CoreKrogoth said:
For all of this I'm going to assume that multiplayer game play isn't ACTUALLY affected by achievements.
It is if Blizzard wants their presentation to have any integrity. If they want the special player icon that you get for doing every achievement on the hardest difficulty to be special, rare and unique, then that is their right. If they want to be able to say to the players who do it legitimately, "This is your reward for being super-awesome, you get to show it off to everyone," then they need to enforce that integrity.
Except it's not the same thing as steam. The major difference being that VAC can be enabled or disabled in games. (it gets trickier with games that they didn't make, but the principle is the same)The way Steam handles it is by disabling achievements when you cheat, which is much better than banning people for wanting a little "achieved" icon to show up on their profile that doesn't affecting game play whatsoever. It is also clear when VAC is enabled or disabled.
And when you activate the actual in-game cheats in SC2, it disables any achievements.
There's really no ambiguity here. As I understand it, the only difference between the third-party trainers they were actually using and Blizzard's built-in in-game cheats, is that the official cheats disable achievements and the trainers do not. They were
only cheating to get the achievements/profile icons, which, as I've said before, Blizzard has a vested interest in preserving the integrity.
It's understandable that we aren't the only people on the planet. That's not the issue. The issue is that it's a decision between taking money from people who (knowing the evil Kotick) weren't informed that cheating to get achievements in single player would take their game from them.
There was a press release about a month or so back where Blizzard clearly warned people that cheating
in any mode of the game would qualify you for a ban. Multiplayer and single player.
What more can they do other than issue a warning, and then follow through?
So Funk or anybody else, do you still think the problem is just snap solved by logging in as guest assuming that the banned persons weren't informed that using a 3rd party cheat in single player and only used it in single player, would ban their account? Let's now add the assumption that some of them were using the trainer not for achievements, but because the cheats that were built into the game didn't do something they wanted to be able to do (such as make your units go MUCH faster) just for laughs. Do these people also deserve to have their game removed?
Yes. That solves it completely. If you want to cheat/hack the game/do whatever, do it while you aren't logged in, and playing as Guest. But when you're logged in and playing under the Bnet system, Blizzard is well within its rights to preserve the integrity of its system and do whatever it wants.
As to the wide reaching implications of this see Gregori's posts, he's got it down, but just because people seem to read one thing and it goes in one eye and out the other here it is again. The fact that they CAN legally punish people for modding (in courts intent is often disregarded, particularly in cases like these) their product has horrible implications for modders. This means that if they so wanted Exort, they could come after you for making that mod because YOU TOO, by making that mod, violated their copy right. Or am I just wrong in assuming that you didn't get written permission from the developers AND Kotick himself before making that mod?
Are you ignoring the mod tools that Blizzard provides for both WoW and SC2? Modding the game is different from hacking it. Or would you like to refer to Blizzard's successful lawsuit against the WoW botting program?
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