Diablo III problems persist with hacked accounts - report
Rumors of accounts being hacked, items and in-game gold being stolen
The troubles continue for Diablo III, as reports are coming in that hackers have managed to compromise the accounts of many players. One Eurogamer writer had his account stolen and taken control of over the weekend.
That hack appears to be just one of many that have started being reported by Diablo III fans around the world. Hacking victims are reporting gold and items being looted as well as accounts simply being taken over. It has been alleged that the Blizzard Authenticator is simply ineffective at preventing the takeovers.
Reports are suggesting that hackers are using a security flaw in the Battle.net sessions identifier system. Hackers are able to 'jump into' accounts without alerting Blizzard authentication processes at all. This theory remains speculation, but is gaining ground by users on the Blizzard forums.
Blizzard has not yet confirmed any account hackings to date, and will not return any items lost to players who have had their accounts taken over. They are simply 'rolling back' accounts to a point before the event takes place.
Interestingly, the rumors happened just before Blizzard took Diablo III offline yet again on Sunday. Servers were down for the EU side for around 4 hours, in which it was alleged an SQL injection attack took place.
Blizzard has not commented on the matter. GamesIndustry International has reached out to Blizzard but has yet to receive any response.
Blizzard has made alotta people angry, this does not suprise me at all.
If your gonna make a game, that people pay for and make it so difficult for them to play it, through numerouse attempts at DRM... then your actually screaming for this stuff to happen.
I see no excuse as to why the game cant be enjoyed offline. The auction house feature only needs to be required to post an item to an auction house, go offline and then later online to see if it was sold. All transactions would be done seemlessly without hindurance in the blizzard servers, while the player played offline. If its not possible because of game design, then it was a poor design choice.
Rick, I agree that the always-online DRM is bad. With my slow internet connection I can't download things while playing Diablo3 so I end up starting another single player game instead. Most of the network codebase is probably taken directly from WoW and that's why they say it's from design. They didn't want to adapt it to allow single player since they probably preferred it stay that way.
Edited 1 times. Last edit by Pier Castonguay on 21st May 2012 8:20pm
Edited 1 times. Last edit by Gnud Rehnquister on 21st May 2012 11:36pm
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5149619846?page=29#571
Still must be frustrating for someone who doesn't care about online play or the auction house.
They need to do something to earn the player's respect, and saying cant really help you is going to hurt them in the end. If this happened to me, It would be the last Blizzard online only game I ever bought.