Diablo II Attacked

An embarrassed Blizzard Entertainment today announced that its multiplayer online RPG "Diablo II" will be unavailable to some gamers for up to a week while the company tries to restore data destroyed in a hack attack. Hackers exploited a weakness in the servers of Battle.net, the company's online service, allowing them to bring down the authorization process. The hackers then proceeded to take control of some characters and strip them of their items, weapons and other bonus equipment, in some cases killing the character outright, so that when the real player logged back on he or she would be forced to start afresh. The attack has unsurprisingly targeted those gamers with high skill levels and valuable items at their disposal, spoiling literally months of hard work. Blizzard are now in the process of restoring those characters affected from their most recent backups. "We will be reviving all hardcore characters who died between December 19th and January 1st," the company told reporters. "The restored hardcore characters will be revived with the experience, skills and items possessed as of Tuesday, December 19th." The company had no comment to make about the possibility that characters who had died under legitimate circumstances would also receive this special treatment. For Blizzard this turn of events must be very awkward. Many players have been petitioning the company to fix bugs and problems with unbalanced gameplay for many months now after the somewhat unpopular release of the last patch. The way that Blizzard neglected to inform players about changes has also come under fire. Players affected by the problems should be back online and ready for use within a week, as soon as the security hole is patched up. Related Feature - Diablo II Review

Source - Battle.net