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Games Linux

Linux Users Banned From Diablo III Servers 518

Posted by timothy 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.
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Linux Users Banned From Diablo III Servers More

Linux Users Banned From Diablo III Servers

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  • Jesus, stop being pathetic! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by crazyjj ( 2598719 ) * on Tuesday July 03, 2012 @09:47AM (#40527777)

    Linux users who crawl to Blizzard remind me of an cousin of mine who kept going back to her abusive boyfriend.

    Yeah, maybe they've changed this time. Maybe they really love Linux now. Why, I bet after 8 years they're going to release a WoW Linux client too, any day now! This time it's going to be different!

    Hey, here's an idea, why not support the studios that really *DO* support Linux instead of studios that treat it like a red-headed stepchild? Just a thought.

    I mean, if you're going to be a whore to studios who clearly have no intention of supporting Linux, you had may as well set up a Windows dual-boot and play your game software in Windows.

    • Re:Jesus, stop being pathetic! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 03, 2012 @09:51AM (#40527841)

      Hey, here's an idea, why not support the studios that really *DO* support Linux instead of studios that treat it like a red-headed stepchild? Just a thought.

      Care to list them? I can think of exactly ... two.

      I mean, if you're going to be a whore to studios who clearly have no intention of supporting Linux

      Define "being a whore" in this scenario. They make a good game. We wish to play it. We hate Windows. Dilemma. Nothing about being a whore in there.

      • Re:Jesus, stop being pathetic! (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 03, 2012 @09:55AM (#40527895)

        But the dilemma is of your own creation. When I make a gaming rig, I just put Windows on it because that's where the games are.

      • Re:Jesus, stop being pathetic! (Score:5, Insightful)

        by crazyjj ( 2598719 ) * on Tuesday July 03, 2012 @09:55AM (#40527903)

        Define "being a whore" in this scenario. They make a good game. We wish to play it. We hate Windows. Dilemma. Nothing about being a whore in there.

        Yeah, except for the part where you buy their game for Windows, sending them the message "You don't need to make a separate Linux client. We whores will happily still buy it for Windows and run it crippled in Wine."

        • Their servers can tell they are running wine, so clearly they have a grasp on how many linux users they are playing the game (or they can look at their bann number from the other day)

          • Re:Jesus, stop being pathetic! (Score:5, Insightful)

            by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Tuesday July 03, 2012 @10:31AM (#40528563)

            They look at the numbers, and they figure it is easier to flag them as trouble makers then adjust their code for the problem.

            It probably comes down to this logic... Are you using library called X. Does it match the approved Check-sums? Nope, then you are probably a cheater.
            Lets say a network library, has been hacked to to make bots, that will mine for stuff... Then sell it for real money.

            These games really need to keep cheating down to a minimum. Cheaters really ruin the game for the other customers.

            Really how popular is gaming in Linux?

        • Re:Jesus, stop being pathetic! (Score:5, Funny)

          by digitig ( 1056110 ) on Tuesday July 03, 2012 @10:40AM (#40528737)

          Define "being a whore" in this scenario. They make a good game. We wish to play it. We hate Windows. Dilemma. Nothing about being a whore in there.

          Yeah, except for the part where you buy their game for Windows, sending them the message "You don't need to make a separate Linux client. We whores will happily still buy it for Windows and run it crippled in Wine."

          Wow, that's what the whores do in your part of the world? That must lead to a lot of out-of-town punters being very disappointed.

      • Re:Jesus, stop being pathetic! (Score:4, Informative)

        by fredprado ( 2569351 ) on Tuesday July 03, 2012 @09:56AM (#40527939)
        http://www.lgdb.org/list_games [lgdb.org]

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Dunbal ( 464142 ) *

        Care to list them? I can think of exactly ... two.

        EVE Online and what else?

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by ArsonSmith ( 13997 )

        When I want a beer, I don't go to the Library and complain that there isn't enough beer there. (well sometimes I do but not in all seriousness) I don't expect there to be beer in a Library that's what I go to the pub for.

