Blizzard Brings Down Ban Hammer on 320,000 Diablo And Warcraft Players

Like culling the lame sheep before summer, Blizzard has gone on a major spree banning 320,000 players from both its Diablo and World of Warcraft games.

In a forum post, Blizzard said that ‘œthat abuse of unintended mechanics and/or use of third party programs is a violation of the agreement made when signing on to Battle.net.’

The players will initially have a 30 day ban, but if the user is a ‘œrepeat offender’, his/her CD key will be banned permanently, with Blizzard noting ‘œall account ban decisions are final.’

In the post, Blizzard said that the ‘œthird-party programs’ and overall cheating ‘œcan severely impact the stability of [their] servers” and that they’ll “continue to aggressively monitor Battle.net in order to protect the service and its players from the harmful effects of cheating.”

With 11.5 million (as of December 2008) WoW users however, don’t think you’re going to notice a sudden drop in player numbers. There will still be literally millions of sad people just like you to play with.

Quick fact: The entire nation of Iceland has only 317,000 people. Just for some sort of scale.

Via: CVG