There is a lot going on in Diablo 3 this week. After the excitement about an exploit, bans were issued. Now a bonus weekend is on the way.
We reported on the Hellfire Amulet. There was an exploit that allowed players to activate all passives of their class. Blizzard had already said: We don’t like that at all. Don’t do it, we will punish you.
Ban affects some popular streamers
And that’s exactly how it happened. With a patch, the exploit was closed, and an attempt was made to reduce lag caused by Hell Tooth Witch Doctors.
As part of the patch, there was a wave of bans, accounts were permanently closed. The ban wave was quite large since Blizzard could precisely track who had multiple passives active and who did not.
Blizzard announced:
- Everyone who had more passives active than allowed was removed from the leaderboards for now.
- Those who did it by accident were forgiven.
- Those who repeatedly used the exploit received an account penalty and a warning.
- And those who excessively used the exploit and promoted it were permanently banned.
The ban wave caused quite a stir because the permanent account loss also affected some prominent streamers. Naturally, they are the ones who can spread such an exploit.
The discussion in the Diablo community right now is whether Blizzard also bans bot users. Apparently, some streamers have taken to having bots farm the necessary keys for Greater Rifts off-stream, to then showcase the Greater Rifts, the exciting stuff, to an audience. But that’s obviously hard to track.
Bonus weekend announced
A bonus weekend is active since this morning for PC and consoles. Bounties give double the usual rewards until Sunday night (for PC) or early Monday morning (for consoles).
