Diablo 3 Blocked In Iran! Who’s Fault Is It?
A few days ago, the internet went nuts when Blizzard fans in Iran found out that they have been locked out. It seems that battle.net and all the Blizz games are filtered for Iranian IP addresses. Even the Diablo 3 players have been affected by this act of censorship. It is a bit unfair for people that paid for a game that is based on an always on DRM to be locked out without doing anything wrong.
The first pieces of news stated that the Iranian government decided to filter the battle.net websites and games due to their blood and gore content. As time passed by, truth emerged and the story has been proven to be wrong as it is not the Iranian government who applied the censorship. The outage was on Blizzard’s side due to US regulations.
Multiple gamers reported this issue and Blizzard had to publish a response for the concerned community. An official post on the forums stated that the US Government imposed sanctions that caused the outage. It seems that the United States has prohibited Blizzard to do business with citizens of certain counties including Iran. On the other hand, battle.net services are blocked in Iran but so far, gamers were able to access them via private networks. Now that the US sanctions are in place, that is no longer possible. Blizzard itself has nothing against the usage of such methods to access their services. They haven’t banned any Iranian gamer and the outage was not something that they endorse but it was imposed by the government. Also, Blizzard has stated that they will happily remove any restrictions for these countries as soon as the law changes in the US. Until then, Iranian Diablo 3 players will have to find something else to play since they have been denied the access to Blizzard products.
(0.o)
Now that’s just wrong… Really wrong. =S
OK so the US goverment will give back to all the people in those countries they don’t want Blizzard to do business with their money back for buying Blizzard games? (Irony) >.>
So I’m from Argentina and lately U.S. and Arg. Have had lots of arguments. Should I expect the same for my country?
Really nice, punishing people for their nationality…
Don’t worry
This is just a political decision and I seriously doubt Argentina is on the US blacklist. Also, there are solution for this problem. I believe that WhatTheFast is a Polish service. It can be used to avoid such restrictions.
Ha, yes I’m pretty sure Arg. isn’t in the U.S. blacklist. I was just… how to say it? Yeah, trolling I suppose =P
But I was just complaining for the poor people that bought the game and can’t play it now =S
I would be angry if that happened to me. Anyone would be mad to be in their shoes.
I hope the restriction can be avoided =)
These restrictions were in place before Diablo 3 was launched. All that Blizzard did was to improve their filter for Iranian IPs. The ones that were playing the game purchased it from outside Iran because the game wasn’t launched in their country due to this prohibition to do business with them.