Diablo® III Players Banned

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5740846683

The link goes to Blizzards Diablo III forums. It's short and basically says several thousand people have been suspended or banned (does not give any exact numbers) for botting or hacking.

My first reaction was... There you go, another reason not to have mandatory Battlenet connection, now these people can't play the game they bought... I then smoked a big bowl and thought about it for a bit... And you know... I'm ok with this... And I'll explain why.

D3 has been a loooong awaited game, and one followed pretty closely. It was known well before the game came out that it was going to require you to be connected to Battlenet in order to play at all. I don't like that aspect of the game, I seem to recall going off about it more then once Regardless of what I think about it, I knew full well what I was agreeing to and since I am also remotely familiar with online gaming, I knew that any type of cheating would be very much frowned upon.

Cheating.... Cheating makes a lot of people sad. The people that want to try and make money off the auction house are sad, the legit players are sad, the people that want to cheat but don't know enough to find the cheats early are sad, the elitist old bastards that never cheat because they have some mis-guided notions on how things should be (This is my category ) are sad, the newbies to gaming that feel like something is wrong but are not sure how or why they should care are sad... Just because, and also all the Blizzard people are sad because they look bad. So many sad people... Cheating sucks.

Cheating... It has just started. Blizzard has always been very hard on cheaters and the people that like to write cheats also like to put them where they will cause the biggest disruption. These things do not get out accidently... Once it is out, lots of people know very shortly as the same godly items keep getting duped and spread about... But duping is not the end, it is just the start. PK'ing (Player Killing) will happen. I hope Blizzard pulls out the ban hammer when that one shows up as well.

Taking all this into consideration, I feel pretty confident that the people who were banned knew full well what the results of their actions could mean. It would take an awful lot to convince me that someone was able to figure out how to both get and use a cheat and yet not know that there could be a penalty for doing it.... I'm just not feeling any sympathy for anyone banned.