experience realm down, an anti-cheat method, from simple lag?
How many players who never used hacks, ever, had their cd-key tagged from getting disconnected from a game? Called Blizzard, challenged them to check their account, said they never used any hacks, and were told 'it's an automated process, don't worry, the tagging will go away in a few days'
If plenty of people unjustly get tagged and realm down, is it a stretch of the imagination to assume they could get unfairly banned?
-> Why doesn't blizzard take care of any of the serious server-side bugs in Diablo II
This one is pure theory, but consider this - Diablo II is an old game. Blizzard isn't earning money on it. What they want is for their 'free' realms to be as lag free for their Warcraft III players and future WOW players. Deleting people who tie up resources is in their best interest. Trying to improve gameplay, introduce new features, fix bugs on an outdated game, isn't.
Deleting bugged items would be easy, and 100% server side. Your characters, and all item-coding is done on their side. Deleting Iths would take a simple fix: have the existing 'dupe checker' simply delete all invalid runeword items, or any runeword item that does not contain the actual runes.
Taking care of most of the known bugs in Diablo II would also be easy - small, server side patches. Most bugs aren't even related to the client-side version of Diablo.
Why aren't any of these taking place? What -DID- take place is a purge of ALL the users who were tieing up expensive server resources.
Obviously, most people who were online hours and hours a day were bot users, but obviously, many weren't. Again, it's not much of a stretch to assume that since Blizzard couldn't care less about solving a single bug in their bug-ridden 1.09 patch, that they couldn't care less about the Diablo II users who no longer are contributing money to their coffers.
Why else would they adapt a 'If you were banned, you were guilty, end of discussion, we won't tell you why, shut up' stand if they really didn't care less?
> In other words: cheaters can make great liars to save their own butts.
Final example: Blizzard is saying ALL of those people complaining are lying, Ignore them. Despite the fact that releasing a completely bug free product is impossible, our procedure for banning people was 100% foolproof and there were absolutely NO mistakes made.
Ignore the fact that we can't get rid of hacks, bugged items, spam bots, etc. We're perfect and everyone else is lying. Isn't this a bit unrealistic?
If they banned legitimate users this time, don't you think it's possible they might ban YOU next time?
If we decided to save on the cost of prisons, and simply execute everyone ever arrested, would you be happy or fearful?
If you weren't personally falsely accused of something, or had a close friend you know 'killed', then you'd be happy, you'd probably be telling everyone that this is great, we're finally getting rid of the criminals. You would probably tell everyone who complained, "Don't worry, this is the greatest country in the world, those criminals deserved what they got"
And you'd be right - except for the very small minority who were falsely accused and had no chance of defending themselves.
To all of those legitimate players who think their accounts will be there tomorrow:
What's easier:
-> Banning the top 1-5% most active accounts eating up expensive bandwidth
-> Asking player's permission to scan their memory to verify that 'no hacks that modify the game' are being run. Then banning or preventing 100% of those attempting 3rd party modification programs and making absolutely no mistakes.
Which option would free up more battlenet resources?
Which option do you think the majority of legitimate players prefer?
Just a clarification, if your account was banned for 'hacks' by Blizzard, you have NO appeal. As they said, they made no mistakes and if it was Blizzard who made the ban/account pswd change, they will never correct it.
If you just happen to have a password problem at the same time, totally unrelated to the account banning, those are the only cases they will listen to.
> In other words: cheaters can make great liars to save their own butts.
In other words "Shut up all you complainers, we could have done an effective, through job to ban hackers, botters, and fix the realms, but we'd rather just get rid of those who use up too many of our resources instead, bot users or not."
> People who left will come back, and people will stop screaming about it
Only problem with this is - they will come back only to get unfairly banned again.
Think about it - if they were legitimate players to begin with, and set up enough false positives to get banned in the first place, do you think they will change how they play the game?
The real hackers/botters will come back of course, they know what they did wrong, and will stop doing it. Only the people who were banned unfairly are still scratching their heads and asking why... and still getting no response other then to 'shut up'
Let's take for a second the assumption that Blizzard's programmers setup reports to log player activities, and searched those logs for events that looked like botting, ie hundreds of games created in a short period of time.
Then they deleted every single account created under the same CD-Key.
-> Some kid opened up a Diablo II case at his local store, wrote down the key, botted, and got all of his AND your accounts banned.
Response: Blizzard says that one of the accounts created under the same cdkey was botting, they have 'proof' - therefore you're lying.
