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?

[Juliusz]

Yeah, cool, but it got him banned. He should have used one of those little, swinging, water-drinking, wooden birds with the funny hats, they're harder to detect.

Re:Anonymous?

[infernix]

I did not submit this anonymously myself; I submitted under my own account a week or two ago. I guess someone else resubmitted it.

And just a minor remark here to people who claim I was botting. Please, go look up some botting software.

1) They virtually all need MS .Net framework - in other words, botting software doesnt work on WINE.
2) Botting software runs around, taps mobs, kills them, loots them and repeats this process. I didnt. I did not loot, move, nor change target. Anyone with a WoW account can run to Thousand Needles, find a Windchaser creature, get a lowest level weapon and hit it indefinately, provided that you are a healing class.

Anyway, I mentioned this, but I can understand why people who quickly read would miss it.

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.

Favor

[Anonymous Coward]

He should consider it a favor. Now he can go back to living his life.

He's better off.

[GundamFan]

It stings to get banned... but realy any MMO is a waste of time, WoW being one of the worst in my opinion.

if this is Blizzards new attitiude towards it's customers, maybe I can get all of my friends to stop playing WoW and spend some time in the real world interacting with people in person.

Mod me a troll if you want it won't change the fact that I am siclk of Fantasy MMOs.

Re:He's better off.

[Hoi Polloi]

Good analogy. Business has lots of grinding, low level mobs, and elitist guilds.

Re:He's better off.

[Cat_Byte]

Ugh. I just had visions of the IT department getting a raid party together and heading down to payroll.

Not a Suprise

[Herkum01]

In any situation which one party has vastly superior authority and little chance of penalized. Don't expect them to act in a reasonable manner.

Re:Not a Suprise

[AKAImBatman]

I'm actually amazed that the company acted so responsibly. It would have been easy to just backtrack and forgive and forget, but they forged ahead, making an enemy and losing a customer, to try to maintain the "rules of the land". Good for them.

You have a funny definition of "responsible". If you read TFA, he went through great lengths to attempt to resolve the issue with Blizzard, keeping his emails polite at all times. He pointed out that both Logitech and Blizzard had advertised the keyboard as being good for WoW, and even offered to accept a temporary ban to make up for any accidental infractions.

Blizzard ignored all his correspondance, and went for a permanent ban, apparently in direct violation of their own terms of service.

Blizzard was WRONG, and paid no attention to a reasonable customer. I find it perfectly acceptable if he was currently considering either legal or grass roots responses to their gross negligence in the matter. If that is the best they can do for loyal customers who attempted civil resolutions, then they deserve to end up in a media circus of bad press and class action suits.

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.

Uhm, no.

[Syberghost]

Banned for violating the rules with his programmable keyboard. They outright told him that; he was interacting with his environment in an unattended manner. That's a violation of the TOS for every MMORPG I've ever read the TOS for, which admittedly isn't many.

However, it is telling that he knows that bot programs won't work on Wine under Linux; I'm not buying the story that he tested them all subsequently.

Summation: Cheated. Got caught. Got banned. Whined and told his buddies an "edited" version of the story, so they all rallied behind him. Tough noogies.

Re:Uhm, no.

[EddieBurkett]

Banned for violating the rules with his programmable keyboard. They outright told him that; he was interacting with his environment in an unattended manner. That's a violation of the TOS for every MMORPG I've ever read the TOS for, which admittedly isn't many.

The best part is that the guy wraps himself in the I'm-being-persecuted-for-running-Linux flag, which he knows will raise the ire of many the WoW player. If he was playing the game unattended and got caught, he deserves to be banned, and if he finds fighting low level mobs to raise his skills so boring, maybe he should find another way to spend his time.

Its been a while since I've played WoW. Can Trolls be Priests?

Re:Getting banned from recreational sites

[Otter]

I suppose it's a bad sign when BadAnalogyGuy beats me to exactly the analogy I was going to make...

Definitely the keyboard

[Kadin2048]

It seems like it was definitely the programmable keyboard and not WINE that set off their bot detectors.

Apparently the macros on the keyboard were making him do repeated actions, and somehow this was interpreted by Blizzard as "unattended" operation. (Why they think it was unattended I don't know, TFA doesn't say exactly ... why didn't they just message him when they saw the odd behavior? Or do something else to verify it's a human on the other end?)

Anyway, a quote from TFA:
"So it seems that if I use a programmable keyboard I am botting. However I suspect their 3rd party detection software saw a very strange enviroinment in which WoW was running; that combined with the repetitive task of healing myself, switching weapons, and casting Hex of Weakness programmed in my keyboard, I am viewed as a bot."

So it seems other people using WoW under WINE are safe, you'd just better not get too trigger-happy with the keyboard macros.

