Blizzard temporarily delays the Battle.net Season IV Elite Ladder Regional Finals of the U.S.A citing an ongoing investigation into apparent "cheating".


Blizzard's Season Final events hardly require an introduction. On its 4th installment, this Season's finals proves to the biggest yet. The 3 preceding Season tournaments had players qualifying from various ladders and then an online finals to determine who would play for the final champion spot, which promised many goodies from Blizzard. That was then, this season Blizzard has stepped it up many notches to provide what can be regarded their grandest one yet.

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They had hosted 3 elite ladders where the most accomplished players in Warcraft were provided grounds for battling it out to reach top ranks. Blizzard had informed the players that the top 16 from the U.S.A ladder (U.S West which had East combined )and 20 players from both Northrend and Kalimdor
would be playing in an offline event where 16 of the best among them would proceed to a Global Offline Finals with over $ 10,000 in prizes.

Thus this being a must-attend event for most players, had apparently led to a certain sharing of accounts among certain clan mates and friends to level the player accounts up. The spark was set off with some players expressing their distaste in their competitor's methods of ranking up their friends on the ladder by account sharing and leveling it up with various methods without the actual player who owned the account playing the games. Then rumours of similar happenings in the Europe ladder surfaced. All in all heated arguments flew between players who considered this impersonation and playing for another method during games as very unfair. This, however, was was not a new thing where the immediately preceding season had similar occurences. We had previously reported it » here. Most thought that Blizzard had taken this lightly and that there was nothing really wrong per se with it till today when this email had been sent to the players, by Jooong Kim, Blizzard Entertainment's Associate eSports Manager.

Hello, Due to an ongoing investigation regarding players cheating for the qualifications of the North American regional, we will be postponing the date of the tournament to December 9th, 2006. I will be in contact via email in the next few days to provide an update on the situation, and on flight schedules and accommodations. I apologize for any inconvenience this will cause and for the abruptness of this matter. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me.

Joong Kim
Associate eSports Manager
Blizzard Entertainment

There appear to be 3 cases of "cheating" that occured. The first was players actually subsituting for another person by gaining his account password and then playing a game for him on the ladder to keep the experience up. The second was to get on to lower level accounts to matchup with top players so that if the lower level account won it would mean only gaining 10 experience points but the top player losing would lose 140 experience, which is rather large. Third, would be giving free wins to friends and team mates who you actually matched up thus helping them level up faster without actually playing the game.

Nick "aG.Axslav" Ranish was kind enough to talk us and tell us what he feels aout this, "Well if Blizzard puts it in their rules that cheating = disqualification then they should enforce them too". Does this seem a step forward in that direction? How can Blizzard catch them out? "Well it's easy really you log the ips and then you see a game started in an IP in canada and then U.S. West and then U.S.East all after an hour. So theres proof. However it's like using a ringer in the tournament isn't considered cheating by you but pretty much the whole world scorns it. However I would rather let Blizzard decide what is best".

That indeed is what many players now wait for.

Links
Battle.net Season 4 - Season 4 Information
GotFrag.com - Source