‘Diablo 3’ fans are in trouble, yet again. Per reports, Blizzard has banned “several thousand” Diablo 3 players for using botting programs and “undermining the spirit of play.”

Blizzard has issued bans to "several thousand" Diablo 3 players who were using bots, hacking or, in simple words, cheating. This is a new report of botting in a game after the same problem was reported with ‘Guild Wars 2’ when the company banned a massive 34,000 bots from Tyria.

Blizzard recently came to the official ‘Diablo 3’ forums to announce the latest news and revealing as to why such a step was taken.

“We've recently issued account bans to several thousand Diablo III players who were found to be using botting programs while playing. In addition to undermining the spirit of fair play, botting, hacking, and other forms of cheating can also cause technical problems with the game as well as contribute to performance issues with the Battle.net service,” Blizzard community manager Lylirra said. “As always, maintaining a stable, safe, and enjoyable online environment for legitimate players is very important to us, and we'll be continuing to keep watch on Battle.net and take action as needed,” the post added.

The post further confirmed that the company will also be adding the ability for players to report this kind of behavior directly through the game client in a future patch. However, a few fans stated that something like this had previously happened in March as well and why wasn’t any action taken by the company at that time.

“This isn't our first rodeo. We have been actively monitoring for exploitative behavior since the game launched and taking action as needed,” Lylirra responded. “We haven't been very vocal about that process (though we have made a few announcements for larger ban waves in the past), but that's something we'll be working to change and improve upon going forward.”

Botting is absolutely a big issue for Blizzard, and more so with the game’s economy linked to the Real Money Auction House. With that in mind, per a PCGamer report, “it seems strange that they’ve taken so long to take such a big swing at it.”