        • Re:Jesus, stop being pathetic! (Score:4, Insightful)

          by DeadboltX ( 751907 ) on Tuesday July 03, 2012 @02:20PM (#40532227)
          What if the library didn't serve beer, but had a section dedicated to people who wanted to bring their own beer. But one beer company decided that even though the library lets you drink the beer in there, they don't want you drinking THEIR beer in a library. So if Blizzard catches you drinking their beer in a Linux environment, they are going to ban you from playing Diablo 3.

    • Re:Jesus, stop being pathetic! (Score:5, Funny)

      by Rhaban ( 987410 ) on Tuesday July 03, 2012 @09:59AM (#40527987)

      I mean, if you're going to be a whore to studios who clearly have no intention of supporting Linux, you had may as well set up a Windows dual-boot and play your game software in Windows.

      But... what about my uptime?

    • Re:Jesus, stop being pathetic! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by LordLimecat ( 1103839 ) on Tuesday July 03, 2012 @10:00AM (#40528009)

      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?

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Bert64 ( 520050 )

        WoW actually did have a linux client when it was in beta, the last version to ship with the linux client was aparrently 0.9.1:

        http://www.learninglinux.com/postp734.html#734 [learninglinux.com]

        So they had a Linux client all along, they just needed to keep it updated which would be considerably easier than porting it from scratch.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by toriver ( 11308 )

          They will probably release a fully patched Linux client for WoW whenever the Year of Linux on the Desktop rolls around.

    • Re:Jesus, stop being pathetic! (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 03, 2012 @10:09AM (#40528183)

      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.

      • Facts, don't let facts get in the way of a good rant. We want to show that we are an abused minority! Who needs to stand up against the man who oppresses us.

      • Re:Jesus, stop being pathetic! (Score:4, Informative)

        by cpu6502 ( 1960974 ) on Tuesday July 03, 2012 @11:07AM (#40529203)

        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.

    • Hey, here's an idea, why not support the studios that really *DO* support Linux

      Which such studio offers a video game with professional-caliber production values in the same genre as World of Warcraft or Starcraft 2 or Diablo 3?

    • Re:Jesus, stop being pathetic! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by gtaluvit ( 218726 ) on Tuesday July 03, 2012 @10:13AM (#40528257)

      Or you could stop blaming Linux users for the actions of modders and botters. PlayOnLinux says at least 30,000 people are using it to play Diablo III. I'm one of them and I have not been banned. MANY Linux users have not been banned because the only people who seem to be posting in these threads are the handful of people who claim to have been banned and Windows users who keep saying "quit whining, you're unsupported". My suspicions are that they are using bots and using Wine as their excuse.

      The recent Humble Bundle had Linux support for all of the games and I was happy to buy it. I do support the companies who support Linux, but I have no intention of buying Windows simply to play a game when the company (with one glaring exception with WoW way back when) has had stellar support for Wine even if they don't handle officially because of cost. I've been Linux only for over a decade and will be happy to stay that way.

  • And that, dear readers, is why Slashdot advice is sometimes unsound [slashdot.org]. After reading reports of client side exploits (like rumors of item duping via system clock adjustments) and understanding basic limits on server/client communication, it is apparent that Blizzard has to trust the client more than they're comfortable with. So if you look at their "warden [slashdot.org]" implementation for WoW, you can imagine that Diablo III has a similar "anti-cheat check" component running in user mode where Diablo III runs. And they probably (correctly) identify Wine as being not genuine Windows. It's an emulation. And therein lies the problem. Without setting up a highly invasive rootkit like The Warden, Blizzard cannot know if Wine is emulating Windows libraries correctly. A simple mental exercise is to imagine that the D3 client cannot query the servers every time it needs a time stamp for each event in the game -- to do so would DDOS their own servers so each client must query each user's system clock. The Windows call that does this is emulated by Wine. One could easily insert a dynamic control for this "system clock" into Wine and recompile. One of the achievements in Diablo III is to finish each act in under an hour. So a user could note the time, play to the end of an act and before beating the final boss, simply turn the clock one minute past the starting time and have Wine report that to the client. And if the client is not asking the server for these time stamps, achievement granted. This is a very coarse example for the sake of brevity but I would imagine that system timestamps affect many more aspects of the game. The rumor was that rolling back your system clock after an item sale would return the item to your inventory and you would still have the gold from selling it.

