Blizzard Bans Starcraft Players Who Cheat in Offline, Single Player Games

SC2 players are very competitive and trust Blizzard to prevent cheating or devaluing the Battle.net achivement system.

Single player games can be played offline (not logged into Battle.net) or played online with cheats. Both of these situations do not reward players with points or Achievements (badges for having accomplished something).

Blizzard is banning people who gamed the Battle.net reward system. They are not banning people who played offline or played with built-in cheats.

If you mess with Battle.net, you will be banned.

Starcraft has built-in cheat codes, which disable achievements. You can play on offline mode, which doesn't have achievements, and not have to worry about getting caught with trainers et al.

Most likely, someone using a trainer is doing it to illicitly gain something that has value in multiplayer.

It's also worth noting this article uses boilerplate arguments that are the hallmark of somebody with almost 0 defensible ground latching onto the only available rock and spouting it left and right:

"Some people might be older or handicapped or simply not possess the fast-twitch reflexes of a 12 year old which seems to be a requirement of some games these days" - nice try, but that statement doesn't even begin to apply to SC2.

Could a games publisher sell the 'trusted membership of the online player community' property as a separate thing to the underlying game?

Maybe some sort of rework of the MSCE structure - 'SC2 Certified Player'

That quote was very much taken out of context in the article. With a title calling out Blizzard glancing at the quote you assume it to be Blizzard but the full quote reads as though it could very well be a different company.

The user has been through a similar situation before, with another game -- where he suspects the company had monetary motivations for the bans, “A bunch of people’s accounts got hacked and used cheats, so we all got banned. The company already had our money so they didn’t care about our accounts.”

Blizzard can't catch them if they don't go online.

Another thing is that SC2 let's you change the difficulty in the middle of the campaign, you are not required to restart the whole campaign if you get stuck.

So tell me: why the hell does someone need to cheat at all if not for the achievements?

I think blizzard is doing the right thing.

It would be fun if they would SUE for license violations (so it's piracy, yay!) next.

On October 1, 2010, Blizzard began the unprecedented act of suspending and banning players for the use of cheats and trainers in SINGLE PLAYER games of Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty. Users found to be using cheats in SINGLE PLAYER CAMPAIGN MODE and AI SKIRMISH mode were treated the same as if they had cheated in a multiplayer online match. For some, their accounts were suspended and for others their CD keys were disabled and they were completely locked out of playing even campaign mode in their legally purchased game.

This seems utterly ridiculous to me. Players have already purchased the game, and it seems to me that after that point Blizzard should no longer have control of what they do with the game in single player mode, on their own computer.

Perhaps since it keeps track of player rankings they are concerned about cheating in local single player games artificially inflating the achievements and gamer score of some players.

However, I still find it strange that Blizzard should take the stance that they still own the software and can take away your access after you have bought it, for doing something with it on your own personal computer, in single player mode.