Players of a variety of games have used auction houses as a way to purchase items, armor and weapons that they haven’t been able to earn through their normal activities. It’s a good way for the sellers to earn extra in-game currency. When Diablo 3 is released, it will feature auction houses that allow players to exchange goods for real money.

Online cheaters, will you never change your evil ways?

Blizzard announced deploying the BanHammer (or BanLaser, as Blizzard calls it) on an undisclosed amount of Battle.net users for StarCraft II infractions. Blizzard’s announcement reminds those who cheat and hack that it’s not only dishonest but can cause stability problems for the entire network. The StarCraft end user license agreement allows Blizzard to permanently ban anyone caught cheating.

Blizzard has posted a not-so-friendly warning to StarCraft II players that anyone caught cheating or hacking the game is violating the terms of service, and their Battle.net account will be banned permanently. As in, forever. Until you make a new account.

After some probing by the community, we learned the map was banned because the user used the term “Badass” referring to a wave of enemies. The actual campaign in StarCraft IIcontains language that can be seen as more harsh than this, but that’s up for Blizzard to decide. What made Cyrileo especially upset was that Blizzard didn’t inform them a component of the map was inappropriate and did not give him/her the opportunity to change it before taking the map down.

If you plan on buying a digital copy of StarCraft II, you can save yourself time by downloading the client right now, long before the game’s July 27, 2010 release date. This saves you precious hours of downloading about seven gigs’ worth of data, precious hours you could instead spend kicking someone’s ass. Or getting your ass kicked.

Blizzard has announced that it has decided not to implement the Real ID feature on its Battle.net forums.

The Real ID feature would have allowed a poster’s real first and last name to appear on any forum post. This news came straight from Mike Morhaime himself, Blizzard’s CEO and co-founder…

In the film Mission: Impossible, Tom Cruise’s character Ethan Hunt meets with a mysterious arms dealer who called herself “Max”. When Ethan tries to guess her real identity, she replies, “I don’t have to tell you what a comfort anonymity is in my profession. It’s like a warm blanket.” Similarly, online forum users enjoy the blanket of anonymity as they post behind the safety of a username. However, Blizzard forum posters will soon have this blanket ripped away from them.

That’s right, Starcraft fans. Starcraft II has finally entered closed beta. That means, of course, that you have to receive invitations from the company to play but, heck, at least it’s happening.

Beta testers are also getting a look at the new and improved Battle.net which will eventually collect World of Warcraft, Starcraft II and any future products into one streamlined service. Now it’s time to sit and pray for an invite. Though maybe we could all just compile a list of the things we’d do for a key and then pray that Blizzard sees it. Either way, there’s lots of prayer involved with receiving one.

In an interview with Joystiq, Blizzard Vice President of game design, Rob Pardo, was asked about earlier reports from Julian Wilson on how Blizzard is looking to monetize Battle.net.

Pardo mentioned that Blizzard is not looking to put Diablo 3 on a subscription-based pricing. “It’s clearly not an MMO, so it’s not appropriate to do a business model like that” Pardo answered.

Further in the interview the VP of game design went on to answer the question about Battle.net saying…

Joystiq reports that our worst fears have been hinted at. When asked, “Will Battle.Net remain free?”, at the Diablo III gameplay panel at BlizzCon 2008, Blizzard’s Julian Wilson gave Blizzard fans a startling answer: “We are looking to monetize Battle.Net so that we get to keep making these games and updating features, we kind of have to.”

This news comes especially dark seeing as how Blizzard recently announced it is breaking Starcraft II into…