Blizzard bans several tens of thousands of accounts from Overwatch in Korea. However, the fans there are not really happy about it.
The fight against hackers and cheaters in Overwatch is an endless back and forth. Blizzard has now announced that they have banned 22,000 hackers in the Korean region once again (22,865 to be exact). However, the honest Korean players are only moderately pleased about this and point out that Blizzard is not solving the hacking issue at all.
Hacking is especially a problem in Korea because players there do not have to pay €40 – like the rest of the world – for a copy of Overwatch that is tied to their Battle.net account. Instead, players in Korea simply pay an hourly fee in internet cafés, known as PC Bangs, and do not have to cover the cost for a version of the game. In return, Blizzard receives a monthly fee from the operators of the Bangs.
For hackers, it’s a piece of cake to simply use a VPN client to create an American Battle.net account with which they can continue to play. If the corresponding account gets banned, it only takes a few seconds before they can start cheating again.
In the Korean competitive scene, a remarkable sense of fairness has developed. Whenever one of the two teams has a hacker, the honest players try to end the match in a “draw”.
Hopefully, Blizzard and the operators of the PC Bangs will soon find a solution that no longer forces honest players in Korea to switch to American and European servers – as currently nobody likes that.
As Kotaku writes so nicely, the news of today’s ban wave can also be read as: “22,885 accounts were banned – and 22,865 accounts were newly created”.
How your heroes perform in the game can be seen in the tier list for February 2017.
