As you all know, there is a ton of cheating in PC Gaming. Ok, you probably don't know and may not care, but there is. Blizzard, the creaters of Warcraft 3, have decided to do something about it.
Blizzard has kicked off its War on Cheating by blanket bombing more than 12,000 WarCraft III accounts and 131,000 Diablo II accounts because their owners are accused of using cheats and hacks, GameSpot are reporting. Furthermore, over 7,000 CD keys have been banned from ladder play for one month, and about 1,000 CD keys have been banned from play for good. The company is warning that repeat offenders are likely to have their accounts blacklisted on Battle.net in its entirety, which will completely cripple their ability to play the games online.
I think that is awesome. This is via 8bit Joystick, who mentioned that Xbox Live is a better solution for online gaming because it cuts out the cheating. I know that on Madden 2003 for PS2 people have found ways to cheat. I don't have any of the details, but I know that there are warnings when you get into the online section. I'm sure it's not nearly as bad as PC gaming, but console gaming is certainly not perfect.
04/02/03 4:09 PM
I also wrote about a couple months ago how the Gameshark can cause major cheating problems with Tony Hawk 4 Online.
http://www.8bitjoystick.com/archives/000861.php
04/02/03 4:36 PM
Thanks for the heads up. I'm totally in support of the idea you brought up. Although Gameshark isn't responsible, they can give back to the community by helping the network admins to identify cheaters. Also, trackback is awesome.