    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:Blizzard Casts Arcane Logic! Customer Is Stunne (Score:5, Funny)

      by aztrailerpunk ( 1971174 ) on Tuesday July 03, 2012 @09:51AM (#40527843)

      And they probably (correctly) identify Wine as being not genuine Windows. It's an emulation. And therein lies the problem. Without setting up a highly invasive rootkit like The Warden, Blizzard cannot know if Wine is emulating Windows

      Wine Is Not Emulation

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by LordLimecat ( 1103839 )

        Be as pedantic as you want, Wine emulates Windows behavior. Whether it does so by reimplementing the libraries is irrelevant; the thing that is accomplished is environment emulation.

        • Everything is an emulator (Score:5, Informative)

          by tepples ( 727027 ) <.tepples. .at. .gmail.com.> on Tuesday July 03, 2012 @10:13AM (#40528265) Homepage Journal
          By how I interpret your definition of emulator, Linux is an emulator because it emulates UNIX behavior. What do I misunderstand?

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by nazsco ( 695026 )

            You missed that windows also emulates windows.

        • Re:Blizzard Casts Arcane Logic! Customer Is Stunne (Score:5, Informative)

          by X0563511 ( 793323 ) on Tuesday July 03, 2012 @10:31AM (#40528559) Homepage Journal

          Wine isn't emulating [wikipedia.org] anything. It's a wrapper library [wikipedia.org]. There's a significant difference.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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" Windo

    • Re:Blizzard Casts Arcane Logic! Customer Is Stunne (Score:5, Informative)

      by LordLimecat ( 1103839 ) on Tuesday July 03, 2012 @10:07AM (#40528163)

      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:Blizzard Casts Arcane Logic! Customer Is Stunne (Score:4, Informative)

        by Baloroth ( 2370816 ) on Tuesday July 03, 2012 @10:50AM (#40528917)

        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:Blizzard Casts Arcane Logic! Customer Is Stunne (Score:4, Insightful)

          by LordLimecat ( 1103839 ) on Tuesday July 03, 2012 @11:38AM (#40529785)

          First of all, you are assuming Blizzard is 100% trustworthy.

          I and several others used WoW on Wine / Linux for years with no issues. Ive also seen time and again people complaining that they were banned for technical issues, only for the truth that they were cheating to come out.

          So forgive me if all of my experience points to this being yet another case of that. If it were some technical issue, why would Blizz stick to its guns and alienate customers?

    • Even if Windows were running on bare hardware I could play tricks with the clock, I could hide memory from any program that Blizzard could come up with to attempt to scan regions of memory, I still could pull all of the tricks you just mentioned. How? Using good ol' virtualisation extensions that exist within processors.

      Not only that but I own the hardware, I have physical access to the hardware, there is no good way for any program to insert itself at a higher level. I control the boot process so I get to

    • And they probably (correctly) identify Wine as being not genuine Windows. It's an emulation.

      You should be receiving a barrage of W.I.N.E. Is Not an Emulator [winehq.org] hate mail any moment. It doesn't invalidate your point but I thought you should be forewarned.

    • Re:Blizzard Casts Arcane Logic! Customer Is Stunne (Score:4, Insightful)

      by LateArthurDent ( 1403947 ) on Tuesday July 03, 2012 @10:30AM (#40528541)

      And that, dear readers, is why Slashdot advice is sometimes unsound [slashdot.org].

      That wasn't unsound advice. His advice worked perfectly, as Diablo did indeed run under Wine.

      There are only two people to blame here. The first is Blizzard (and all the other game companies for similar games) for making the game the way they did (they can ban whoever they want from their severs, but a single player game should be able to run single-player, and the multi-player aspect should allow any one person to host the game without ever talking to their servers). The second are the people who would buy a single-player game that requires connection to remote servers in order to work.