-> You purchase the game from Ebay, from a friend, similar to the case above, and someone else has your CD-key.
'Ditto, account banned, they have proof, you're lying, no appeal.
-> (my particular case) - You are trying to do millions of cow games to prepare for the next patch, you and your brother are doing 3 minute cow runs for 3-4 hours a night, over the last month or two, getting a account of '90 characters. Heavy usage + frequent lag/connection interrupted/realm downs/'create button faded' gets you banned.
What is the evidence for banning? Their reports showing you using/abusing their service. I'm sure that if they didn't have a report on you, your account would be restored, but if report was triggered due to similar behavior you took that made you look like a bot, then they will not 'under any circumstance' restore your account because their report is right and you are wrong.
-> Blizzard is forbidden to scan your computer for 3rd party hacks.
Bots simulate player behavior, if player behavior is close enough to how a bot operates, how are they going to tell the difference? Instead, why not simply ask people's permission to 'detect' known hacks or bots running in memory, and simply ban 100% of those who use them and leave the legitimate users alone?
If they can't scan for the exact signature of a bot program, then they are looking at bot-like behavior. And if your play on Diablo makes you look like a bot, why is it hard to conceive that you could get banned?
-> Blizzard's programming techniques are not flawless.
There are many people on my friends list today that are still botting - it's obvious, they've set their away to a generic message, and simply spam you with 'Player30412' 'Player30413' games over and over again, even late at night.
If there -was- a clear and easy method for detecting all botters, why didn't it catch all of them? And vis versa, why is it so hard to assume it 'caught' some people incorrectly?
-> Why will Blizzard not specify at least vaguely 'why' your account was banned?
This is a new pattern, in the past they've announced that 'X number of users were banned from using Chest Hack'. 'X number of Warcraft III users were banned for using Maphack.
Maybe it's because in this case the top let's say 1-5% of all users using the most amount of Blizzard's resources were banned. Or else as I mentioned above, reports were generated figuring the most probable 'possibilities' of using a hack. Since their techniques aren't flawless, and since they admitted themselves, they are obviously not foolproof and could be easily circumvented if they told people how they did it.
And also, easy to assume, not 100% accurate and banning people incorrectly.
-> Unfair realm down, unfair cd-key tagging suggest hack-detection is not foolproof
How many players experience realm down, an anti-cheat method, from simple lag?
How many players who never used hacks, ever, had their cd-key tagged from getting disconnected from a game? Called Blizzard, challenged them to check their account, said they never used any hacks, and were told 'it's an automated process, don't worry, the tagging will go away in a few days'
If plenty of people unjustly get tagged and realm down, is it a stretch of the imagination to assume they could get unfairly banned?
-> Why doesn't blizzard take care of any of the serious server-side bugs in Diablo II
This one is pure theory, but consider this - Diablo II is an old game. Blizzard isn't earning money on it. What they want is for their 'free' realms to be as lag free for their Warcraft III players and future WOW players. Deleting people who tie up resources is in their best interest. Trying to improve gameplay, introduce new features, fix bugs on an outdated game, isn't.
Deleting bugged items would be easy, and 100% server side. Your characters, and all item-coding is done on their side. Deleting Iths would take a simple fix: have the existing 'dupe checker' simply delete all invalid runeword items, or any runeword item that does not contain the actual runes.
Taking care of most of the known bugs in Diablo II would also be easy - small, server side patches. Most bugs aren't even related to the client-side version of Diablo.
Why aren't any of these taking place? What -DID- take place is a purge of ALL the users who were tieing up expensive server resources.
Obviously, most people who were online hours and hours a day were bot users, but obviously, many weren't. Again, it's not much of a stretch to assume that since Blizzard couldn't care less about solving a single bug in their bug-ridden 1.09 patch, that they couldn't care less about the Diablo II users who no longer are contributing money to their coffers.
Why else would they adapt a 'If you were banned, you were guilty, end of discussion, we won't tell you why, shut up' stand if they really didn't care less?
> In other words: cheaters can make great liars to save their own butts.
Final example: Blizzard is saying ALL of those people complaining are lying, Ignore them. Despite the fact that releasing a completely bug free product is impossible, our procedure for banning people was 100% foolproof and there were absolutely NO mistakes made.
Ignore the fact that we can't get rid of hacks, bugged items, spam bots, etc. We're perfect and everyone else is lying. Isn't this a bit unrealistic?
If they banned legitimate users this time, don't you think it's possible they might ban YOU next time?