After thinking about it, they could actually action accounts that clearly show shard counts fall way outside the realm of what would be normal for the amount of regular and Greater Rifts that were completed if they really wanted to send a strong signal about the exploitation policy.
What I mean is that they have their base algorithm when it comes to awarding shards upon rift completion. They can create a mean deviation that can show a range of what is normal (and that includes the amounts one would get from bounties as well as blood thief goblins – both of these would be relatively lower). The outliers are going to stick out like a sore thumb. Yes, it would require a programmers time to write that code, time to run it against the data, and require someones time to go through those results.
That’s the main problem though. D3 has never had the backend tools that allowed them to effectively deal with the issue when it came to the clever use of game mechanics, utilizing hacks to gain an advantage, etc. And as far as bans go, it’s been fairly limited to those found using bots to farm gold/items (and that was more prevalent prior to patch 2.0 when gold was tradable and the auction houses existed).
Bans were never really issued for past exploits except for the gold duping issue due to the auction house bug where they did ban some streamers who were performing the exploit live (and that caused other players to begin performing the exploit). While they took the auction houses offline to patch the issue, what Blizzard decided against doing was rolling back the servers (they instead decided to perform rollbacks on a case-by-case basis for individual accounts).
On their end, that ended up being a time consuming process since it meant having to manually go through and audit trading window transactions logs to match those up with the auction house ones. They probably only went after the most egregious ones but the reality is there was no way to catch and deal with everyone.
A company’s terms of service holds little weight if they don’t enforce those policies. Blizzard really should take a hard line stance with this particular exploit to send a strong message.
