I believe that the majority of players will support Blizzard in this. Please read the whole comment before you downvote me ...
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.
What you write is totally different from what article says. That article states that Blizzard also bans people who plays offline/single player games, I'm sure everyone is fine with banning online cheaters.
tl;dr: The article is deceptive. People where effectively cheating Battle.net.
Longer explanation...
The cheating appear to be people modifying save game files. They alter the file and give themselves more resources, units, etc.
They must have been logged into Battle.net in order for Blizzard to catch them. Single player != Offline in SC2.
The only reason to really cheat is to gain Achievements. As I said before, there are cheat codes built into the game[1], they are perfectly legit, but they do not give you any Achievements. This is why people were cheating - to get the benefit of the legit codes, but still gain Battle.net achievements.
My guess (not owning the game) is this: even for playing offline/single player, you can earn rewards that will show up in Battle.net. So you could be cheating on the online environment by just playing offline.
I have no knowledge to speak on this article directly but it's worth keeping in mind that this is from some folks who sell cheats for money. Beware of potential slant.
Blizzard already has built in cheats in single player. You just press enter and type a few phrases. However the built-in cheats disable achievements when activated.
This is key. If they didn't strike out against this kind of cheating then people wouldn't take any of the achievements seriously and the replay value of the game would be diminished.
Indeed. To further show the pointlessness of this kind of cheating, achievements are not available in single player mode, but only on battle.net (apart from the campaign-related ones).
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.
Bans? He got a 14-day suspension. Even if he was just using cheats for kicks and Blizzard flagged him unfairly, it's just a slap on the wrist.
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.
How about "I wanted to play the game on 'god mode'?" It seems a little harsh to suspend/ban/whatever players to 'cheating' at a one-player game. That's like trying to make it illegal to cheat at solitaire. The reason that cheating is bad is that it is unfair to other players. In a single-player game, who exactly is being cheated? The AI?
The in-game cheats Blizzard supplies have all the functionalities of the trainers (at least that I saw on a simple google search). The only perk of using a trainer is to be able to get achievements while cheating. You could make the argument that devaluing the achievements is cheating the people who went through the effort of earning them legitimately.
The company already had our money so they didn’t care about our accounts.
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.”
As many already said, SC2 has inbuilt cheat codes, there is no reason for using hacks.
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 don't like the precedent. There are lots of reasons a person may want to modify game beyond the given cheat codes.
For example, the Starcraft (original) AI contest works by injecting a dll into the Starcraft client which allows you interact with various elements of the game. Most anti-cheating mechanisms would detect this and would flag the user as a cheater.
The first interaction I had with programming came from writing hacks to Diablo 2. I started out writing save game trainers and simple memory modification cheats. I graduated to more advanced hacks involving dll injection, OpenGL hooks, etc as time went on.
This whole experience significantly influenced me into my current career. I'd hate to know that the current generation of young hackers growing up won't have the same opportunities to learn as I did.
Blizz is doing it right.
Statement that WoW players using 3rd party programs are only suspended are complete bullshit - they ban you right away even for unattended fishing with autoit script.
Besides there is a mode without achivements - you can play play as guest without connecting to bnet and without achivements if you wish to cheat.
They're using a Trainer.
For Single player.
Which is pretty common and quite fine if you don't buy into the idea that EULA's and other shrink-wrap adhesive contracts actually hold water in court.
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.
Single player mode unlocks achievements and special badges of honor. If a ton of people are cheating, it devalues that prize and that accomplishment for other people.
That's the only reason these people would use those cheats in the first place. There are plenty of legal ways to cheat with codes in the game that won't reward you with the badges.
There is something curious about programmers thinking that possession is 10/10s of the law for computer code but that code on your server should serve their interests.
This is the Power of the EULA. By saying yes, I agree to such a contract, you are leasing use of the software, not "buying" it. This little bit of legal jiggery allows the software owner to disable that software for almost any reason. Tis a concept legal rationalized by copy protection, similar to how purchasing most media (music, movies, ect) gives you only a limited license for it's use. The only way to escape this fate is to only use opensource and non-commercially produced software (namely your own and other programmers you know)
Ditto, when I heard I needed an account with Blizzard to play SC2, my first thought was F-you.
I happily buy games from Bioware where I need to make an account, why? Because I've not heard of bioware abusing the privileged. I buy games from Steam, why? Because I've not heard of Valve abusing the privilege. However, I've heard of Blizzard abusing their authority near constantly, they're the PayPal of the new-generation of copy protection.
Enlighten me: How did Blizzard abuse their authority? Banning cheaters? Valve does that too and a lost Steam account can hurt much more than a lost Blizzard account (based on the fact that there are many more games you can possibly add to your steam account than to your battle.net account).
Now, I'm not hugely into gaming and I might have missed some news, so I'm genuinely interested in what ways Blizzard is worse than Valve.
I support Blizzard here, but I will try to give you a real answer.
I couldn't tell you why, but Valve either a) bans people less b) has less people that need banning or c) keeps it quiet
Blizzard gets a lot more bad press IMHO because it seems to happen all at once, and possibly also because they have a TON of users (and thus quite a lot of cheaters)
An example of why Valve is received so positively can be seen in TF2. When they added item drops, people started working hard to beat the system. Valve was not O.K. with this, but instead of banning everyone they simply deleted the ill-gotten items and gave people who hadn't 'cheated' the system a free hat in the form of a halo called "Cheater's Lament". They stepped on some toes because some people were falsely identified as cheating and lost items, but it went over pretty smooth.
It'd also be interesting to know more about the frequency of exploits against the two company's products. The Steam client is buggy, but when it comes to games it seems like Valve runs a pretty tight ship.
Valves reaction here is nice, then OTOH, this was about exploiting a game mechanic that wasn't completely thought out. In such cases Blizzard wouldn't ban either - at least not without a warning (they would certainly remove the items though).
The Valve forums are full of people complaining about having been banned without reason (yeah. right.). Maybe it's the smaller community that makes it seem as if it didn't happen as often.
Frankly. If I were to lose my Steam account, I would be seriously pissed considering all the money that went into that.
Also, it's crazy we even have this discussion. I think it's completely crazy that cheating in $game will cause you to lose $allgames.
Then again, I guess there must be some motivation to not cheat.
I think it probably IS tied to the smaller community. Complaints about either company never really seem to get a foothold, hopefully because most intelligent people realize they are hogwash, but with Blizzard there's so many people involved they make a clamor for everyone to hear.
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.