Quote:Excuse my bluntness, but anything we have to say about bliz decision re: D2 means squat now. For what little it's worth, I think the current online, D2 realm game does both. *It flips the bird to players who wants to play legitimately and lets cheating goes on (albeit on bliz terms).
Agreed. I largely stopped playing except for ladder racing, and quit even that when people figured out team strategies would win, as I don't know anyone who would be willing to devote the time to stay in the race. Single player occasionally happens if my roommate forgets the innernet bill (which happens a bit more than I would like).
Quote:*see various changes like Durance area and Pindle drops that were supposed to counter maphack and bots, but have little impact to cheaters but affects non-cheaters alike. Right, I always liked it when in school some a-hole starts trouble, and the entire class gets detention. All for the greater good. But that's another whole can of dead horse.
Regardless of medium, legitimate players will be penalized in order to target cheaters (assuming you're targeting cheaters in the first place). I completely agree that Blizzard did a very poor job of keeping the cheating out, and I think a lot of the failure had to do with greatly reduced man-hour input toward the end (the realms were pretty clean in the early, pre-LoD days). It rivals Diablo original now, albeit in a vastly different manner.
Personally, I don't think Blizzard's actions were extreme enough. I'm not sure what I'd have done differently, or what could have been done differently (I'm not quite the codemonkey most of my friends are), but surely they could have used a little more force than the paltry amount of too-little, too-late bannings that did occur (those before the current batch were also too late).
My reference point comes from playing Magic: the Nerdening competitively on a local level. Wizards has implemented some fairly draconian measures to stop cheating (it existed in the past, but you rarely hear about it these days, and you NEVER see it). Random deck checks every round, with a full check after cuts to top8, and game/match losses handed out for anything as innocuous as card sleeves worn in a pattern (and far more serious penalties for anything that looks more sinister--6 month bans and the like). Does it catch legitimate players? You bet. But all the guys who are affected by it will call it a bad beat, shake it off, suck it up, and keep playing, because the game would be a much worse place if these measures weren't there.
For the record, I've been burned by the deck check once (checked the wrong box on a registration sheet) and the sleeve check twice (once laziness, once defective sleeves, which I'd purchased at that very tourney), but fully support both.
--me
edit: grammar fail