Linux Users Banned From Diablo III Servers 518
dartttt writes with word that "Blizzard has banned all Linux users who are playing Diablo III on Linux using Wine." Reader caranha adds that these users have been flagged as "using cheating programs," and that replies from Blizzard support staff so far have upheld these bans.
Update: 07/03 16:57 GMT by S :An official response from a Blizzard Community Manager indicates they don't ban people for using Linux. As with most reports of game bans, we have only the word of random gamers that they were banned for the reason they say they were banned.
Reddit made some observations (Score:5, Interesting)
Blame the Real Money Auction House (Score:5, Interesting)
Blizzard really are doing very well at generating massive amounts of bad publicity for themselves on Diablo 3. They may have achieved some impressive early sales, but I still can't help but wonder whether they're not being self-defeating here.
I think a lot of this stems from their decision to cash-in on what had formerly been a "grey market" around their games, via the introduction of the official "real money" auction house. While it's easy to see things like the always-on connection requirement and the paranoid 3rd-party software detection as being driven by piracy concerns, I suspect the RMAH has at least as much to do with it.
Partly, this will be due to Blizzard wanting to protect their anticipated margins. But as much as that, it's about covering their legal backside. By mainstreaming real-money financial transactions between players for virtual goods like this, they're entering a legal minefield - in fact, more than that, they're entering a different legal minefield for every territory where the RMAH is available.
If a third party exploit reduces the value of the cash investment that players have made in an in-game item or commodity, are Blizzard, as the service-provider, liable? In ANY of the territories where the service is offered? Chances are, questions like this haven't even been tested in most of those territories. Blizzard therefore need to minimise their risk by being as paranoid as possible and accepting as inevitable any harm that they do to the player experience. For Blizzard, absolute control over the game client is now more important than ever.
Actually, even more interestingly, I wonder what this might mean over time for Blizzard's love of tweaking stats and balance. If Blizzard do something that reduces the value of a particular set of items or commodities, are they vulnerable to law-suits? In ANY of the territories where the RMAH is available. Blizzard have an absolute fixation with tweaking stats and balance in their games. In some ways, it would actually be good for this tendancy to get stomped on a bit; their constant meddling with my class was one of the biggest factors that drove me to quit World of Warcraft. But I do wonder whether their development teams might find themselves increasingly frustrated by constraints placed on them by legal and marketing.
I really do wish Blizzard had decided to stay well out of the real money trading thing. There was always a real money grey market in World of Warcraft (and, I gather, in Diablo 2). It was an occasional low-level irritation (mostly when the activities of gold-farmers started to impinge upon "genuine" players), but it was never catastrophic. You always knew that, on balance, it was likely that a good number of the players in your guild had bought gold at some point and that, in all likelihood, a small minority did so regularly. But you just got on and played the game.
Blizzard seem to want to have it both ways; the up-front profits from the "direct sale" model and the profits over time from the "pay to win" model. I always defended WoW's subscription model on the basis that your purchase of the game and its expansions covered "sunk" development costs and your subs covered the ongoing cost of maintaining and incrementally enhancing the game. I still believe that's correct. But I do hope that players don't let them get away with what they seem to be trying to achieve with Diablo 3.
Re:Blizzard Casts Arcane Logic! Customer Is Stunne (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem is that no rootkit can truly be invasive enough. The only real answer is hardware trust management where the hardware system vendor and the OS vendor can provide guarantees via known public-key software signing, etc, to the application vendor at the expense of the user not really having any control over their machine anymore. Anything less, and where there's a will there's a way to manipulate the client software and bypass the checks of an invasive Warden-like program, even on "official" Windows.
The *real* answer is that they can only protect their game server-side. It's ok to do client-side optimizations that don't matter much to the integrity of the game, but things like buying and selling items need to be implemented as proper server-side transactions. It's perfectly possible to design a networked game with the right local optimizations to make it playable and the right server-side transactions to make it mostly-unhackable in all important ways. It just requires a lot more coding work and proper design and $$ spent on server infrastructure to support the increased load on their end, and they're unwilling to expend that. The only other logical conclusion is to accept a hackable game. Banning Linux users does nothing to change this fundamental problem.
Re:Blame the Real Money Auction House: Pick a side (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Jesus, stop being pathetic! (Score:5, Interesting)
Why would they release a Linux client for WoW when WoW has been probably the best supported program with Wine for the last 5 years? You DO know they made the decision to go with both DirectX and OpenGL graphics paths, when they could have just done the windows only DirectX, right?
I mean, if there were things that didnt work with WoW/Wine, yea maybe they could fix it, but it was flawless, with only occasional patch-day issues. Addons, graphics, everything "just worked".
Complain about the diablo 3 issue, but complaining about WoW's linux support? Seriously?
Incentive (Score:2, Interesting)
What's their incentive to fix it? They already have your money, so, if they flag you as a cheater due to some faulty definitions in their cheat buster, it's much easier and cost effective to simply deny the fact and leave you banned. It's not like Linux+Wine is going to make up a significant portion of their player base, anyway, so potential for bad PR and, by extension, lost future sales, is pretty low.
Vivendi/Blizzard has piss-poor customer service, and always has. The company has been shitting on its customers since the Blizzard North crew left. If you want a good game that hearkens to the days when Blizzard was an awesome development house, pick up Torchlight II, developed and produced by the same folks who brought you Diablo & Diablo II. /They/ are the folks you should be following; not some corporate entity that leverages every IP in its portfolio into dead-horse territory just to make a buck.
Re:Blame the Real Money Auction House (Score:5, Interesting)
Based on what Blizzard said a few years ago, the subscriptions are almost pure profit [pcmag.com] when considering WoW by itself. $200 million in 2008 would have covered four years of operation/maintenance, plus the costs of developing the Burning Crusade and Lich King expansions, all covered by two months' worth of subscription income.
Also, the impressive early numbers for D3 are largely an illusion, IMO. Lots and lots of those "sales" were freebies for people that committed to a full year of WoW subscriptions, and from Blizzard's perspective I'd argue that locking in that additional $1.2 billion or so in income was far more important than the income they'd have received from paid D3 sales. Lots of people were not happy with Cataclysm, and D3 offered Blizzard an additional way to maintain those WoW subscriptions in the face of that dissatisfaction while waiting for the release of Mists of Pandaria.
Re:Everything is an emulator (Score:2, Interesting)
The goal of Linux isnt to pretend to be Unix. The goal of Wine IS to pretend to be Windows. Its entire purpose is setting up an environment that as closely as possible pretends to be a Windows one. According to the wikipedia definition [wikipedia.org],
In computing, an emulator is hardware or software or both that duplicates (or emulates) the functions of a first computer system (the guest) in a different second computer system (the host), so that the emulated behavior closely resembles the behavior of the real system.
How does Wine not fit that bill?
Re:Jesus, stop being pathetic! (Score:0, Interesting)
It is pretty cool the way Blizzard sold them the game and took their money and THEN started banning them for using Linux. Some in-advance-of-preorder statements about linux being bannable would have been due dilligence.
Re:Reddit made some observations (Score:5, Interesting)