GAMEBREAKER posted last week about Blizzard imposing temporary bans on players found to have been abusing a bug that allowed them to gain exceptionally high rating while win-trading. In that post we clarified how Blizzard Community Managers Daxxarri and Nakatoir had been very adamant that the bans were final and had been thoroughly investigated, leaving little to no margin for error.
It was quite the surprise, then, when Senior Community Manager Bashiok posted this at the very end of the week on the US forums:
Earlier this week, several player accounts were given short suspensions and had their ratings wiped for being involved in Rated Battleground win-trading. Upon further review, we determined that some of the players initially identified as cheating may not have purposefully participated in the exploitative behavior, and as a result, we’re in the process of lifting suspensions and restoring ratings to all but the most egregious offenders. This process should be completed following the Tuesday maintenance.
As always, our goal is to identify cheaters while making sure people playing by the rules aren’t inadvertently penalized. Rest assured that we’ll continue to take action against players who aren’t competing in the spirit of fair play.
It seems that fears about unfair bans were, in fact, not wholly unfounded, and that the difficulty of catching win-traders while avoiding doing ill to those who unwittingly ran into win-trading teams was greater than Blizzard had perhaps imagined. Nonetheless, the fact remains that it is better to let a few cheaters go free than to punish innocent players who only queued up against teams without meaning to. Of course, this now means that every suspension will be appealed, and that Blizzard’s team is once again left looking slightly inept.
What’s your take on this? What should Blizzard be doing about win-trading and other exploits in their battlegrounds?