      Queue the people who go, 'Diablo III isn't a single-player game.' Well, considering diablo 1 and 2 were, they should be blamed for that too.

  • Reddit made some observations (Score:5, Interesting)

    by The MAZZTer ( 911996 ) <megazzt.gmail@com> on Tuesday July 03, 2012 @09:50AM (#40527829) Homepage
    A summary:
    1. Blizzard has had excellent Wine support in their more recent games. I suspect some of their devs love Linux and so make it unofficially work well.
    2. Some Reddit users of Diablo 3 on Wine have confirmed they are not banned.
    3. It has been observed this would be a good go-to excuse for cheaters looking to get their accounts unbanned.

    • Re:Reddit made some observations (Score:5, Informative)

      by The MAZZTer ( 911996 ) <megazzt.gmail@com> on Tuesday July 03, 2012 @09:52AM (#40527863) Homepage
      Oh yeah, and apparently an official statement by Blizzard has claimed Wine users have not been banned and will not be banned, it is merely unsupported. They tested reported configurations and could not reproduce a ban.

      • Re:Reddit made some observations (Score:5, Informative)

        by LordLimecat ( 1103839 ) on Tuesday July 03, 2012 @10:10AM (#40528219)

        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.

        • Re:Reddit made some observations (Score:5, Interesting)

          by medv4380 ( 1604309 ) on Tuesday July 03, 2012 @10:31AM (#40528561)
          Hmm, there was an issue with the 1.0.2 patch. They started doing Warden scans and in Wine the reported Ram is exactly what the system has. Kicked Diablo into an infinite loop if you have a 64bit OS. See bug [winehq.org]. I can't help but think that some of the "work arounds" may have triggered a false positive. Then again since I had this issue maybe I should log-in and see if I'm banned, but their probably doing maintenance right now since it's Tuesday.

  • Blame the Real Money Auction House (Score:5, Interesting)

    by RogueyWon ( 735973 ) * on Tuesday July 03, 2012 @09:51AM (#40527849) Journal

    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.

    • We constantly hear complaints about companies and their inability to deal with the grey market over item resale. Like it or not, they're building digital economies and that means real value is being dealt with. Valve hired an economist for a reason and, likewise, Blizzard has taken a very bold step in their RMAH. Many have praised 2nd Life for its embrace of digital/real value and have talked about it being a model for serious later material, but, honestly, we're still collectively wary if someone actually

    • Re:Blame the Real Money Auction House (Score:5, Interesting)

      by NormalVisual ( 565491 ) on Tuesday July 03, 2012 @10:15AM (#40528299)
      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.

      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.

  • Obviously (Score:4, Informative)

    by ranton ( 36917 ) on Tuesday July 03, 2012 @09:52AM (#40527865)

    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.

    • Whats news is that Slashdot's headlines are getting worse by the day. "Banned ALL Linux users on wine!" Wow! Really? Wonder what the folks in this thread [reddit.com] might say about that? (User using wine [imgur.com]; also, this post [battle.net])

      Very clearly, this is only "all linux users" for certain, low-percentage values of "all". From the posts on battle.net, it appears that "all" is roughly in the vicinity of "10". But congrats on yet another inflammatory headline, slashdot. Drive those clicks!

  • Oh well (Score:5, Funny)

    by Rik Sweeney ( 471717 ) on Tuesday July 03, 2012 @09:55AM (#40527905) Homepage

    Guess Linux users will just have to wait for the PS3 version!

    (Runs and hides)

  • This new piece of information leads me to believe I made the right decision.

    While most of my concerns lay with Activision proper, Blizzard now seems close to the same dark hole in light of their recent user abuse.

  • Already Blue Post saying this is false (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    "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)

    by xd1936 ( 2676133 ) on Tuesday July 03, 2012 @10:02AM (#40528037)
    http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/vyc4z/linux_users_permanently_banned_from_diablo_iii/ [reddit.com]

    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)

    by SoTerrified ( 660807 ) on Tuesday July 03, 2012 @10:03AM (#40528071)

    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."

  • Better rush to get those angry rager page views. Never mind anything else [battle.net].

