When signing up for a website or downloading just about anything from the internet, you're often forced to agree to a company's statement of use. These are normally pages long documents filled with legalese, designed to protect both the company and the user, that most people never bother to read. However, normally these documents contain descriptions of the kinds of prohibited activities that can lead to a user being banned from continual use. Today, 320,000 Warcraft III and Diablo II players learned the hard way that Blizzard takes its own terms of use very seriously, as they have had their accounts banned.

The specific violations committed by the large number of gamers clearly vary, but the majority of the infractions are made up of people exploiting the games' mechanics, running third-party programs designed to increase players' statistics, or stealing personal information about other users.

First time offenders will only have their accounts suspended for 30 days, while repeat offenders will have their CD keys permanently barred from the services. The developer states that most of the violators were discovered as a result of user tips, and in a posting on the official Blizzard forum, asked for the community to continue to root out the rule-breakers.

"Many account closures come as the direct result of tips emailed to our hacks team by legitimate Battle.net users. If you come across a hack, find a site responsible for distributing hacks, or have a replay of a newly available hack, please report this to our hacks team at hacks@blizzard.com."

As a gamer who honestly lacks the time or inclination to hack code in order to advance in a particular game, I applaud Blizzard as well as the members of its community that were willing to stand up for what's right. Remember everyone - when you agree to a company's terms of use, you're also agreeing that if you violate them, that company is well within its rights to make it so that you can't ruin the experience for others.

[Source]