What's really the problem here is that there seems to be a huge disconnect between official Blizzard policy (programmable keyboards are okay, this has been explicitly said by one of their reps in the forums, according to the article) and what the GMs did. And after the guy got banned, they seem to just be just stonewalling him and hoping he'll go away, giving him a lot of "the matter is closed" crap. I have to salute his perserverence, though, in spite of this.

Rather a disappointing showing from Blizzard.

Re:It's the keyboard, stupid. - And he was BOTTING

[JasonUCF]

OMG! I wanted to get the link in, but I read through the rest of the email:

At the time of the suspension I was playing WoW on Linux. I was training my weapon skills because I recently turned to level 60. I had programmed the switching of weapons (I use Wardrobe for that) to my programmable keyboard and was fighting a low-level healing mob to upgrade all my weapon skills to 300. As you might very well know, this takes hours, and while I was training my different weapon skills by pressing the macro keys and healing myself every now and then, I watched some movies on my TV, because fighting a level 25 healing mob doesn't require much attention if you're a level 60 priest.

It's not a matter of WINE, he was fucking botting! He took his programmable keyboard and built macros for fighting mobs and then left it unattendend.

When you a grinding, if a GM suspects botting they will whisper you looking for you to respond. If you don't respond within a reasonable amount of time you get nailed for botting.

Yawn..

But that is not the point

[geddes]

1. He wasn't using the LCD functioning of his programmable keyboard, he was using macros, it is far less clear if that is against the WoW tos, since programmable macro-keys do not involve "intercepting data" being sent from the WoW application.

2. But you are right, it was the Keyboard that brought this on. He was wathing movies and just casually pressing his macro key every now and then. Since he wasn't paying attention and doing the same thing over and over again, it looked like he was botting. Blizzard may have been right to ban him. Though I tend to think that since they have no clear programmable keyboard policy, they should have warned him.

3. Nonetheless, after reading his website, I have sympathy for the guy. Blizzard's communication with him really sucked. Getting sent those form letters must have been so frustrating. He asked specific questions to his accuser and they were replied to by generic form letters. He went into great detail explaining what his (somewhat unique) situation was. Even if Blizzard had replied and said "We have no problem with your running Wine, but using those programmable keyboards are against our ToS." Then that would be fine. But Blizzard was vague in their responses, which is unfair, and if they were a government (which they sort of are in this online world) for a developed, democratic, nation, this guy would have the right to at least SEE the evidence against him. It sounds like here somebody reported him as not responding to messages. They should tell him WHEN and WHERE it happened. Explain what showed up in their logs for them to conclude that he was botting.

The true problem here isn't lack of Wine support or Programmable Keyboards. The problem is that Blizzard makes decisions behind a closed curtain and doesn't tell you what evidence they used to support their decision.

And I think all FPSs are a Wate of Time

[brunes69]

It's called a gamesupposed to be a waste of time. If it wasn't a waste of time then it would be called "work" or "chores", because other than work, chores, eating, and sleeping, everything you do in life is a "waste of time", since it's only purpose is to entertain you.

To each his own, I don't care if you don't like MMORPGs, but you don't have to try to belittle those who do.

Player TOS

[Bonewalker]

You know, the real irony here is that while Blizzard won't allow players to 'bot' their way through the game, the only responses you get from them are bots. Standard form letters that are automatically activated when you contact them.

There should be a Player TOS that the company agrees to before selling their games. It would read like so:

17. In the event you, the player, are ever in need of technical assistance, customer support, account maintenance, or in the event you are banned from the game and your account closed, you have the right to expect that a human Blizzard employee will examine your situation and respond without the use of bots, form letters, or automated responses to make certain that your situation is fully resolved. Furthermore, while the resolution may not always be to your liking, the details will be explained in full using simple, standard language showing the logic we used to make our decisions. Once we have made every effort to explain our decisions, if you still feel that Blizzard has errored in some way, you will have one appeal effort to escalate your situation. This will mean that a team of three Blizzard employees will examine your case in full, reaching a decision. You will only be notified that either Blizzard's previous decision has been upheld, or that there is sufficient evidence to reverse the previous Blizzard decision.

Re:It's the keyboard, stupid. - And he was BOTTING

[Arathrael]

It's not a matter of WINE, he was fucking botting! He took his programmable keyboard and built macros for fighting mobs and then left it unattendend.

As I understand it, he didn't actually leave it unattended. On the contrary, he couldn't leave it unattended, he still had to be sitting there pressing the programmed keys. He just wasn't paying attention while he was doing that. You can argue not paying attention is equivalent to leaving it unattended, but a simple macro on a programmable keyboard that you can't leave unattended does not make a bot, let along a fucking one.

Anyway, the real culprit here is the game design. If Blizzard want their players to worship at the altar of the great Time Sink, then they can expect them to use things like this to make it less mind-numbingly tedious.

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.