Creative Assembly Launcher Poll Results

Yeah that's not surprising really Didz. Even in D2 Blizzard showed a remarkable ability to just let things spiral out of control. It took huge amounts of pressure to get them to even do any banning of map-hack players, and that was even after they had been warning for months that you were going to get banned if you were using map hacks.

There's a possible roadblock to what you've suggested - prosecution of thieves in game worlds. The problem, as I recall, is that you don't actually own any of the things associated with playing the game - not your characters, items, none of it. Blizzard maintains ownership of the servers and all the information on them, you just pay to access all that stuff. So the trouble is that, under the law, the other person has not done anything wrong to you. Stealing from you would require ownership on your part first, which unfortunately is missing here. I know it doesn't make a shred of sense from a moral or real world perspective, but IIRC that's the legal sticking point.

However, the person may have violated any number of portions of the EULA by thieving from people. But, again we have problems. That means that the ball for legal action (and action of any sort) is squarely in Blizzard's court. So, legal action is never going to happen, because Blizzard doesn't really care to go to bat for its users who are being wronged since it gains little by doing so. Likewise, it probably doesn't want to pay for how many people it would really take to resolve all the matters like this that happen, so it simply fobs everyone off since it requires many less employees to send generic BS emails full of lies. Hopefully you get discouraged and stop asking them to help out, maybe you quit - either way Blizzard gets to stop being troubled by you, which is of course what the company wants. It wants you to shut up, pay, and never require any special attention at all so it can keep costs down. Similarly, I'm sure the Blizzard execs consider it an outrageous expense to pay people to go looking at server records to determine players who should be reprimanded. The end result is that nothing will ever be done, because it would require Blizzard to pay someone to do it, and to them that cost will never be worth it for only some good will and PR. Obviously at Blizzard everything revolves entirely around money, even more so than in many less-than-user-friendly companies, and as a result I fear that any future Blizzard products that remotely resemble D2 or Wow will almost certainly continue to be tainted by their absolutely abysmal administration policies.

I suppose some would argue that Blizzard has no obligation to do anything about this, and they would of course be right. However, I hold that it should do something about such situations, in order to promote good PR instead of the horror stories I have so often heard from ex-players. Not only are players much less likely to join if they know people that this kind of thing has happened to, but likewise current players are apt to quit when their accounts are wrecked and Blizzard does nothing. Frankly it seems like pretty simple math to me: many people that would quit over events like this could be saved if Blizzard fixed things, so it sure looks like it would easily be a worthwhile investment to pay techs to solve such problems in order to keep victimized players playing, and thus paying.