Linux Users Banned From Diablo III Servers 518
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timothy
from the heavy-hand-holding-broad-brush dept.
from the heavy-hand-holding-broad-brush dept.
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.
Blizzard Casts Arcane Logic! Customer Is Stunned! (Score:5, Informative)
So is there actually a modified version of Wine cheating for you under your Diablo III client using the windows DLL api as a facade? Blizzard doesn't know. They can't know unless they have a rootkit that runs in super user (administrator) mode that profiles and scans all other programs for offending actions. That's how they caught WoWGlider but it would be infinitely harder with individual people like me tailoring their own versions of Wine. I am not saying their reaction is correct, I'm just trying to explain to you why they are employing arcane logic. The solution is for them to natively support Linux but that's a completely separate flame fest for which I really don't have the energy right now.
Re:Reddit made some observations (Score:5, Informative)
Obviously (Score:4, Informative)
This is hardly news. Blizzard has probably tens of thousands of people out there trying to break their games and their economies. If Blizzard doesn't feel it is worth extending Warden (their anti-cheating tool) to work on Linux (because of the marginally increased sales that come from supporting Linux), then they don't have to.
If they allowed Diablo 3 to be played on Linux, but weren't able to properly monitor users who play on Linux, their WOW and Diablo 3 economies would be sunk.
Re:Jesus, stop being pathetic! (Score:4, Informative)
Already Blue Post saying this is false (Score:2, Informative)
"We’ve extensively tested for false positive situations, including replicating system setups for those who have posted claiming they were banned unfairly. We’ve not found any situations that could produce a false positive, have found that the circumstances for which they were banned were clear and accurate, and we are extremely confident in our findings.
Playing the game on Linux, although not officially supported, will not get you banned – cheating will."
It's not because of Wine, it's because of cheating (Score:5, Informative)
There are only one or two accounts that were banned. I think it's fairly obvious that they are just using Wine as an excuse for using cheat engines. Plenty of users are using Wine with no problems at all.
Blizzard's Response (Score:4, Informative)
From http://www.ubuntuvibes.com/2012/07/blizzard-clarifies-diablo-iii-ban.html [ubuntuvibes.com]
"We’ve extensively tested for false positive situations, including replicating system setups for those who have posted claiming they were banned unfairly. We’ve not found any situations that could produce a false positive, have found that the circumstances for which they were banned were clear and accurate, and we are extremely confident in our findings.
Playing the game on Linux, although not officially supported, will not get you banned – cheating will."
Perhaps they were cheating? (Score:4, Informative)
Too many assumptions here. When cheaters get caught they like to spout lies ... so why believe any of this?
A post from support (a blue) in the thread above:
>> Playing the game on Linux, although not officially supported, will not get you banned – cheating will.
Re:Blizzard Casts Arcane Logic! Customer Is Stunne (Score:5, Informative)
A clear and concise explaination for why they might ban Linux users. Only problem? Banning Linux users isnt whats happening here, and they have stated that playing on Linux will NOT get you banned:
http://www.ubuntuvibes.com/2012/07/blizzard-clarifies-diablo-iii-ban.html [ubuntuvibes.com]
We’ve not found any situations that could produce a false positive, have found that the circumstances for which they were banned were clear and accurate, and we are extremely confident in our findings.
Playing the game on Linux, although not officially supported, will not get you banned – cheating will.
I dont think Warden works properly on Linux, but then it didnt for WoW either, and that didnt stop it from working flawlessly. Blizzards games have tended to be shining examples of Wine actually working well.
Re:Jesus, stop being pathetic! (Score:5, Informative)
Read past the first link, and you'll see that actually, cheaters using wine were banned. There are plenty of regular people still playing on wine.
Re:Reddit made some observations (Score:5, Informative)
Heres the blue-post (Blizzard statement)
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5978861022?page=21#402 [battle.net]
We’ve extensively tested for false positive situations, including replicating system setups for those who have posted claiming they were banned unfairly. We’ve not found any situations that could produce a false positive, have found that the circumstances for which they were banned were clear and accurate, and we are extremely confident in our findings.
Playing the game on Linux, although not officially supported, will not get you banned – cheating will.
Blizzard doesnt have a track record of cracking down on Wine usage, and its not like they dont know it exists.
Everything is an emulator (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Jesus, stop being pathetic! (Score:5, Informative)
Generally, the 3d performance is TOTAL BULLCRAP in VMs.
So, no, it doesn't.
Blizzard says WRONG! (Score:5, Informative)
Clearly, as usual, nobody did their research. I quote the Blizzard Community Manager:
We’ve extensively tested for false positive situations, including replicating system setups for those who have posted claiming they were banned unfairly. We’ve not found any situations that could produce a false positive, have found that the circumstances for which they were banned were clear and accurate, and we are extremely confident in our findings. Playing the game on Linux, although not officially supported, will not get you banned – cheating will.
Re:Blizzard Casts Arcane Logic! Customer Is Stunne (Score:5, Informative)
Wine isn't emulating [wikipedia.org] anything. It's a wrapper library [wikipedia.org]. There's a significant difference.
I'll never forgive Blizzard over bnetd (Score:3, Informative)
Screw Blizzard. They did this:
https://www.eff.org/press/archives/2002/04/08 [eff.org]
The headline: "Blizzard Freezes Bnetd Gaming Platform, Sues Own Customers"
I've never bought anything from Blizzard ever since, and never will.
Re:Jesus, stop being pathetic! (Score:3, Informative)
Is Linux going to have this soon(tm)? I hope it does, would be nice to have Windows has a guest instead of a host, but Linux typically lags in GPU driver architecture.
