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Activision did a similar thing with the completely botched release of Warcraft 3 both the modern Battle.net re-release and the Reforged remake. The TLDR is that
by ddtaylor 4y ago
Activision did a similar thing with the completely botched release of Warcraft 3 both the modern Battle.net re-release and the Reforged remake. The TLDR is that if you tried to play most any custom map - even privately - you would reconnect shortly later and find your account permanently banned. In some cases even if you ever actually got to start the custom map, just simply from trying to host a lobby. In my case it was a private lobby with two other friends for the old-school map "Enfos".
I filed an appeal/ticket with Blizzard and they gave me an almost identical canned response as from the article and I simply gave up and vowed to never buy another Blizzard game. About 6 months later on a whim I tried to play the game again and it worked, but the entire experience left such a bad taste in my mouth that I have no motivation to participate in this exercise in frustration.
The problem is that the mapping community had created some very inventive use of out-of-bounds memory access as a way to use the internal game APIs to accomplish things the game engine supports but isn't exposed to mappers. If you take a close look at almost every "big" map eventually you'll find some level of use of these techniques. The community created a "safe list" of known patterns of OOB memory access so that maps could be "verified" as not doing anything naughty while still also having access to these extra modding features.
The worst part? Blizzard was so aware of this situation that they actually re-implemented the OOB memory access in a safe way using known memory offsets. So, they fixed the actual OOB memory access so it shouldn't be possible to use an OOB memory access to crash your game or steal your "cdkey" or similar, but they have whitelisted many useful memory offsets so it's still possible to interact with the game engine in more complex ways.
That's the strangest part for me is that they put in a LOT of effort to remain that level of backwards compatibility and then banned players automatically when they tried to use it. Of course absolutely none of this was communicated to regular players in game and of course the forums are a complete shit show.
REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!