From what I understand, all they were doing was gathering in large groups in specific locations, correct? Just having large groups, even thousands, of people in an area should not be enough to crash a Blizzard server. As rich as Blizzard is, their servers should be strong enough to handle having every single player on the server in one area.

I know Blizz has the ability to limit how many players can be on a realm at one time. I always assumed that limit was based on how many players the server could hold and remain stable. Don't blame the players for doing nothing more then gathering in one area. Blame Blizz's servers for being cheap pieces of crud.

The guy who was banned should never have been banned in the first place. The only crash that I can tell he was responsible for was the first one and, as far as I can tell, it was an accident, not planned. Banning him because thousands of other people decided to go crash other servers is just plain stupid. I didn't see him encouraging or telling anyone to go crash other servers and I seriously don't expect one player to be able to order thousands of other players to do something that they don't want to do.

"From what I understand, all they were doing was gathering in large groups in specific locations, correct? Just having large groups, even thousands, of people in an area should not be enough to crash a Blizzard server."

Gathering fine. Macro smamming emotes to lag server... not so much.

The guy regards himself as a big time pvper...which means he knows that macro emote spamming will slow down the game for people around him.
He also regards himself as an informed person on the game... which means he knows that many people gathered in one place can crash a server.

So, unless he is retarded, he knew that gathering a ton of people in an already busy area (then spamming emotes on top of that) would have a good chance of crashing a server (not like this has not already happened in the past).

He was the known face, he hosted the livestream, he his event has already crashed two other servers... not sure what else one has to do to deserve a ban. Honestly it makes gold selling look like a good clean living as far as I am concerned. What could he have done? Well, saying hey guys I'm not doing this any longer because it's crashing servers might have been a start.

 

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In this video, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-DFfBUA6vM, the only crash he was responsible for, I didn't see or even hear of anyone spamming macros or doing anything else to deliberately crash the server. I even heard him say they weren't trying to crash the server. The other servers that were crashed, as far as I can tell, he wasn't even there because he had already been banned. Someone else was leading/egging that on. Zybak, I believe his name was, not Swifty. Swifty was the guy hosting the original event. *That* person should have been banned, I will agree with you there.

Yeah its only in games that popularity gets people off the hook for wrongdoings... Oh wait.

 

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To me this is more of a failure on Blizzard's end then the 1000s of players that wanted to group up. Why should we have to hinder our in game desires by the limits of the server hardware? By this point Blizzard should have so much iron behind the servers that any number of people could gather up in one location. 1000s of people start going to one area? Fine insta spawn another server Amazon style and drop that servers resources into the pool. FFS get off your bed of money and spend some more on the hardware. I haven't heard of any large hardware purchase they got all those blades, what... 3 years ago now? And that was stipulated to be for the battlenet upgrade.

 

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I almost lost a set of GSA to that.

 

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Moral of the story is don't try to make a dated game fun by trying something new with some friends. Blizzard may ban you for it.

 

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