So, Diablo Immortal put its foot down and probably just shot that foot right off.

One of the in-game currencies can really only be gained by buying them, 60 for a buck and 7200 for a hundred bucks.

Uf

(Using them to buy items to buff gear with is about 160 orbs, cosmetics for your character tend to run between 1,000 and 1,650 orbs.)

given the number of items you need to buy with them, eternal orb costs really stack up

So a lot of players were turning to third party sellers, who had insane deals that let you pay as little as 10% of the in-game cost.

... i actively hate this

So Blizzard decided to do something about this

They've erased the purchases made through third party sellers and created a debt system where players cannot participate in group activities like parties, dungeons, and rifts, until they pay Blizzard for all of the orbs they got from third-party sellers.

Which, given the prices given by third party sellers, means that some players now owe Blizzard tens of thousands of dollars of in-game purchases.

... They are just going to stop playing

Yeah, there's talk that they might outright disable people's accounts if the balance isn't paid, but that's just rumor atm.

Given how Blizzard is doing right now... this isn't going to go the way they think it is at all

... yeah this game is done

... The fuck

People have already largely stopped playing, considering you need to spend something like hundreds of thousands of dollars just to have any likelihood of getting the gear you need to do end-game content without having the kind of insane luck you win real-world lotteries with.

So this is. An interesting business move on their part.