Diablo 2 and Diablo 2 Lord of Destruction "Anti-Realm Down"

We, the Undersigned Gaming Community of Diablo 2 and Diablo 2 Lord of Destruction, from around the world to the United States, do hearby create this petition in hopes of forming a better online gaming community for Blizzard Entertainment, the Battle.net servers, and ourselves.

The current problem that most of us experience on Battle.net is the so called "Realm-Down" IP (Internet Protocol) address ban which was implemented by the Battle.net servers in August of 2004. The problem arises that the game servers wrongfully ban legitmate players for making games too fast on any Diablo 2 Battle.net Realm: USWest, USEast, Asia 1, Asia 2, Asia 3, or Europe. This type of ban results in kicking the player from the realm, and not having the player able to log on to his or her account on the realm but instead see a message with a black screen that says "Realm Down," which can last for an unknown period of 15 minutes to 48 hours from the time the player first sees the message.

Neither Blizzard nor it's representatives have stated what the minimum time limit is for creating a game on the Battle.net servers so that such a ban can be prevented by legitmate players, since the new implementation was originally designed to stop people from doing illegal "botting" activity (or running a program that lets your account create games without you having to be at the computer). Blizzard has not provided any sort of remedy for the situation to get legitmate gamers who were wrongfully banned back on the Realms and back into gameplay. However, such "botting" activities have not stopped on the Battle.net servers after Blizzard implemented the changes, since hackers have built programs to circumvent this "Realm Down" message, thus making gameplay unfair to those who legitly play.

Banning legitmate players is a diservice to the gaming community, and we recognize the frustration that all gamers go through when trying to avoid getting banned for doing legitmate activities on Diablo 2 or Diablo 2 Lord of Destruction such as Magic-Finding (MFing), Leveling Up (Baaling), Switching Characters to help a friend kill monsters your other player cannot, or just trading equipment. Such activities have been around the Diablo 2 gaming community since the day Diablo 2 first came out in 2000, and the new server-side patch implemented in August of 2004 has put an end to most people gaming on Diablo 2.

We demand that the changes be removed immediately and that a new change be implemented that will be able to more precisely follow accounts that have been doing such botting so that less people who play legitmately will get banned. No ground rules have been set at all, as Blizzard has not told the Diablo 2 gaming community what guidelines to follow when creating games, other than their usual "don't use 2rd party programs" automatic messages. We demand that Blizzard set some ground rules for how games are made on the Diablo 2 realms (especially in terms of time limits per game) so that the gaming community can follow them and not be banned from gameplay for up to 2 days. This will put an end to the bitter, frustrated, and outraged gamers on Diablo 2 since people do not know what rules there are to follow since the new implementation has come out.

We do not wish to stop playing Diablo 2 or Diablo 2 Lord of Destruction, but we would rather keep gameplay at an optimum, enjoyable level rather than deter it with massive bannings of legitmate players. Please make Diablo 2 and Diablo 2 Lord of Destruction on Battle.net more enjoyable so that we can continue playing and suppoting you in the future.