Blizzard Bans Diablo III Bots + Massive Duping on Asian Realm

We’ve recently issued account bans to several thousand Diablo III players who were found to be using botting programs while playing. In addition to undermining the spirit of fair play, botting, hacking, and other forms of cheating can also cause technical problems with the game as well as contribute to performance issues with the Battle.net service. To learn more about our exploitation policy for Diablo III and how it may affect your gameplay, please visit our official support site.

As always, maintaining a stable, safe, and enjoyable online environment for legitimate players is very important to us, and we’ll be continuing to keep watch on Battle.net and take action as needed. In the meantime, if you wish to report the possible use of botting programs to Blizzard, please see this thread for more information. (We will also be adding the ability for players to report this kind of behavior directly through the game client in a future patch.)

For questions regarding account actions, please refer to Account Administration.

We know that having your account compromised = zero fun. That’s why we provide an account-rollback service that helps get players back into the game as quickly as possible. However, we’ve found that a number of compromised account claims are actually fraudulent attempts to get extra items and based on this, we’ve decided to tweak our rollback policy in the Asia region to allow us to continue assisting players while also protecting the game economy. This change is in addition to our zero-tolerance policy against filing fraudulent claims.

[Updated Policy]

As of 12/18/2012 at 11:00 am (local time), all character equipment, such as weapons and armor, restored via the Diablo III rollback service will be bound to the restored account. While this means that these items cannot be traded with other players or posted on the auction house, they can still be shared with other characters on the account and sold to merchant NPCs. Note that gold and commodities restored via the rollback service won’t be bound to the player’s account. As always we are committed to continuing to monitor the health and economy of the game and may make additional tweaks if necessary.

Considering that the rollback service is intended to help players whose accounts have been compromised, we obviously wish that no one ever needed to use it. The best way to help protect yourself from account compromise is to secure your PC and Battle.net account, for example by adding a Battle.net Authenticator. While no security measure is completely foolproof, we’ve often found that many accounts are compromised a second time simply because players do not take any action to protect themselves after being compromised the first time.

To learn more about the Battle.net Authenticator and some best practices for securing your PC against viruses and malware, check out the links below.

Learn more about the Battle.net Authenticator and suggested antivirus/malware programs.

Get a Battle.net Authenticator now!

Guide for running antivirus/anti-malware programs.

The game economy is important to the quality of the player experience. Anyone who attempts to gain extra items through false claims is potentially causing harm to the game, the economy, and the experience of other players. By strengthening our policies against dishonest claims, we hope to provide further stability to the economy and an even better gaming experience for all players.

I think we are 9 months to late on that.
This isn’t our first rodeo. We have been actively monitoring for exploitative behavior since the game launched and taking action as needed. We simply haven’t been as vocal about that process (though we have made a few announcements for larger ban waves in the past), but that’s something we’ll be working to change.

How does one justify if he/she is botting? I mean, I could play for 12 hours for weeks not saying that would be a good thing but its possible so I am just guessing I would eventually get a ban hammer dropped on my head?
While I’m not about to reveal how we identify exploitative behavior in Diablo III (and understandably so), “playing a lot” is not criteria enough to merit an account action for botting.

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If you have received an account action and have any questions about it, be sure to check out and follow the instructions provided here: https://us.battle.net/support/en/article/diablo-iii-account-administration

The steps included the article are your best course of action.