Banned From WoW For WINE & Programmable Keyboard

An anonymous reader writes "Player gets banned for playing World of Warcraft under WINE and using a Logitech Gaming keyboard. "I am an experienced network engineer for an ISP and I am often running World of Warcraft on Linux through the use of WINE..."" Although the e-mails exchanged are unclear my guess is that the programmable keyboard was more the problem then WINE. Not that you'd ever know that given that Blizzard communicates with their users seemingly almost exclusively with form letters.

Comments

Anonymous?

[LiquidCoooled]

Slashdot profile

The keyboard he is using sounds quite cool though :)
I shall have to look into getting one.

Re:Anonymous?

[thelost]

I sympathize with you man. This kind of treatment is why I gave up WoW. I haven't had to go through that terrible process myself, I just sick of the way people were being treated and cancelled my account, but to see you being blind-sided like that with no warning really makes my blood boil.

One of the most obvious problems with WoW these days is that there is this massive wall of low level employees (GMs, Billing & accounts etc) who don't have either the authority or time to really look after customers properly. Add to this Blizzards obvious contempt for it's playerbase as easymeat who are pretty much addicts so can be treated like trash and you have a situation where people will frequently get reamed like this with no way to prevent it.

You will of course get accused of botting by lots of players, but lots of players also happen to be 14 year old children who love to point fingers (not to say every 14 year old is like this, but the culture of WoW has shown to me that while there are exceptions if a player sounds like a 14 year, acts like a 14 year old and talks AOL trash talk then he's caek).

In the end Blizz and it's employees can pretty much act as they want and this is the most problematic part of it for me. There is no accountability, GMs have been to behave extremely innapropriately in the past, it's impossible to defend yourself from accusations of cheating because Blizz wants to be seen to having a strong anti-cheater policy so if false positives come up then it doesn't really matter. Amoung the thousands of cheaters those innocent will go unheard.

I suggest that you give up on WoW, and find a MMO that treats it's customers with at least a little common decency. Hmph that might be tricky though.

Re:Not a Suprise

[AKAImBatman]

So you're convinced that every person who accidentally triggers a TOS violation should be permanently banned from a service like WoW, even when:

1. The service claims in forum posts that what he's doing is okay.
2. The user offers to correct the problem, and even accept a punishment.
3. The service has a policy that is supposed to require multiple violations to obtain a ban.
4. The user has no prior history of TOS violations.
5. The user has spent considerable money on the product.

If you think that all that combines to make a "responsible decision" on the part of Blizzard, then allow me to be the first to point out that you're a heartless tyrant, and I really do hope this happens to you. Perhaps you'll see things different from the other side.

I for one, hopes he gets a good lawyer. Given that this is far from the first time I've heard these complaints, a class action suit against Blizzard may just be what's needed to shake things up.

You were still botting

[Shivetya]

It just is a matter of degree. In your view you were not botting as you define it to a scope which your event does not qualify.

Look, if your not paying attention to the game go do something else. If it is that boring to do what you were doing then why bother? If it is for improvment within the game should you not focus your attention on it.

Unattended play, botting, macroing. Call it whatever you will.

If you want a game which will allow you to bot, supposedly only attended, then go play Asheron's Call. Turbine themselves approved of combat automation to the horror of the entire industry.