  • Bad headline, truth not much better? (Score:3)

    by Anubis IV ( 1279820 ) on Tuesday July 03, 2012 @10:06AM (#40528119)

    It should read some Linux users banned. It's possible to run Diablo III in Linux, and Blizzard has already responded to some of the tickets being filed by confirming that Linux, while unsupported, is perfectly acceptable. The ones getting banned are apparently using WINE, and there's no confirmation yet that it was everyone using WINE or just a subset of the WINE users.

    Even so, if they did decide to ban everyone using WINE, that's low.

  • Perhaps they were cheating? (Score:4, Informative)

    by markalot ( 67322 ) on Tuesday July 03, 2012 @10:07AM (#40528145)

    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.

  • Blizzard says WRONG! (Score:5, Informative)

    by Arkham ( 10779 ) on Tuesday July 03, 2012 @10:22AM (#40528407)
    http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5978861022?page=21 [battle.net]

    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.

  • Even more dodgy than that (Score:4, Insightful)

    by humanrev ( 2606607 ) on Tuesday July 03, 2012 @10:26AM (#40528473)

    I have no idea if this accusation of Linux users being banned for using WINE with Diablo 3 is true or not, or if we have all the facts yet or not, but one thing seems quite clear to me - if your account is banned, you can't play the game AT ALL - not even single-player, since D3's single player still has to be played via their servers.

    So if, through a fuckup of their Warden software you are marked as a cheater despite being nothing of the sort, you probably won't get any recourse. I mean, why would they bother investigating? Here's the TOS: http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/about/termsofuse.html [blizzard.com]

    "BLIZZARD MAY SUSPEND, TERMINATE, MODIFY, OR DELETE ACCOUNTS AT ANY TIME FOR ANY REASON OR FOR NO REASON, WITH OR WITHOUT NOTICE TO YOU"

    This crap isn't unusual, it's actually very common and will become increasingly pervasive as more service-dependent games are brought into the world. And some people wonder why I don't fucking use Steam/Origin and only go with Humble Bundles, GOG and other non-DRM outfits.

  • I'll never forgive Blizzard over bnetd (Score:3, Informative)

    by hirschma ( 187820 ) on Tuesday July 03, 2012 @10:33AM (#40528611)

    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.

  • There might be a way. (Score:3)

    by Sique ( 173459 ) on Tuesday July 03, 2012 @10:53AM (#40528981) Homepage

    You could send Blizzard a Cease&Desist forbidding them to call you a cheater. And then you demand them to either unban you or refund your game purchase. Wait what happens.

  • There's only 4 confirmed reports of banning... (Score:4, Informative)

    by Dewin ( 989206 ) on Tuesday July 03, 2012 @01:07PM (#40531301)

    A feral druid blog I follow had this to say about the banning:

    TLDR:

    • There are tens of thousands of Linux/Wine Diablo 3 players.
    • Only 4 of them were banned.
    • Whatever they were banned for is completely unrelated to Linux or Wine
    • They were either cheaters or ran something else that turned up false positive by Warden.
    • If they were innocent, then they are pretty much screwed without possible help.

    (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.

  • Go on... (Score:3)

    by mchappee ( 22897 ) * on Tuesday July 03, 2012 @01:53PM (#40531913)

    And allow me to extrapolate:

    " 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."

    and had I taken even a single course in journalism, I probably would have contacted Blizzard before posting this to what has become The Enquirer of "tech news".

    MC

  • If the banned truly cheated ... (Score:3)

    by Skapare ( 16644 ) on Tuesday July 03, 2012 @01:57PM (#40531963) Homepage

    ... then tell THEM what the cheat was. Or better yet, get THEIR permission to make it public how D3 thinks they cheated.

    This is a general overall problem with all the online services. They ban people and never say why other than BS about "violated terms"? They need to answer with WHAT ACTION violated WHAT TERMS. They need to start answering these VERY IMPORTANT questions if they don't want to be thought of as just banning people for the fun of it. If the person they accuse consents to it, make these PUBLIC (so we know the accused is not making it up).

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