StarCraft II developer Blizzard announced recently that it has taken action against players who have been using cheats or hack programs during online play. 

 

It is well known that until now, the online play through Blizzard’s Battle.Net structure on StarCraft II has been particularly susceptible to hacks and cheats. Unfortunately, due to its recent release it has taken the Blizzard team several weeks to comprehensively address these issues. 

 

A company statement reads:

 

“We recently took action, including suspensions and bans, on over 5,000 StarCraft II players who were in violation of the Battle.net Terms of Use for cheating and/or using hack programs while playing. In addition to undermining the spirit of fair competition that’s essential to play on Battle.net, cheating and hacking can lead to stability and performance issues with the service. Maintaining a stable, safe, and secure online-gaming experience for legitimate players is a top priority for us, and we'll be continuing to keep watch on Battle.net and take action as needed.”

 

In addition, the company revealed that it is constantly looking at ways to make online play more fair. In future, Blizzard plans to focus on the Zerg race by improving it and making it more evenly ranked when compared to Terran and Protoss. 

 

The following changes will be made:

 

- We're increasing roach range. This will allow roaches to be more effective in large groups, giving the zerg more options in the mid to end game.

 

- Fungal Growth will now prevent Blink, which will give zerg a way to stop endlessly Blinking stalkers which can be very challenging to deal with in large numbers.

 

- The Barracks are going to require a Supply Depot, which will impact a lot of early terran reaper pushes.

 

- The reaper speed upgrade will require the Factory, which is meant to weaken a lot of the early terran reaper attacks that dominate so many matches, especially in team games.

 

- We're making a number of increases to the health of zerg buildings, which will make the very vulnerable zerg technology structures more resistant to raids. We don't expect these hit point changes to have a super significant impact on the game, but the current numbers felt way too low.

 

StarCraft II is one of the most popular gaming releases of 2010 and currently holds an average rating of 93% on Metacritic.