[ayakura]

My own take throughout the whole thing is similar to Brian Kibler's [1]. To me, even though it made sense that Blizzard wanted to stay neutral, the punishment was too severe for all of the people involved (zero prize money, 1 year ban) so it's nice that at least one of them was reverted.

[1]: http://bmkgaming.com/statement-on-blitzchung/

Sidenote, Linus is reading the statement on the WAN show and he mentioned that Blizzard was "Lawful Evil." That's a pretty solid way to put it

[aasasd]

Dunno about version 3 or later, but in the classic system ‘lawful’ means adhering to strict principles and ‘evil’ means selfish with disregard to others. So I'm pretty sure Blizzard is either chaotic or neutral, what with it trying to appease both sides at once. And probably neutral on the good-evil axis, since it passably honestly trades its games for the money.

[ethbro]

Are there any multinationals that aren't chaotic evil, posing as lawful neutral?

[anthony_doan]

> it made sense that Blizzard wanted to stay neutral

To me it made sense that Blizzard wanted China's money, see diablo mobile.

"Do you guys not have phones?"

Also there are reports Blizzard is stopping people from deleting their accounts.

[013a]

I ran into that "stopping from being able to delete your account" thing with regards to the SMS code to verify your account. Its definitely real, at least for some people.

My suspicion, however, is that it was an unintentional bug on their end. We've all seen this before in engineering. You're using some service like Twilio. You've got a TON of people trying to cancel their account at the same time, using SMS verification. Their backend trips a rate limiter or account limit. You don't handle the error properly, and the client gets an inaccurate error. Its a story as old as time.

I went through the drivers license verification just fine. Its totally possible that they're being malicious, but its just so much more likely that engineering fucked up and it was blown out of proportion.