Overwatch has only been out for about a week, but Blizzard have already proved to cheaters that they ain’t nothing to fuck with.
Over 1500 players in China have already been permanently banned, and popular hacking forums are alight with the news that nobody seems to be able to trick Blizzard’s cheat detection.
Like naughty schoolchildren at the end of assembly, the 1572 banned players in China were called out by username on Blizzard’s forums, while PC Gamer has detailed a ton of Western forum posts from cheaters that have tried and failed to hack the game. Poor dears.
One player shared that they were banned, so went out and picked up Overwatch again, only to be banned once more after a few days. Apparently, the software they had used previously was detected on their PC.
A savage move on Blizzard’s part – but then again, cheating is kind of a dick move.
Obviously, Blizzard are taking cheating pretty damn seriously. One gamer shared an account closure email that they received from the developer.
It read:
We don’t take this decision lightly. Our team issued this closure after a careful review of relevant evidence. Our support staff will not overturn these closures and may not respond to appeals.
The lesson here of course is that you shouldn’t cheat. Ever. Not on your partners, not on tests, and certainly not on Overwatch. That last one is clearly the most important.
Whether or not Blizzard should be permanently depriving these people of a product they paid for is debatable. There should be consequences, for sure – but this might just be a stretch too far.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.