A much overdue mass banning

[Merlinios]

You could say that you believe the perception of the numbers of cheaters compared to non cheaters to be inflated. I say take a closer, colder and sobering look at what's out there. A company like bliz (or any company that can sign bliz's paychecks) did not get to where it is now without doing the same.
(...)
Saying that Lurkers or Basiners don't always go in public games and therefore are not represented in the larger number, is exactly the point. Lurkers and Basiners in general do not form the majority of what's out there in the public realm. There's no deception in that observation.

I maintain that perception is inflated. In no way am I trying to state that non-cheaters make up even one percent of Battle.net, but we are not so few as a lot of us believe. The perceived number of cheaters is amplified by the way that most legitimate players simply do not play public games. The best example I can point to here is actually Diablo 1. There are a few hundred people playing at any given time. If one joins only public games, one would be led to believe that all of them cheat. But last time I logged in, I knew five or ten people (so maybe as much as 3% of the total population on that realm) personally, and that they did not cheat. But the casual observer cannot find this portion of the population unless he already knows them.

Cheaters, on the other hand, at least in Diablo II, are quite open about it in my experience. When I was still playing online, I frequented public games and went off to solo high experience yielding areas to try to stay on the ladder. For the most part, at least once people started hitting decent gear (or duping runewords, whichever was more needed by the build in question), you'd see an experience run led by a bot, frequently with two or three others discussing the bot, its origin, the most efficient way to run one, etc. There is no attempt to hide from anyone. The cheaters are the vocal majority, while the clean players are the silent minority, making them seem a smaller percentage than they actually are. Which does not change the fact that they are already an exceedingly small portion of the population.



As for Blizzard's money-making policies, I think we're in agreement for the most part, but I'm bad at expressing it. My major point of contention was that other companies are using other models successfully. I'm sure Blizzard has researched the subject on levels deeper than I can fathom without a marketing background, but letting cheaters run rampant is not the only successful way to run a business. Hence my treatise on respecting Blizzard's ability to make financially successful decisions, but still disagreeing with some of their policies. Yes, they are financially successful decisions, but other models are also successful, and it is to companies that use a specific subset of these other models that will get my future business.

Moreover, almost the entirety of posts in this thread have been based on the following:

1) Blizzard action
2) <my observations and logic>
3) Blizzard profits

We know their actions and ultimate motivation, but we do not know what specific logic is applied to bridge, for example, banning several thousand accounts and making/keeping more money. I can only speculate (poorly, as I have no marketing background).

--me