Microsoft and Blizzard have been warming up for the US holidays with a seasonal display of warmth to humanity – by banning hundreds of thousands of their users from Xbox Live and Battle.net.
Blizzard announced: “As part of our continued effort to ensure a fair and fun online experience for all Battle.net players, we have expanded our efforts to remove cheaters from StarCraft and Diablo II. We have identified and closed over 350,000 StarCraft and Diablo II accounts which were found to be using third-party hacks. The Diablo II CD keys associated with the closed Diablo II accounts are now restricted from playing on Battle.net for approximately 30 days. Cheating ruins the game experience for legitimate players, and we will not tolerate it.” Nearly 8,000 Warcraft III accounts have got the hammer too.
Microsoft are also, according to Kotaku, responsible for throwing thousands of Xbox 360 gamers off Xbox Live. Mostly these seem, from forum chatter, to be people who claim to have kept back-ups of their games – for which Kotaku reads “I pirated game X before launch day”.
So, the moral of the story seems to be – if you want to spend Christmas playing online games rather than dealing with your dysfunctional family, don’t pirate games.
