battlecruisers. Maybe 10 or 15, if they play their cards right, but even with that kind of titanic fleet, your average gamer will still fall to the proper combination of opposition spacecraft in the real-time strategy game.

StarCraft II player gm0ney did things a bit differently.

Using a “trainer” program he downloaded from the website Cheat Happens, he found he could remove the game’s supply limit and steamroll his opponents with hundreds of gargantuan warships. If it looked like he might lose, he could switch to God Mode and watch his units turn invincible.

He was clearly cheating, and that’s why Blizzard Entertainment suspended him from playing the game for two weeks in early October.

Exactly the sort of punishment one would expect from a responsible gamemaker, no? After all, nobody wants to be a hapless player caught in the cross hairs of a military machine built by somebody who isn’t playing by the rules.

But there’s a twist: Gm0ney got suspended for gaming the system against the game’s AI, not for mobilizing his illicit fleet against other players. He might have been playing online, but no other players were directly affected by his actions.

Still, gm0ney got caught up in a sweep, during which Blizzard reportedly banned 5,000 StarCraft players for cheating.

The ban of a player for tweaking his solo experience is the latest gamemaker move to call into question the limits of gamers’ rights. Once you bring a piece of software home, whose business is it to tell you how to use it? Should a game company be allowed to ban you from using mods and hacks against an AI opponent? The interconnected nature of online gaming creates a gray area that means players can get punished for activities that seemingly cause no harm to anyone.

StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, which Blizzard released in July for PC and Mac, carries with it an explicit anti-cheating policy that forbids players from using “any file or program that is not a part of the StarCraft II software, but is used to gain an advantage in the game.”

Now some are saying Blizzard’s StarCraft II bans go too far by blocking those who are only battling computer-controlled enemies.

The Single-Multiplayer Game

Blizzard includes built-in cheats with StarCraft II, but players had not yet discovered them before gm0ney downloaded the Cheat Happens trainer.

“I played through the [single-player] game pretty fast, and by the time I wanted to have fun with cheats, there were either only one or zero cheats out,” said gm0ney, who declined to give his real name in an e-mail to Wired.com.

The anonymous gamer said he had no intention of playing the game versus a human opponent. But StarCraft II’s interface offers precious little differentiation between the game’s single-player and multiplayer modes. All players are greeted with a login prompt for Battle.net, Blizzard’s ubiquitous online service, which is inexorably linked to the game’s main functions.

There’s an offline option called Guest Mode that can be used for single-player functions, but gm0ney wanted to see his friends list. So when he cheated to crush computer opponents, he was signed in to Battle.net.

“There were some custom games I had the trainer running while I played online versus the [computer],” he said.

He also accidentally turned on the trainer while playing cooperatively with his friends against the computer. These actions might have set off red flags at Blizzard HQ, although the company says it is not banning StarCraft II players just for using single-player cheats.

“In order to protect the integrity of multiplayer competition, we are actively detecting cheat programs used in multiplayer modes, whether there are human opponents or not,” a Blizzard representative said in an e-mail to Wired.com.

But are a player’s private games against a computer opponent really “multiplayer” just because he is signed in online at the time? Cheat Happens co-founder Chris O’Rorke says no.

“Playing against the AI is a single-player mode,” O’Rorke said to Wired.com in an e-mail. “It’s not affecting any other players or standings if you cheat against the AI.”

Cheat Happens does not publish hacking software that can be used in multiplayer games, said O’Rorke, adding that “the recent trend of ‘always online,’ where game publishers want users to be constantly logged in to their servers … has caused some of the lines to be blurred.”

False Achievements

Blizzard has another reason for cracking down on single-player cheats: They can affect users’ online profiles.

“While single-player games only appear to be you and a computer at first, your achievements and gamer score also [carry] weight and prestige for your online play,” Blizzard wrote to another Cheat Happens user, according to O’Rorke.

Starcraft II dangles more than 400 achievements — virtual trophies for completing difficult or tedious tasks — in front of players. Battle.net public profiles keep a record of those achievements, so gamers can brag and show off their accomplishments to the rest of the world.

But if players are allowed to use cheats to get them, achievements become meaningless. Who cares if you beat the whole campaign on Impossible difficulty if you did it with unlimited minerals?

Achievements are disabled in Guest Mode, and cannot be collected while playing offline. But the co-founder of Cheat Happens says a better way of solving this problem would be to allow players to disable achievements if they want to hack the game.

“Many gamers have no interest in earning achievements, they just occur regardless of whether one is cheating or not,” O’Rorke said.

Blizzard did not respond to Wired.com’s follow-up questions about how third-party hacks affect achievements.

E-mailed remarks have been edited for clarity.

See Also:

• Report: Blizzard Floats Spring 2012 Release for Starcraft II: Heart of the Swarm
• Review: Polished StarCraft II Lives Up to 10 Years of Hype

Authors: Jason Schreier

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