Re:Blizzard Casts Arcane Logic! Customer Is Stunne (Score:4, Informative)
First of all, you are assuming Blizzard is 100% trustworthy. I, and many others, are not so sure, not after Blizzard's behavior over the past few years. Secondly, Blizzard's setup, pretty much out of necessity, assumes everyone is using 100% default, unmodified software. There are plenty of legitimate reasons (million, literally) for Linux users to be using custom software, in every single component from Wine to their kernel, especially when running 3D Windows software in Wine. And finally, the comparison to WoW is poor: WoW is a pure client-server achitecture, which means the server doesn't have to trust the client for much more than user input. Most of the "cheating" in WoW was, in fact, just using bots to replicate false user-input. Diablo III, OTOH, obviously trusts the client far more than that, probably for Blizzard to lessen their load (and because Diablo, at heart, is a single player game, not an MMO).
Which is the final problem: if people want to cheat at Diablo III, why does Blizzard care? Because they are greedy bastards who want to force people to play online so they can use their RMAH, that is why. And that is the real reason people are pissed: because if even 1 person gets false banned because of that, Blizzard are the ones at fault, from the very beginning, because they were being greedy. And that is why I did not buy Diablo III or SC2, and will not be buying anything from Blizzard in the foreseeable future.
Re:Jesus, stop being pathetic! (Score:2, Informative)
My suspicions are that they are using bots and using Wine as their excuse.
Your suspiciouns are correct. Blizzard already confirmed, even before this appears on slashdot, that wine users will not be banned and that the only people banned have been cheaters. The fact they ran wine on Linux is strictly beside the point.
Long story short, there absolutely is no story here and the only people who care about the story are suckers and losers.
Re:Jesus, stop being pathetic! (Score:4, Informative)
This /. post should probably be deleted or edited, since it is False. Here are several relevant quotes from the comment section of the linked article:
Foo
WINE user here, not banned. Sensational journalism here, move along.
Kamezero
Blizzard is well aware of Linux, they've actually tested D3 in wine to see if they'd get any false positives.
"And as far as anyone can tell, there have been exactly 4 people affected. Does anyone here actually know someone who was banned just for being on Linux? I've played D3 in wine and am still able to log in just fine.
Re:Jesus, stop being pathetic! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Everything is an emulator (Score:5, Informative)
How did this get to +4... does the modern-day Slashdot reader really not know the difference here?
WINE is a re-implementation of the Windows system-call library. Tepples is absolutely correct above: It's a reimplementation of the API, and no more a emulator than Linux is of UNIX.
An "emulator" is very specifically a program that reproduces the behavior of an entire system, hardware included. An emulator reproduces the system in software, and then you can run device drivers, etc. on top of it. The machine code you run on an emulator never gets executed as instructions on the host hardware -- it's executed as instructions within the emulator; the host runs the code of the emulator alone. DOSBox is an example of an emulator; it runs in software all of the hardware of an early x86 system including the CPU itself, so that you're able to run 386 games on *anything* that you can compile DOSBox for, even PowerPC, MIPS and ARM systems. I myself used DOSBox on PowerPC many moons ago to play old DOS games.
The next level up from that is a Virtual Machine. A virtual machine can only expose hardware that actually exists on your system, and your CPU actually switches between the different contexts -- your CPU is actually aware that it is running different systems on modern chips. The abstraction here is mostly at the driver level; your guest OS is typically using drivers provided by the VM software maker that interact with the VM software to expose the hardware's functionality. Whereas an emulator can emulate any hardware you do not have from the CPU on up, a virtual machine simply exposes your existing hardware, and lets your hardware do as much of the work as possible.
With an API reimplementation like WINE, you are still running Linux (or Mac OS, or whatever), and the driver layer is Linux's drivers (or Mac OS's, or whatever's). All you've done is add a library to the mix which:
1. Add a new kind of executable loader; in addition to a.out-format and ELF-format (and Mach-O on Mac, etc), you now have the ability to load EXE format files, and
2. Translate Windows library calls into the corresponding Linux (or Mac, or whatever) library calls.
So, in brief:
1. An EMULATOR (like DOSBox) emulates the hardware, and the programs are completely divorced from your system's actual hardware;
2. A VIRTUAL MACHINE (like VMWare) creates a virtual driver layer for your existing hardware that allows you to run different OSes simultaneously;
3. An API (like WINE) is just a new set of functions that add capabilities to your existing system.
There will be a quiz on Friday.
There's only 4 confirmed reports of banning... (Score:4, Informative)
A feral druid blog I follow had this to say about the banning:
(Full source here) [theincbear.com]
Blizzard doesn't make a point of banning Linux users. The same source claims that there was an incident a few years ago where they inadvertently banned everyone using Cedega to play WoW, but when Cedega contacted them they determined the bans were false positives and not only lifted them but credited them with 20 days of game time.
Re:Jesus, stop being pathetic! (Score:3, Informative)
This argument has been bandied about for almost a decade, now. Simply, the market base for Linux users is simply too small (and the subset of that contingency that uses Wine for gaming is even smaller yet) for any conglomerate consideration of that markets buying power to matter worth a damn to any of the large studios.
Small indie houses, maybe. But nobody is going to go out of business not selling to the Wine userbase.
The reality of the situation sucks, but given past trends, it's safe to conclude at this point that it will never change.
It's the truth. There really is no profitable market for Linux gaming. Of all the Linux users who actually play games, half will cite "Software should be Free" and won't spend a penny. 25% would rather boot to Windows for maximum performance and the final 25% will purchase the game. With lack of driver support for Video card articles being posted once a week it's a surprise anyone really believes Linux gaming will be a reality.
Re:Jesus, stop being pathetic! (Score:4, Informative)
They don't appear to have banned all wine users. I run diablo 3 under wine and I just logged in and verified that i haven't been banned.