Diablo 3 Hacked Account Claims Instantly Stop, What Happened?

As you know, we've been covering the account infiltration claims since they started shortly after the game launched, originally with the Eurogamer and Examiner compromises. The account infiltration count on the forums alone was close to 130 claims per every eight hours. Today, however, there are none. Zilch. Nil. Zero.

Checking both the general forum and technical support, the one thing you won't see anywhere are any forum goers complaining about missing items, missing gold, deleted characters, odd names on the friends list or having their account or their friend's account compromised.

For the past few days I've been monitoring the forums and since patch 1.0.2b dropped, there have been no more compromised account claims.

Now, this means one of a few things:

1.) Everyone claiming to have a hacked account was trolling and decided to stop and actually go play the game when patch 1.0.2b dropped. It's tough to imagine that 390 people every day would just magically stop posting to play the game instead of troll, or even troll instead of playing at that magnitude. But let's move on.

2.) Blizzard is deleting any "I got hacked" threads before anyone ever sees it. Now I've been monitoring the threads they've been deleting and trying to bookmark them using Google cache. The latest "I got hacked" thread that wasn't deleted was from two days ago and may not have even been an account compromise, as a few individuals describe what the real problem might have been in a lengthy, technical description. Also, it's highly unlikely Blizzard would be fast enough to delete the "I got hacked" threads before anyone could see them unless they were monitoring the forums 24/7 with razor-sharp hawk eyes.

3.) All the hackers took a vacation. Technically, the rumor floating around here is that all the hackers are regrouping after the latest patch because they need to test and re-test their bots, spammers, scripting tools and everything else in between to see how well it works against any potential upgrades or modifications to Warden. This rumor makes a lot of sense because it wouldn't make sense to hijack accounts if your bots/farmers/etc., are getting picked up by the security protocols. Taking a few days off to reinvest into the tools necessary to keep gold farming accounts holds some weight, especially following on the information spilled during the confessions of a gold farmer.

4.) Blizzard stealth-patched Diablo 3. This here has been the most frequent and the most popular rumor. You don't have hundreds of people instantly stop posting onto the forums regarding account infiltration because they all went out and bought authenticators, all of them changed their passwords between June 5th and June 6th or all of the potentially at-risk users simply decided to stop posting on the forums after an account compromise. While this particular conspiracy theory could never be proven, it does hold weight insofar that if Blizzard stealth-patched the problem away (whatever the actual problem may have been) then there's no accountability. There's no need to fess up, no need to make a public announcement and everything they've said in hindsight would still apply.

In any case, the hacking claims have ceased (on the U.S. forums anyway) and this means some players can rest easy, for now. Whatever actually happened is something that will fade into the digital ethers forever, unless someone at Blizzard was kind enough to do a tell-all and let everyone see what the technical specs of the patch included. Otherwise, it looks like magically all the hacking claims have ceased.