Accordingly to one of Blizzard’s representitives, Blizzard has banned over 320,000 users for ToS violations in Warcraft III and Diablo II. This includes anything from hacks and bots to illegal configurations. First time offenders were given a 30 day ban, while repeat offenders were permanently banned. Only their CD-key was banned, however, which means that their Battle.net accounts will be fully usable for the release of Starcraft 2. The statement from Bashiok at Blizzard can be found below:
We’ve recently banned over 320,000 Warcraft III and Diablo II accounts that were found to be violating the Battle.net Terms of Use. If this is a first offense, the CD key associated with the banned account will be suspended for 30 days, while repeat offenders will see their keys banned permanently. All account ban decisions are final.
We would like all players to remember that abuse of unintended mechanics and/or use of third party programs is a violation of the agreement made when signing on to Battle.net, and can subject your account to disciplinary action up to and including a permanent ban of its access to the service. These types of activities can severely impact the stability of our servers, and we’ll continue to aggressively monitor Battle.net in order to protect the service and its players from the harmful effects of cheating.
Many account closures come as the direct result of tips emailed to our hacks team by legitimate Battle.net users. If you come across a hack, find a site responsible for distributing hacks, or have a replay of a newly available hack, please report this to our hacks team at [email protected] or through our Hacks Report Form at http://us.blizzard.com/support/article.xml?locale=en_US&tag=hacksform
As always, thank you for your continued support, and we’ll see you on Battle.net!
It has also been announced that all bans are final and are not open to appeal.