With this change, though, they don’t need to dig that far. Time is money, and investigation takes time. If they have to dig in and prove that there was a specific piece of software instead of hardware being used to duplicate actions across multiple game clients, that takes time, and even more time to explain it to people, and even more time to have an inevitable “no I didn’t” back and forth until their appeals are exhausted. If there’s a blanket prohibition on using any kind of action duplication across clients, that makes it much easier to detect and apply actions, because they don’t need to nitpick. I don’t think that they’re wrong to make this clarification, it was clearly part of the intent of the original change. I just think that it’s regrettable that we can’t have nice things.
It was always part of the risk, yeah.
Oh, sure, this they take the community view on. No, I think that Blizzard is pretty immune to the rabble-rabble of the grievance du jour on the forums. I do wonder what will happen, though, when the community as a whole starts to realize that the bot problem didn’t suddenly go away due to these changes. Most likely they’ll continue to complain that Blizzard “refuses to do anything about them” when actually it was that the action that was taken for the most part only affected people who were already following the rules and trying to not get their accounts banned, instead of going for full disallowed automation and counting in the churn of banned accounts into their overhead.
